The Osgoode Certificate in Family Law Skills and Practice

Osgoode Professional Development is the lifelong learning arm of Osgoode Hall Law School, one of Canada’s leading law schools.

We provide a uniquely broad and flexible range of interdisciplinary graduate-level legal education to professionals with and without law degrees.

What You’ll Learn

1. How to master the initial client interview (and why it is so critical)

2. Strategies for managing your client, including those “difficult” client and clients with special challenges

3. What you should and shouldn’t include in your Financial Statement, and what you should look for in the other sides’

4. How to assess options for consensual resolution: learn how to determine what your client really wants and needs; participate in a simulated negotiation

5. Tactics for drafting Minutes of Settlement

6. What needs to be done when your matter doesn’t settle, including mastering the case conference and preparing for a trial or arbitration

7. Effective affidavits

8. Successful strategies in motion advocacy: how to give the Court what it needs

9. How to effectively structure your written and oral submissions

10. Best practices for dealing with experts. Using your own and strategies for challenging the other side’s

11. Practice management techniques for avoiding issues after you wrap up the file

Assessment Criteria

In order to obtain the Certificate, the learner must:

1. complete/attend all modules;
2. view all online primers; and
3. complete all skills workshops.

Estimated learning effort

Approximately 35 hours of learning effort, spread over multiple weeks.

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