Lisa Cirillo, Law’96, got her feet wet in access to justice issues as she helped some of the most vulnerable community members during her law school days with the Queen’s Law Clinics. Devoting her career to social justice, she has worked with such organizations as the Ontario Human Rights Commission, ARCH Disability Law Centre and the University of Toronto’s Downtown Legal Services (DLS), where she was a staff lawyer for five years and has been Executive Director since 2010. On September 8, she begins a new chapter in her career becoming CEO of the Law Foundation of Ontario (LFO). There, she will oversee the granting of funds to improve access to justice across the province.
Before taking the helm at the LFO, Lisa Cirillo spoke with us about what opportunities and challenges her new role will bring, how she developed her interest in social justice, how her Queen’s Law experience set her up for a fulfilling career, and what advice she has for students.
What attracted you to the CEO position with the Law Foundation of Ontario?
I’m really excited about the Foundation role because I have either worked for or with pretty much every agency the LFO funds (including the DLS clinic). It’s an opportunity to continue to work with legal service providers and community agencies that I believe in and think do fantastic work, but in a different way. Now, I’ll be working to support these agencies. I’ve spent my whole career primarily working on frontline legal services, looking at the access to justice issues at a very micro level. With the Law Foundation, I’ll be looking at these problems from a macro level and from a funder perspective, asking where can we be strategic in our investment in order to fill in the deep gaps that exist in terms of the justice system. It’s a unique opportunity to make a different kind of impact on access to justice.
How does COVID-19 make this a critical time to be joining the LFO?
New challenges and new urgent legal needs are emerging from the pandemic. We can already see that the impact is being felt disproportionately along economic lines and other traditional social fault lines. People with low incomes are experiencing the pandemic in a more severe way than people who have the ability and the kind of job that allows them to work from home. There are deep connections between poverty and other grounds of vulnerability, like race, disability, and immigration status. COVID is exacerbating and amplifying these pre-existing inequalities, and this is true internationally. We can anticipate that the demand for legal services is going to increase dramatically and be that way for a while. Even as the province moves through different stages of recovery, we can imagine that there will be long-term impacts on low-income communities in terms of health issues and their future. I think that will be a challenge for the Foundation to work with their network of community agencies to identify those new legal needs and then to be able to pivot and get programs in place quickly enough that can start to respond to them. It’s a challenge, but there’s also a huge opportunity to make an impact.
What else are you looking forward to in your new role?
The world of grant-giving and foundations is new to me, and I’m really excited about the challenge. I’ve spent my legal career perpetually seeking funding for programs and organizations, so I have an intimate knowledge of how it feels to both be successful and not successful, and I’ll bring that to the CEO role. It’s important in our career to keep challenging ourselves and try to keep growing. I look forward to entering this new world and learning from those who have been in it for a while.
What are the first things you will do as CEO?
When you’re starting in a new place, the most important thing is to take the time to orient yourself and learn from the people who are there. I plan to spend most of my first months just meeting people and listening. Community is very important to me and it’s going to be trickier to build community in a virtual environment than meeting with people in person. Fortunately, I’ve had some experience with building community in a virtual environment this summer with our student program and I feel confident I will be able to establish relationships despite these challenges.
I think the Foundation is in fantastic shape and that that will make it much easier to step into my new job. I’m really grateful to the board and to Tanya Lee, the outgoing CEO. I’m continuing to get a much more intimate picture of the Foundation and all of its different pieces from Tanya and she kindly provided me with a reading list about grant-giving and foundation work. My key strategy when doing something outside my comfort zone is to over-prepare.
Where and how did you first become interested in social justice?
My undergraduate criminology classes got me thinking about the inequities in the legal system and I started asking questions. Is the legal system the justice system? Is it capable of delivering justice? Are these different things? In classes on young offenders and incarcerated women, we were presented with material that highlighted the disproportionate impact of the legal system on certain communities, so it really sparked an interest. At the time, I was also volunteering with the John Howard Society and with an open custody facility for youth, and I really enjoyed that work. I decided that I wanted to be a criminal defence lawyer. I chose law school at a time when the only lawyer I had ever even had a conversation with was a criminology professor who was a practising lawyer. When I got my offers for law school, I called him and asked, “Where do you think I should go?” He said, “If you want to do criminal law, you should go to Queen’s and take the Correctional Law Project (now the Queen’s Prison Law Clinic),” so that’s what I did.
At Queen’s, what solidified my interest in doing in social justice/public-interest law was the chance to do both the Correctional Law Project and Queen's Legal Aid. Through my experiences in these programs, I realized that although we need committed, dedicated criminal defence lawyers, that wasn’t the right fit for me. It was great to have the opportunity to learn this about myself while still a student. Now I always tell my clinic students that you may have an intellectual idea of what a particular practice might be like, and that might be fed by all of the TV and media around certain kinds of practices, but clinical opportunities are great ways to try them out and see if they fit.
It was a really great opportunity for me to rethink, “Is this what I want to do?” In fact, I went down a different path entirely. It was clinic experience really solidified that I wanted to do this kind of work.
Queen’s Legal Aid showed me the value of community-based work and working at a clinic where we could provide lots of different kinds of legal assistance. Law is an ever-present force in the lives of low-income people and they’re forced to interact with the law on a very routine basis in many different aspects of their lives. The clinic model of services is a direct response to that. It’s common for clinic clients to be dealing with multiple legal issues and all the social service needs that come from being low-income. Law clinics can assist them with their criminal law charge at the same time as we can help them with their family law case, their employment law case, and/or their housing case. I really like that idea of a holistic approach to delivering services to clients and my first peek into this model was with Queen’s Legal Aid.
What advice do you give law students and junior lawyers about improving access to justice?
I always tell law students they should do clinics when they’re in school. It’s such an important complement to the more traditional classroom-based learning. In clinics, they will have the opportunity to learn professional skills, written and oral advocacy skills, how to talk to a client, and procedural law. We teach substantive law. They’re also being placed in situations outside their comfort zone, and that’s where real learning and real professional and personal growth happen.
Law is an amazingly diverse field. Stay true to your heart and what brought you to law school. To me, the most important thing is to meet a community of like-minded people who work together. Law is one of those professions that can consume you if you’re not careful. Every lawyer I know struggles with balancing work and having a life outside of work. Even if we find that balance, we spend a lot of time at work, so you want work that is meaningful to you, that you believe in, and that you look forward to doing.
Don’t lose heart if you aren’t sure yet what practice or career path is right for you. Have faith that you will find it – or it will find you. My partner, Thomas Timmins (Law’94), is a leading expert in renewable energy law. He didn’t go to law school with that practice in mind but grew into that work as a natural extension of his early years as a cycling advocate. Stay open to possibilities.