Helping on real estate matters
To mark National Volunteer Week in Canada, we highlight five initiatives, and the CBA volunteers behind them, to inspire legal professionals.
The work of legal professionals in the real estate market is to help ensure smooth transactions that end up with a buyer getting keys and a good title and a seller getting paid in time. When it’s done well, it looks effortless. Which of course means that a lot of work has gone into it.
For a long time, lawyers enjoyed direct communications with lenders. But over the years, banks started centralizing their mortgage operations and that communications channel got badly disrupted. Lawyers no longer had an efficient way to address issues, get clarification or seek instructions.
That’s when Ray Leclair, honourary member-at-large of the Real Property Section of the CBA and Vice President of Public Affairs at LAWPRO, decided to form a committee of volunteers to write a mortgage instructions toolkit “to warn lawyers of such matters and to provide them with some comfort or solutions.” And because that toolkit is freely available on the CBA website, it has led to gradual re-establishment of a channel of communications between lawyers and lenders, via the Canadian Bankers Association.
Another committee of volunteers similarly came together to create a Real Property Comparison Table to help lawyers in different provinces and territories share ideas and procedures to make the work more efficient and provide clients with better service. All CBA Branches contribute to this ongoing project, “and we would hope to encourage any lawyer in any province who wishes to contribute to send us information,” says Leclair.
Tools developed by groups of volunteer lawyers freely sharing information benefit everyone, including clients and other parties to real estate transactions.
“Humans like to help, and we like to give back,” Leclair says. “And this is a way that we can make changes that individually we could not make.” Working with committees of volunteers leads to great discussions and debates among people who are passionate about the same subjects, often leading to great solutions to common problems. “It just makes you feel good at the end of the day that you’ve been part of a group that has created something that people will use and get some value out of. That’s perfect.”
