ARCTIC OBITER

MARCH/APRIL 2012 | 15
Choosing the Right Bank for Your Trust Accounts
If you’re in private practice and do more than legal aid work,
you’ve got a trust account. Any interest that the account
generates is to be paid, by law, to the NWT Law Foundation semiannually
under the Legal Profession Act, s.57(2).
Not all trust accounts are equal, however, so it bears taking a few
minutes to assess what your bank is doing for you, and whether or
not you could be doing a better job generating interest on those
trust monies.
It is the lawyer’s obligation to instruct their bank to remit any
interest earned on the trust monies to the Law Foundation every
six months. Every year during the audit process, we discover a few
lawyers who have been receiving the interest back into the trust
account, which is verboten under the Act. Please review your bank
statements carefully in order to be sure the interest is not going
back into the account, and check with the bank periodically to
make sure the interest is actually being paid to the Law
Foundation.
Currently, the five banks operating in the NWT have slightly
different rates of return – ScotiaBank is offering prime less 3%,
effectively zero interest. The other four – Bank of Montreal, CIBC,
Royal Bank, and TD – are all offering 0.25%. When dealing with
your bank, please insist on getting the highest return possible –
low interest has a direct effect on the work the Law Foundation
can support year to year.
We rely on your diligence, so please take a couple of minutes to
make sure your part of the system is working the way it is
supposed to. Students and community groups thank you for your
efforts.
$50,000 to the GNWT to maintain the M.M. de Weerdt court
library; and
$5,000 to the Native Law Centre at the University of
Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, to assist and encourage
Aboriginal people to enter the study of law.
Also in 2011, the scholarship program was changed to
provide financial incentives for Northern law students to
return home post-graduation. Under these new rules, eligible
applicants receive a non-repayable grant of $2,000 per year
for each of three years while attending law school. If they
return to the NWT to article, and continue to work post-call
in the NWT for one year, the scholarship fund will assist
them in the amount of $7,000 for each of those first two years,
for an overall commitment of $20,000 per student.
For the 2011/2012 academic year, four students have received
scholarships.
Please help us continue to fund these innovative projects and
dedicated students. We rely on your trust account interest to
make this possible.