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PAGE 16 BRIEF: OBA INSTITUTE January 26, 2009 • Law Times STRENGTH IN IDEAS. STRENGTH IN RELATIONSHIPS. At PKF Hill Chartered Accountants we are interested in helping you with the "Business of Law". Talk to our practitioners about benchmarking the performance of your legal practice. Whether your challenges are in profitability or cash flow, PKF Hill has the experience to help you improve your performance. For over 40 years PKF Hill has built a reputation based on building strong relationships by making strong commitments, by adhering to strong values, and constantly being a source of strong ideas. Check us out at www.pkfhill.com. 41 Valleybrook Dr., Suite 200, Toronto ON M3B 2S6 416-449-9171 Untitled-3 1 1/20/09 2:47:40 PM Volunteers backbone of OBA event Continued from page 15 The rest of Monday's lineup includes sessions on business law, civil litigation, environmental law, insolvency law, privacy law, and property law. There is also a ses- sion on the public's right to access information, given from a public sector lawyer's perspective, and a session for young lawyers on start- ing up their own practice. Also on Monday there is a family law session entitled, "Ev- erything You STILL Don't Know about Family Law and are Afraid to Ask," featuring a panel discus- sion on parental alienation and judicial remedies. The session also promises to provide "everything you ever wanted to know about complex child support issues in 10 minutes or less per issue." The second half of the ses- sion on Monday afternoon looks at support and property issues. There will also be a year in re- view of substantial case law and legislative changes. Family law co-chairwoman Lorna Yates, family lawyer with Wilson Christen LLP, Toronto, says opportunity to help host a session at the event is sort of like coming full circle. As a law student she participated as a volunteer and remembers what it was like. "When I was asked to co- chair this year I thought back to when I was in law school and I used to volunteer at the OBA every year throughout my years in law school, because I got to come for free if I volunteered," Yates says, hinting at the benefits of volunteering for the event. "The very first institute I went to in 1996 or '97 and I remember meeting the judges there and I re- member going on and looking at the different exhibitors and it was such an experience, so it is kind of wild to be co-chairing it." Aside from co-chairing the family law session, Yates will likely be taking in the exhibits again and using the event to net- work and catch up with lawyers from across Ontario. "I love the institute, I go ev- ery year, it's kind of one-stop shopping, you get kind of ev- erything you need to know, in terms of updating yourself for the area of law you practise in," she says. "It is nice to see old friends that you haven't seen in a while. Because, I find, that the people who come to the institute Untitled-2 1 www.lawtimesnews.com 1/20/09 2:34:29 PM are not just Toronto people, it's the Barrie people, the Oshawa people, the Ottawa people, the London people, people you just don't see the whole year." Tuesday's sessions begin with an international law breakfast, a law practice management breakfast, and the second OLAP breakfast. The sessions on Tuesday in- clude a look at pensions and benefits, aboriginal law, con- struction law, education law, and immigration law. A corpo- rate counsel employment law refresher will also be a featured session on Tuesday. Also on Tuesday there is a complimentary media training session, "Managing Your Mes- sage," will run in the afternoon. Karen Gordon of Squeaky Wheel Communications is co-chair- woman of the session that pur- ports to teach techniques used by more than 300 members of the OBA. The session will deal with crisis communications, media scrums, talk radio, expert com- mentary, and panel discussions. Helping to host the event and run the sessions will be more than 275 volunteers made up of lawyers, judges, academics, law students, government officials, and experts in related fields. To thank the volunteers and the session co-chairpersons and speakers the OBA makes dona- tions to the Hospital for Sick Children — SickKids. The asso- ciation has made similar dona- tions each year starting in 1995 and to date more than $130,000 has been raised to help in buying specialized hospital equipment. Yates says the quality of the pro- gramming and the sessions is in no small part due to the effort of volunteers. And while being part of the institute takes a lot of effort, she says it is worth the extra time. "The OBA is a volunteer or- ganization, so you get out of it what you put into it," she says. "So if you put in the effort, and certainly being a co-chair has been a significant effort this year, you are going to get it out in other ways . . . fabulous programming, opportunities to meet other lawyers and judges, and share ideas. "That is the joy of volun- teerism, which is you have a lot of control over the programming and the level of involvement you have, so it is rewarding in that LT