MLT Aikins on their new outdoor adventure practice group

Some lawyers spend their free time at spin classes, book clubs, fantasy football or with a pint and a few friends at a bar. For MLT Aikins LLP senior counsel Ryan Morasiewicz, a litigator who practises commercial and insurance-defence litigation, many of the hours not billed to clients are spent trekking deep into British Columbia’s mountainous wilderness, rescuing lost hikers, backcountry skiers, snowboarders and mountaineers.

For the last seven years, Morasiewicz has been active with North Shore Search and Rescue — a team of 50 volunteers who carry out around 130 search-and-rescue operations per year in the region a short drive west of downtown Vancouver. After joining the firm less than a year ago, Morasiewicz united with like-minded colleagues, including MLT Aikins associate and former provincial snowboarding champion Thomas Clifford, to use their shared interests in B.C.’s outdoor tourist activities to tap what Morasiewicz says is an underserved market in North America and launched an outdoor/adventure practice group.

“This is the mecca for outdoors activities in Canada and MLT Aikins, the firm I’m with here, is a Western Canadian-only firm,” Morasiewicz says. “It's only got offices in Western Canada. And when you think — with all apologies to Ontario and back east — when you think of outdoor adventure, you think mountains, you think B.C. you think Alberta, you think the west.”

Born in Whistler, B.C., snowboarding occupied Clifford’s competitive energies until he injured his knee and broke two vertebrae at age 16. He shifted his focus to his studies and 10 years later became a lawyer, joining MLT Aikins in 2017. Clifford says his backstory was a common thread among many of the lawyers with which he and Morasiewicz worked, and they thought they could leverage their dedication for the outdoors and adrenaline-triggering sports and hobbies, to build their legal practices.

“We just thought it would be so cool to be servicing clients where not only could we provide them with good legal advice but we could also share in their passion,” Clifford says.

Though tourism is a significant part of the economy in B.C. and Alberta, Morasiewicz says he was shocked to find that no other firm in the country and only a handful in the U.S. offered services tailored specifically toward the businesses that serve that industry.

“I started doing some Googling and realized this is an entirely under-serviced industry here. There's nobody in Canada doing work specifically focused for outdoor adventure and it’s a huge industry,” he says.

Morasiewicz’s outdoor/adventure clients include outdoor guides, ski resorts, outdoor equipment manufacturers and distributors, not-for-profits, educational organizations and rafting, hiking and other adventure companies, he says. The specific legal issues these parties encounter include questions about liability waivers and injury actions resulting from outdoor/adventure activities and land-tenure permits for guides and other adventure companies operating on Crown land. But as with any business, these companies also need the typical legal services — employment law, corporate commercial, litigation and tax — which can all be handled by their full-service firm, Morasiewicz says.

Clifford says the sector may have been overlooked because most of the players in it are smaller companies and no one had thought to group them together as a specific practice area. Clifford, Morasiewicz and their colleagues put together a list of potential clients and brought it to their office practice group coordinator, William Skelly. An avid skier who owns a cabin in Whistler, Skelly was excited by the idea and gave the green light, says Clifford.

Knowing they were not dealing with the average “stuffy corporate clients,” they took an outside-the-box approach to marketing the launch of the practice group and produced a video showing Morasiewicz gearing up for a rescue mission and Clifford cutting through fresh powder during a heavy snowfall, surrounded by pine forest. The video ends with Clifford offering a stark choice: “Are you going with the lawyers who don’t know the world beyond their desks or the ones who live and breathe the outdoors?”

MLT Aikins at a glance

MLT Aikins is a full-service law firm with more than 240 lawyers. The firm has offices in Regina, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. The firm is the result of a 2016 merger between MacPherson Leslie & Tyerman LLP and Aikins MacAulay & Thorvaldson LLP. The firm’s history stretches back to 1879 and partner Sir James Albert Manning Aikins, who founded the Canadian Bar Association. Conspicuously absent from the firm’s operations is a Toronto office, as the firm markets itself as Western Canada’s law firm.

Fun Facts

Outdoor/Adventure industry clients:

• Tour guides
• Ski resorts
• Ski and snowboard instructors
• Equipment manufacturers and distributors
• Educational organizations
• Notfor-profits
• Adventure guides
  • White water rafting
  • Hiking
  • Camping
  • Canoeing