This month’s spotlight shines on Brandon D. Hastings of Northpoint Legal LLP.
How did you first get involved with CLEBC?
I don’t recall a single “origin story,” but my first engagement with CLEBC was through dispute resolution programming early in my career, thanks to the venerable Sharon Sutherland, who was also one of my professors at UBC Law. I was involved with CLEBC’s Alternative Dispute Resolution Conference in 2015 and 2016, and then with CLEBC-TV programming on justice technology and digital dispute resolution. That was a natural fit for me because my practice has always been at the intersection of litigation, mediation, access to justice, and technology.
Over time, CLEBC became one of the places where those interests could come together in a practical way: not just talking about change in the abstract, but helping legal professionals build skills they can use.
What are you currently working on (or have most recently worked on) with CLEBC?
Most recently, I have been working with CLEBC on programming for legal support professionals and mediation counsel. I chaired Civil Litigation Basics for Paralegals and Legal Support Staff and presented on ethical dilemmas for front-line support staff. I am also chairing Advanced Civil Litigation for Paralegals and Legal Support Staff [June 16], and am faculty for Definitely Not the Courtroom: Best Practices for Counsel in Mediation [June 23], which focuses on how lawyers can be more effective in mediation.
What I like about these programs is that they are very practical. They’re about the real work of legal practice: how files move, how teams communicate, how ethical issues arise in day-to-day interactions, and how counsel can use dispute resolution more thoughtfully. That pragmatic focus also reflects my own work at Northpoint Legal LLP, where my practice includes appeals, family and civil mediation, and helping clients navigate complex disputes.
What made you decide to become a lawyer?
I wanted to be a lawyer from a very young age—around eight years old. Whether that was destiny, personality, or just very effective parental suggestion is hard to say.
What is interesting is that the idea kept surviving contact with reality. At different points in my education, through personality tests, career assessments, business school, law school, and actual practice, I kept coming back to the same conclusion: law suited the way I think. I like language, systems, argument, fairness, and problem-solving.
Over time, my reasons became less about the idea of “being a lawyer” and more about the kinds of problems law lets you work on: helping people through conflict, improving systems, trying to make complicated things clearer, and—especially in appellate work—thinking carefully about how legal principles may broadly affect society.
You are very active in the legal community both as a writer and as a speaker. What motivates you to give back to the profession?
Part of it is a sense of obligation. My own rough moral philosophy is something like “deontological utilitarianism”: try to do the right thing, and try to make that right thing useful. I’m proud to fulfill that role.
That way of thinking comes from a mix of influences. I studied ethics and philosophy, but I also came to law through business, entrepreneurship, psychology, and economics. My first post-secondary diploma was issued by an economics faculty and later formed part of my undergraduate degree in entrepreneurial leadership, so a lot of my thinking about doing good in the world is grounded in the social sciences as much as in legal theory.
That is also the source of my interest in innovation. Entrepreneurship is not just about starting businesses. At its best, it’s a way of identifying unmet needs, designing better systems, and creating social value. The same logic applies to the legal profession. If we can improve how lawyers work, communicate, bill, supervise, use technology, and serve the public, then we can make the system better for everyone who depends on it.
But it is also personal. I enjoy writing and speaking. I enjoy working with ideas. I also have a background that gives me a slightly different lens on legal practice and access to justice. Sometimes that means I can help translate between communities—lawyers, technologists, mediators, court reformers, business people, and people simply trying to navigate the system.
A phrase I come back to is: if you do not know where to go, go where you are needed most. I have tried to follow that in my legal community work. My hope is to keep building a career where giving back and doing good work are not separate projects, but mutually reinforcing.
You write and speak on both substantive law topics and topics on law practice management. Based on your experience, what topics do you feel the legal profession is in need of more education?
I think the profession needs much more education in practice management, broadly understood. Not just trust accounting or how to open a file—although those things matter—but the deeper questions of how legal work is designed, priced, supervised, communicated, automated, measured, and improved.
Lawyers are generally good at reading rules and analyzing legal problems. That is what legal education trains us to do, and we also have strong institutional supports—CLEBC, CanLII, courthouse libraries, colleagues, and other resources—to help us stay current on substantive law. Where I think many lawyers receive less structured support is in the business and systems side of practice. I also think lawyers sometimes underestimate how complex business can be, particularly the business of law.
Practice management is an art: it blends mathematics, social science, psychology, operations, technology, marketing, incentives, human behaviour, and creativity. That is part of what makes it difficult. Lawyers are trained to work carefully within rules and precedents, but practice management often requires creativity drawn from knowledge bases lawyers are not always exposed to: entrepreneurship, design, systems thinking, pricing, management, and organizational behaviour. A lot of what remains “unsolved” in law is not that lawyers do not know enough law. It is that we have not always designed our practices, teams, workflows, and professional cultures as intentionally as we design legal arguments.
That matters because the legal system is elaborate not only for the public, but also for the people working inside it. It can be overly complex, procedurally dense, and hard to navigate. Better practice management is not just about lawyer efficiency or profitability. It is about freeing lawyers from unnecessary friction so they can focus more clearly on what they are supposed to be doing: serving clients, acting as officers of the court, putting cases forward responsibly, helping society resolve disputes, and applying advanced common sense to difficult human problems.
Breaking the dichotomy, I would also include training in ethics and professional culture as something the profession could use more of. We need more practical education on how ethical issues actually arise in real workplaces: supervision, delegation, client communication, boundaries, access to justice, burnout, incivility, and the grey zone between information and legal advice. Rules matter, but our professional culture determines whether people feel able to raise concerns, ask questions, and do the right thing under pressure. We need better modelling, delivered in a less diffuse manner.
What is your favourite book, and what are you currently reading?
One of my favourite books is Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens. I do not agree with everything in it, which is partly the point. I like writing that sharpens thought, challenges assumptions, and makes disagreement feel intellectually alive rather than merely combative. One line from that book has stayed with me: “Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity.” I like that because it captures something important about law at its best: intellectual courage in service of fairness.
For similar reasons, one of my favourite pieces of fiction is actually the script of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. I love its ambiguity, its humour, and the way it leaves room for interpretation without becoming empty. I also have a deep affection for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, which probably says something about my taste for absurdity and dry humour.
Other books that have stuck with me include The Checklist Manifesto, The Tools, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World, Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition, and Iain Morley’s The Devil’s Advocate.
These days, I tend to consume more documentaries, articles, online courses, lectures, and long-form interviews. Some books are excellent, but I am increasingly drawn to learning formats that are dense, practical, compressed, and immediately useful. The more I have written, the more I have come to value writers who kill their darlings.
Other than law, what are you passionate about?
A little bit of everything. I’m interested in technology, movies, theatre, board games, sailing, martial arts, arts and culture, tabletop RPGs, and video games as a way to connect with friends over distance and busy schedules—especially VR and strategy games.
If there is a through-line to what makes me tick personally, it’s probably the combination of curiosity, logic, and humour. I have always loved the way humour can subvert expectations, expose hidden assumptions, and let us see the world differently. At its best, humour is not just entertainment; it is a kind of applied logic. It reveals the gap between what we expected and what is actually happening, and that gap can be funny, uncomfortable, insightful, or all three.
Martial arts has also been part of my life since I was young. I earned a black belt in a Taekwondo-based hybrid martial art as a teenager and have since trained in karate, gung fu, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai, and a few other styles along the way. I enjoy the discipline and technical problem-solving, but a huge draw for me is the sense of community: people working together to improve themselves and each other while doing something healthy, humbling, positive, and skillful. It is an environment where everyone is expected to maintain a “beginner’s mind,” no matter how long they have been practicing.
I have a real fondness for performing arts. I was a theatre kid in high school and enjoyed both on-stage and behind-the-scenes work. I like musicals because they tend to have soul. One of my favourites is Heathers: The Musical, which—no surprise—is a dark comedy. I was also in Carousel Theatre’s Lawyer Show production of Grease. I would like to get back to performing when time allows, but for now, my work with CLEBC offers a similar sense of community, presentation, and learning.
More broadly, I have always loved learning. I genuinely enjoyed my LLM in Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship, and have kept up a Duolingo streak that is now somewhere around 1,900 days. I am happiest when I am learning something, creating something, or sharing a laugh.