Richard Swan, a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and former Director of The Advocates’ Society, served as National Litigation Co-Chair of Bennett Jones LLP for eight years and Co-Chair of the firm’s Commercial Litigation Practice Group. He was also an elected member of his firm’s national Executive Committee. His practice focuses on dispute resolution, with extensive trial, appellate, mediation and arbitration experience, regularly appearing before a range of courts, tribunals, and mediation and arbitral bodies.
Richard is the co-author (with Robert Harrison) of the recently-published Thomson Reuters book Skillful Witness Examinations in Civil and Arbitration Cases, and the author of several recent witness examination articles in The Advocates’ Journal.
Richard is an Adjunct Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, teaching Advanced Commercial Litigation. In addition, he regularly teaches on civil litigation analysis and strategy as part of CLE programs. He has served as an instructor at programs for the National Judicial Institute and Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice for the past 18 years.
Richard’s areas of substantive experience and expertise include corporate and commercial disputes, injunctions and equitable remedies, shareholder remedies, corporate governance, partnership disputes, restructuring and insolvency litigation, estates, trusts and fiduciary duty disputes.
Richard has appeared on Benchmark’s List of Canada’s Top 50 Trial Lawyers multiple times, and was named Benchmark’s Ontario Litigator of the Year in 2015. He was named one of Lexpert’s original Top 40 Lawyers under 40 in Canada in 2002. Richard clerked at the Federal Court of Appeal in Ottawa.