Accredited training for lawyers

Family law cases involving violence against women are complicated, time consuming, stressful, challenging and can be dangerous for both the client and her lawyer.

To support lawyers’ work in this area, Luke’s Place offers an online training, “Effective Lawyering with Clients Leaving Abusive Relationships”. Designed for family law lawyers in Ontario, this 3-hour course is CPD accredited for 1 hour 20 minutes Professionalism Hours and up to 1 hour 10 minutes Substantive Hours.

The course fee is $125. Registrants have 100 days access.

Effective lawyering with clients leaving abusive relationships: Course content

This course explores issues commonly encountered in family law cases involving woman abuse, including:

A client who may present as confused, disorganized, disengaged and even hostile

Challenges in gathering information from a client who is unaware of her financial situation, reluctant to disclose abuse and fearful of the opposing party

Delays by the opposing party, including failing to file court documents, seeking repeated adjournments, lodging complaints against court personnel, bringing repeated frivolous and vexatious motions

Abuse that doesn’t stop with separation including legal bullying and stalking of your client by the opposing party

Harassment of you and your staff by the opposing party

Learn strategies for:

Identifying signs of abuse in clients
Assessing risk to the client, yourself and your staff
Interviewing an abuse survivor
Managing legal bullying
Gathering and presenting evidence of abuse
Recognizing and managing vicarious trauma

This is a self-directed online course, which you may do on your own schedule, in one or multiple sittings. It consists of narrated slide presentations and short quizzes. A high speed internet connection is recommended for optimal viewing. The Luke’s Place publication, “Best Practices Manual for Lawyers with Clients Leaving Abusive Relationships”, is included in the cost of the course.

Note: This course is designed for lawyers. Registrants must provide their LSUC number and year of call to the bar.

What lawyers say about our course

98% of course registrants would recommend this course to colleagues

Very relevant info that is extremely useful

This was a great course and I feel that I have learned a lot.

It was a very good course and I highly recommend it.

A sample of what lawyers tell us when asked what they thought was the most useful aspect of the course:

Learning about the different typologies of abuse

Reminders of how to deal with victims when they are having issues providing you with instructions

Drawing the connections between trauma and how a woman may present as a client - as well as how to manage this and set appropriate boundaries

Legal bullying and the use of an advocate

Practice management tips - i.e. conducting an effective first interview, security protocols

How well structured it was, i.e. so that you can immediately see that the content will be useful and so that you have a way of going back to the course easily to obtain information about various topics)

The content: information about domestic violence, advocacy and practice management

Applying knowledge learned from videos to quizzes

The Best Practices Manual for Lawyers, I appreciate having a tool that I can reference again and again. The manual is precise and provides many tools.

Practical strategies on dealing with risk assessments and safety plans