Biography • Insolvency & Restructuring

E Bruce Leonard is the chair of the business reorganisation group at Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP in Toronto and was admitted to practice in 1970. Mr Leonard is the past chair of the International Bar Association's committee on insolvency and creditors' rights (comprising 1,200 lawyers from over 80 countries). He is a founding member of and was the chair and a director of the Insolvency Institute of Canada, a limited membership invitational organisation of senior insolvency professionals in Canada, from its inception in 1990 to 2001. Mr Leonard is the chair, a director and a founding member of the International Insolvency Institute, a limited membership global organisation of senior insolvency professionals.

Mr Leonard is a member of the American Law Institute where he was the chair and co-reporter for Canada on the American Law Institute's transnational insolvency project and co-chair of the ALI/III project on co-operation in international insolvency cases. He served as the co-chair of the government of Canada's bankruptcy and insolvency committee working group on international insolvencies and is a member of the Ontario Court of Justice Chief Justice's committee on commercial law proceedings. Mr Leonard is a past director of the American Bankruptcy Institute (1997-2000) and served as co-chair of the ABI's international committee. He is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the only international member of the United States National Bankruptcy Conference. Mr Leonard is a fellow of the American College of Bankruptcy and is a director of the college and chair of the college's international committee. Mr Leonard served as co-director of the LLM programme in Insolvency Law at the Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, Canada's only graduate programme in insolvency. Mr Leonard has been named in Canada's Top 500 Lawyers (Lexpert/American Lawyer), Chambers and other directories of leading insolvency lawyers for many years.

Mr Leonard is the co-editor of Current Developments in International Insolvencies and Reorganizations (Graham and Trotman, London 1994), and Multinational Commercial Insolvency (American Bar Association, Chicago 1993). Mr Leonard is a contributing editor of Norton Bankruptcy Law and Practice and the American Bankruptcy Institute Journal and editor-in-chief of the Annual Review of International Insolvency. Mr Leonard has participated in most significant domestic and international reorganisational proceedings in Canada for many years.