Biography: Competition

Neil Finkelstein is a partner in McCarthy Tétrault's litigation group. He has been lead counsel in many of the leading Canadian competition, securities, constitutional, pension, commercial and tax cases at every level of court up to and including the Supreme Court of Canada. He has been counsel in 24 appeals in the Supreme Court of Canada, 50 appeals in courts of appeal across Canada, and 97 major trials and hearings in courts and senior administrative tribunals across Canada. In the antitrust merger field, Neil has been successful counsel in four of the five merger cases to have been decided under the Competition Act: Superior Propane, CP Ships, Southam and Hillsdown, as well as the ground-breaking Labatt cases before the Competition Bureau, the Competition Tribunal, the Federal Court, and the Federal Court of Appeal, respecting early closing of complex merger transactions and the validity of investigative subpoenas. He has been successful counsel in some of the leading hostile takeover cases in Canada, such as Canwest v WIC.

Neil is a chartered accountant and has law degrees from McGill University (LLB, 1979) and Harvard Law School (LLM, 1990). He was law clerk to the Right Honourable Bora Laskin, Chief Justice of Canada (1980 to 1981), and senior policy adviser to the attorney general of Ontario from 1985 to 1986. He is a life bencher of the Law Society of Upper Canada since 1991, a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and an honorary fellow of COMBAR (UK). Neil has advised both federal and provincial governments on constitutional reform and taught constitutional law courses at both Osgoode Hall Law School and the University of Toronto Law School. Additionally, Neil was co-counsel to the Gomery Commission into Sponsorships and Advertising by the government of Canada from 2004 to 2005 and in that capacity examined Paul Martin – the first time a sitting prime minister of Canada had been examined at a public inquiry since Sir John A MacDonald at the Canadian Pacific Railway Commission in 1873.

Neil has lectured extensively on constitutional law topics and published extensively in the areas of constitutional, administrative and competition law. Among his publications are Laskin's Canadian Constitutional Law (ed, fifth edition, 1986) and Finkelstein and Finkelstein, Constitutional Rights in the Investigative Process.

Neil was ranked by Lexpert magazine (July/August 2002 edition) as one of the top 25 corporate litigators in Canada. He is one of the most frequently recommended lawyers in the area of corporate, securities and competition litigation according to the Canadian Legal Lexpert Directory and is also included in the Lexpert American Lawyer Guide to the Leading 500 Lawyers in Canada, the 2006 Lexpert Guide to the 100 Most Creative Lawyers in Canada, Chambers Global: The World's Leading Lawyers for Business, Legal Media Group's Guide to the World's Leading Competition and Antitrust Lawyers and the PLC Which Lawyer? Yearbook.

Other Practice Areas

Neil Finkelstein also features in the following practice areas:

• Commercial Litigation
• Product Liability Defence