At the end of May 2015, CAPE filed a grievance against the Department of Justice’s decision to impose quotas for billable hours on its employees in the EC group working as paralegals.
The Department informed its paralegals at the end of April 2015 that it would be introducing a measure requiring them to log a minimum of 1,400 billable hours annually in the performance of their duties.
The amount of billable hours required of paralegals would thus be raised to the same level as the amount required of lawyers in the Law Practitioner (LP) group.
In CAPE’s view, this measure is unfair to paralegals and its effect on them would be disproportionate by comparison with their co-workers in the LP group. Paralegals do not have primary responsibility over the files assigned to them (such responsibility is normally given to lawyers), and few paralegals have administrative support for the management of their files; also, the decision does not take into account the fact that paralegals and lawyers have different work schedules.
Moreover, when it announced this decision, the Department of Justice informed paralegals that this target for billable hours would be among the objectives factored into their annual performance reviews for the 2015–16 period.
For all of these reasons, CAPE filed a grievance on May 20, 2015, contesting this decision by the employer and requesting that it be withdrawn. In addition, CAPE believes this new measure to be illegal because the EC group is currently engaged in collective bargaining and is therefore subject to a statutory freeze on its terms and conditions of employment.
