December 8, 2011



May Cheng, a partner at Fasken Martineau, heads the Firm's Intellectual Property practice in Toronto. She is certified by the Law Society of Upper Canada as a specialist in Intellectual Property Law (trade-marks and copyrights).

Excerpt

Helping Law Firms do a better job of tracking gender demographics is a key focus of the Justicia Project, launched in 2008 by the Law Society of Upper Canada as part of its Retention of Women in Private Practice initiative. According to a June 2011 Justicia report, most of the 56 participating firms are collecting and maintaining gender data.

May Cheng thinks they can do better. "That falls short of what my expectation was with respect to the gathering of the data," says Cheng, a partner at Fasken Martineau Dumoulin LLP and a member of Justicia's Women's Equality Advisory Group, which is charged with monitoring follow-through on Retention of Women in Private Practice project initiatives. "Surely if you're asking firms to gather and collect the data, it shouldn't be just for their internal purposes, but also reported externally so there could be some external accountability for the numbers."