Do Lawyers have an Ethical Obligation to Defend the Unpopular?

Carol Hansell is the Founding Partner of Hansell LLP, providing expert independent legal and governance advice to boards of directors, shareholders, management teams and regulators. Her firm is regularly engaged on matters that include special committee mandates, board investigations, governance reviews and shareholder engagement. Carol has extensive experience as a director. She currently serves on the boards of Munich Reinsurance Company of Canada, Life Storage, Inc. (NYSE: LSI) and the American College of Governance Counsel. She has served on the boards of a number of other organizations, including the Bank of Canada and the Public Sector Pension Investment Board. Carol has been involved in governance education and thought leadership throughout her career. She is the author of a best-selling book for directors and a four volume loose-leaf service. Carol served as the only non-American Chair of the Corporate Governance Committee of the American Bar Association (Business Law Section) and continues to serve as Special Canadian Advisor to the Corporate Laws Committee of the ABA. She has taught more than 5,000 directors as an instructor in the ICD-Rotman Directors Education Program offered in Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Ottawa. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Corporate Directors and the American College of Governance Counsel. She is also the Chair of the Business Law Advisory Council, appointed by the Province of Ontario. Carol has received a number of awards and recognitions and was awarded the Hennick Medal for career achievement from the Hennick Centre for Business and Law. She was also recognized as one of the top 25 most influential lawyers by Canadian Law Magazine and received the Lifetime Achievement Award in investor relations from IR Magazine.

After studying law at Oxford University as a Manitoba Rhodes Scholar, Philip Slayton clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada in Ottawa. Then, for thirteen years, he pursued an academic career, teaching at McGill University and becoming dean of law at the University of Western Ontario. Philip then went into legal practice with a major Canadian law firm in Toronto, and worked on many of the biggest corporate and commercial transactions of the time. He retired from the practice of law in 2000. Since leaving legal practice, Philip Slayton has written two best-selling books: Lawyers Gone Bad: Money, Sex and Madness in Canada’s Legal Profession, published in hard cover by Viking Canada in 2007, in paperback by Penguin Canada in 2008, and as an ebook in 2010; and Mighty Judgment: How the Supreme Court of Canada Runs Your Life, published in hard cover and as an ebook in 2011 by Allen Lane and as a paperback by Penguin Canada in 2012. In 2014 he independently published Bay Street: A Novel, a legal thriller. The Toronto Star described Bay Street as “expert and engaging… exciting and hilarious… a first rate crime novel…” Mayors Gone Bad was published in hard cover and as an ebook by Viking in May of 2015. How To Be Good: The Struggle Between Law and Ethics (with Patricia Chisholm), a collection of essays first published in Canadian Lawyer magazine, was published in 2017. The Future of Tennis (with Peter Figura) will be published in August 2018 by Skyhorse Publications of New York. Philip is now working on a book about freedom in Canada, to be published by the University of Regina Press in 2019. Philip divides his time between Toronto and Nova Scotia. He is married to the writer Cynthia Wine.