Mr. Michael Fitz-James

This extensive interview with Michael Fitz-James chronicles the career of a pivotal figure in Canadian legal journalism who fundamentally transformed how legal information was disseminated in Canada. Fitz-James, trained at McGill Law School, began his career in unconventional journalism at the National Examiner tabloid before becoming a CBC television reporter. His legal career was brief, practicing in Montreal for a short period before being recruited by Butterworths in 1983 to launch Ontario Lawyers Weekly.

Fitz-James describes building the Lawyers Weekly from a struggling startup with a $250,000 first-year loss into a highly profitable publication generating over $3 million annually by the 1990s. He pioneered aggressive coverage of the Law Society of Upper Canada, challenging its closed-door culture and helping to modernize legal journalism in Canada. The publication expanded nationally in 1986 and developed innovative revenue streams including case law photocopying services that generated hundreds of thousands in additional revenue.

After being dismissed from Butterworths in 1994, Fitz-James worked briefly at Quicklaw negotiating database licensing deals before becoming a freelance journalist and eventually editor of Canadian Lawyer Magazine. Throughout his career, he witnessed and participated in major shifts in legal publishing, from the emergence of electronic databases to the rise of competitive publications like Law Times. His work fundamentally changed how Canadian lawyers consumed legal news and information, moving away from academic-style reporting toward accessible, commercially-focused journalism that served the profession’s practical needs.

This description was written by AI and may contain some inaccuracies.