By Julius Melnitzer | November 4, 2026
Bill Horton, a Toronto commercial arbitrator, marked Halloween on LinkedIn by asking whether Ontario’s civil justice system had become any less scary than it was a year ago. His answer, not surprisingly, was no.
The anniversary he had in mind was the final report of the Civil Rules Review Working Group, co-chaired by Justice Cary Boswell and Allison Speigel and dated Oct. 31, 2025. The report pulled no punches: Ontario’s system, it said, is “plagued with delay, prohibitively costly, and obsessed with process over substance,” and badly in need of reform.
According to Horton, the most important recommendations “have been effectively shelved after major opposition from the legal profession” — a profession that, as he sees it, behaves like most monopolies, leaving needs unmet wherever the service isn’t profitable. He also has a warning: “A new and formidable competitor to the civil justice system is waiting in the wings. It has many names. One of them is Claude.”
Reform has indeed stalled. But it’s open to question whether the bar stalled it, and whether AI is the competitor to fear.
Technically, nothing has been shelved. Attorney General Doug Downey and former Superior Court Chief Justice Geoffrey Morawetz announced in May that the government would implement the report in stages. But the first stage, slated for 2026, consists mostly of housekeeping changes. Meanwhile, the government is still “exploring” what matters most — the upfront evidence model, pre-litigation protocols and a three-track system. As mediator Shawn Patey noted in a Substack post on Nov. 1, the announcement “did not formally abandon those recommendations.”
But “exploring” comes without a schedule. Chief Justice Patrick Boucher told the Opening of the Courts on Sept. 29 that implementation would begin only “later this year.” As far as I can tell, none of the first-stage changes is yet in force, and we’re less than two months away from year’s end.
Some rule changes came into force on Sept. 1, but they did not relate to the review. Ironically, the most significant recognizes AI’s impact by requiring lawyers who sign a factum to certify that every quotation from a cited authority matches the source.
As for the profession’s opposition, most of it came early and focused on the original consultation paper that recommended eliminating oral discovery. The Federation of Ontario Law Associations complained that upfront document production “front-loads enormous costs,” and Canadian Defence Lawyers protested that “Paper doesn’t tell the whole story.”
After the final report preserved oral examinations, though limited to 90 minutes in cases headed to trial, Ontario Bar Association president Katy Commisso told Law Times that the province was “moving in the right direction.”
By the time the report got to Downey, then, many of the bar’s complaints had been resolved — which suggests there are other reasons for the government’s stalling. My guess is money. Upfront evidence, judge-led case conferences, and fixed timelines all demand judicial time, and the report’s half-page transition section says little about where it would come from.
Horton is right, though, about the profession’s monopoly. The civil justice system for resolving private disputes, which lawyers control, works best for the few who can afford it. But the competition to be feared isn’t Claude, which can’t enforce a judgment, whatever its ability to decide a dispute.
The real competitors are private arbitration (Horton’s own field, and available mainly to those who can afford it) and simply walking away from a claim. Walking away doesn’t show up in anybody’s statistics, so the access-to-justice crisis is likely worse than the numbers show.
When I wrote about the collapse of Weil, Gotshal & Manges earlier this week, I asked what the legal profession is all about. The question, albeit in a narrower sense, applies to civil justice reform as well. I’m tempted to say the answers aren’t encouraging, but the truth is they haven’t even been forthcoming.
As Barry Leon, an arbitrator and mediator at Arbitration Place, puts it, the time for settling down and reflecting has passed.
“There needs to be engagement with the profession, the judiciary, and others on meaningful rule changes,” he says. “Perhaps expert assistance on consensus building is needed. One way or another, the attorney general, the judiciary, and Ontario legal organizations should put reforming the Rules on the front burner now.”
Horton suggests an annual check-in on whether the system has improved. How about just any date for implementation of the structural reforms? It’s called a deadline. Without one, the working group’s “urgent” reform is moving even more slowly than the system it condemns.
Julius Melnitzer is a Toronto-based writer who focuses on law, legal affairs, and the business of law. Follow him on LegalWriter.net or email him at julius@legalwriter.net.