Most professionals build a practice. Fewer build something that can outlast it.
There is a moment, usually somewhere in the third or fourth year, when a practitioner looks at the invoices going out under their own name and asks a quieter question. What, exactly, have I built? For most, the honest answer is a very good job with a letterhead. The clients follow the person. The goodwill walks out the door every evening and comes back in the morning. It is valuable, but it does not belong to anything.
Barbarian Law began in Aurora on a simple premise: transactional work, handled by one lawyer from start to finish, at a price set in writing before the work begins. Real estate closings. Incorporations and the corporate housekeeping that follows them. Businesses bought and sold. Wills, powers of attorney, signatures that need a notary. Several hundred closings later, the practice has accumulated what most small practices never do: a registered name, systems built to carry real volume, and a reputation earned one review at a time.
Incorporation is where the question of what you have built begins to change, though not for the reasons people usually give. A professional corporation keeps more of what it earns. A properly structured rollover moves a going practice into that corporation without a tax event along the way. These are the reasons accountants lead with, and they are good ones. They are also only the visible part.
The less discussed part is separation. In Ontario, a law practice can only be owned by licensees, and that is as it should be. The independence of the profession depends on it. But a practice is made of more than its legal work. It has a name people recognize. It has the systems that make volume possible. It has the accumulated craft of how things get done, written down or not. Not all of those things are the practice itself, and the rules do not treat them as though they were.
A small number of practitioners have started to draw that line deliberately, between the work only a lawyer can do and everything that makes the work possible. This year, Barbarian Law drew it too. From October 15, 2026, the practice operates through a professional corporation, and the name it practises under is held separately and used under licence. Done with care, at fair value, and with no outside hand on a single file, an arrangement like this respects every principle the Law Society cares about. Done carelessly, it does not. That is why the details matter far more than the idea.
What happens once the line is drawn is the interesting part. The practice remains exactly what it was: a lawyer serving clients, answerable to the regulator. What sits beside it becomes something else. A name that already means something in York Region does not have to stay in York Region. Systems built for one lawyer’s volume can carry more than one lawyer. Practice areas can be added without starting from nothing. And the whole of it can be valued on its own terms, planned for on its own timeline, and, under the right conditions, treated very differently than the practice ever could be.
We will not map the whole terrain here. Structures like this turn on facts, and the facts are rarely the same twice. The professional corporation rules, the prohibition on sharing fees, and the tests the Income Tax Act applies along the way each have edges, and the edges are where the real planning lives. For a broader view of where the profession may be heading, see our piece on whether Canada should allow non-lawyer ownership of law firms.
Some of the most interesting conversations at this firm are not with clients. They are with lawyers and builders who look at a practice and see what it could become. If you are one of them, the door at 14981 Yonge Street is open, and so is karim@barbarianlaw.ca.
This article is general information only and is not legal or tax advice. Every structure depends on its own facts; speak with a lawyer and an accountant before acting.
