The following is an excerpt from the acceptance speech that Michael Eizenga, 2024 recipient of the OBA Award of Excellence in Civil Litigation, delivered at the OBA Civil Dinner on November 25, 2024, in front of a collegial and congratulatory crowd of powerhouse litigators, justice sector leaders, rising stars of the profession, and colleagues, friends and family, at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto.
We are litigators. We understand the importance of a skilled and professional bar to the administration of justice. We respect the role that the administration of justice is meant to play in our democratic system of government – its role in maintaining accountability, social cohesion and access to justice.
But I have to acknowledge that we often exercise our skills in a pretty controlled and rarefied environment.
When we go to court, we have an immediate right of audience. We get to calmly lay out a road map for how we intend to take the judge through the process of understanding and then being persuaded by our argument.
Of course, those of us who have appeared in front of Justice Perell know what it is like to be just getting to the main verb in the second sentence of your road map when you get asked that penetrating question that goes right to the heart of your case. (That is the moment when you’re glad you have that three-sentence
narrative at the ready. “Justice Perell, here’s what this case is about at its core…”).
But I think the point is straightforward. We operate in the dignity of wood paneled court rooms – sometimes wearing gowns. We have rules of procedure and argument and rules of evidence that give us a shared reality to debate from.
So the question is this: In our increasingly fraught and tribal world, do the skills of the litigator apply outside the respectful context of the courtroom? In that world, where public discussion is so often hurtful, coarse and shallow –where angry language is sometimes designed to strain at the crevices that already exist in our social cohesion.