Lawyers, Families, and Businesses: The Shaping of a Bay Street Law Firm, Faskens 1863-1963

by C. Ian Kyer, Lawyer and Historian, published with Irwin Law, 2013.

Ian Kyer holds a Ph.D. in history and was for many years a partner at Fasken Martineau. He has combined  his historical and legal expertise to produce a comprehensive account of the first century of Faskens. He takes us through crucial stages in the development of not just this but many other Canadian law firms – alliances with business, the growth of two or three man partnerships into considerably larger firms, and the links between leading firms and politics. Along the way we see how law practice changed, how remuneration was divided up, how strong leaders stamped their individual personalities on the collective identity of the firm. This is a major contribution to our understanding of the seismic changes in Canadian law practice.

Reviews of Lawyers, Families, and Businesses: The Shaping of a Bay Street Law Firm, Faskens 1863-1963

Lawyers, judges, historians and countless individuals vitally interested in matters historical … will rejoice at the publication of yet another full length monograph on the subject of the creation and development of a leading law firm. Lawyers, Families and Businesses recounts in great detail a century of lawyering, not only of … Fasken’s, but of the city of Toronto. Gilles Renaud, Deakin Law Review, vol 19, 2014, p. 187.