I've written a series of programs that process and extract the names of counsel from Ontario Court of Appeal judgements. I've analysed 8077 decisions and extracted 12,000 lawyer-case pairs (some decisions have multiple counsel).

Using the extracted data I compiled a table of the lawyers who appeared most frequently before the Court of Appeal over the last 15 years.

You'll see below the names and numbers of cases that each lawyer has worked on. If you click the name you'll see a list of the cases with year, role of the lawyer (appellant/respondent) and a link to the case.

  1. Mark Halfyard (52)
  2. Timothy Breen (51)
  3. Paul Calarco (49)
  4. Brian Snell (47)
  5. Gregory Lafontaine (43)
  6. Catriona Verner (42)
  7. Michael Dineen (42)
  8. Christopher Hicks (41)
  9. Greg Skerkowski (40)
  10. Paul Pape (38)
  11. Peter Scrutton (38)
  12. Joanne Stuart (37)
  13. John McInnes (34)
  14. Deborah Krick (34)
  15. Robert Sheppard (33)
  16. Joseph Di Luca (33)
  17. Nadia Thomas (33)
  18. Andreea Baiasu (32)
  19. Howard Krongold (31)
  20. David Harris (31)
  21. Susan Magotiaux (31)
  22. Dena Bonnet (30)
  23. Benita Wassenaar (30)
  24. James Lockyer (29)
  25. Roger Pinnock (29)
  26. Michelle Campbell (29)
  27. Alan Gold (29)
  28. Matthew Asma (28)
  29. Grace Choi (28)
  30. Frank Au (27)
  31. Vincenzo Rondinelli (26)
  32. Susan Ficek (26)
  33. Michael Lacy (25)
  34. Jennifer Woollcombe (25)
  35. Brian Greenspan (25)
  36. Gillian Roberts (24)
  37. Lisa Joyal (24)
  38. Richard Litkowski (24)
  39. Delmar Doucette (24)
  40. Leslie Maunder (24)
  41. Christine Tier (24)
  42. Philip Campbell (23)
  43. P. Andras Schreck (23)
  44. Holly Loubert (23)
  45. David Finley (23)
  46. Craig Harper (22)
  47. Joseph Wilkinson (21)
  48. Karen Papadopoulos (21)
  49. David Lepofsky (21)
  50. John Patton (21)

Note: court data is messy and difficult to process so this is not the definitive list of lawyers who've appeared most frequently. That said, imperfect data is better than nothing and this is the only time (that I'm aware of) that someone has created a data set like this.