Ontario Appellate Bar Series - Judicial Appointments
This is one article in a series which reviews the composition of counsel who appear before the Ontario Court of Appeal.
Many law students aspire to become judges. It comes as no surprise that those law students go on to become lawyers who aspire to become judges. In reviewing the composition of counsel who appeared before the Ontario Court of Appeal, we noted which lawyers continued their career journey by being appointed to the bench (with the below information being that available as of the end of 2025).
Despite the slow progress to elevate women in law to the bench, in recent years judicial appointments to superior courts in Canada have reflected significant improvements in this regard. From October 2016 to October 2018, there were 153 judicial appointments, with slightly over half (54%) being women.[1] As of December 1, 2025, across all levels of court across Canada, of 1,195 judges, 588 (approximately 49%) were women.[2] At the end of 2025, there were 27 judges for the Ontario Court of Appeal, 14 of which were men and 13 of which were women.[3]
The lawyers who appeared as counsel before the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2024 and were subsequently appointed to the bench include:
The Honourable Justice Amy Ohler, who was appointed to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in the fall of 2024.
The Honourable Justice Scott Cowan, who was appointed to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in the fall of 2025.
In conducting the analysis of counsel composition before the Ontario Court of Appeal, individuals who were appointed to the bench were also considered, however, the LSO Lawyer and Paralegal directory no longer lists a LSO number for these individuals. While these individuals were included in the overall gender counts in the analysis conducted, they were not included in the seniority counts which are based on LSO numbers. Since the appointments were equal in gender, and it can be assumed that any member of the profession who is appointed to the bench has more than ten years of experience (which was confirmed, as Justice Ohler was called to the bar in 2010 and Justice Cowan was called to the bar in 2002), these appointments do not affect the analysis conducted with respect to more junior counsel in the articles which follow.
For lawyers interested in learning more about becoming a judge, there is a variety of information online for the various courts and other sources, including:
The Ontario Court of Justice - Appointments Process
The Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs Canada - Guide for Candidates
Precedent Magazine - How to Become a Judge: Honest advice that you won’t find on any government website
Canadian Bar Association National Magazine - So you want to apply to be a judge?
Footnotes/Sources:
[1] Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs, “Statistics Regarding Judicial Applicants and Appointees” (last modified 29 October 2018), online: <https://www.fja.gc.ca/appointments-nominations/StatisticsCandidate-StatistiquesCandidat-eng.html>.
[2] Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs Canada, “Number of Federally Appointed Judges as of December 1, 2025” (last modified 1 December 2025), online: <https://www.fja.gc.ca/appointments-nominations/judges-juges-eng.aspx>.
[3] Ontario Court of Appeal, “Judges of the Court”, online: <https://www.ontariocourts.ca/coa/judges-of-the-court/>.
A note on this article and analysis:
The figures included above are for information purposes only (and are obviously not legal advice). The information collected was drawn from publicly available decisions released by the Ontario Court of Appeal as published on CanLII for 2024, and is subject to certain limitations which are inherent in relying on only publicly available information as to seniority and gender. The gender information for counsel is not publicly available from the Law Society of Ontario. In order to ascertain the gender of counsel, after counsel’s name was searched in the LSO Lawyer and Paralegal Directory (or provincial equivalent), a general online search was performed for the lawyer to locate their law firm biography, academic publications, news articles or online commentary, LinkedIn profile, and/or any other social media or online presence which indicates the pronouns used by the lawyer. Lawyers using he/him pronouns are identified in the analysis as men, while lawyers using she/her pronouns are identified in the analysis as women. No lawyers using they/them pronouns were identified as part of the analysis, and therefore a category for non-binary individuals has not been included. There were several cases which included counsel of record with a more common name. For these lawyers, there were several potential matches in the LSO Lawyer and Paralegal Directory. As such, it was not possible to determine with any degree of accuracy which lawyer listed in the LSO Lawyer and Paralegal Directory was the lawyer who appeared as counsel of record. In the matters in which this was the case, an assumption was made as to the gender of counsel based on counsel’s name. Lawyers who are not licensed with the LSO are excluded from the LSO number information as they do not have a LSO number.
Given its dominant position in Canadian appellate advocacy relative to the other provincial courts of appeal, the matters heard by the Ontario Court of Appeal and who appears as counsel is information which certainly calls for at least some measure of analysis. Admittedly, a more robust review would include the ethnic, cultural, and gender diversity of both the litigants and their counsel of record. However, information about cultural or ethnic backgrounds, for example, is of a more personal nature and not publicly available. Conducting such an analysis would necessarily require more invasive research methods, such as interviews, focus groups, and/or surveys. This project is limited by both time and structural constraints, with its primary goal to serve as a methodological and intellectual interest-driver, potentially encouraging others to consider the appearances by counsel before the Ontario Court of Appeal and other appellate courts across Canada. A further study of this information, as well as the ethnic and gender diversity of counsel who appear before the courts, would provide the basis for a comprehensive longitudinal study.