Source of Funds

How We Fund Our Granting

Our primary source of revenue is from interest earned on lawyers’ pooled or mixed trust accounts.  

The Legal Profession Act requires lawyers to keep one or more trust accounts to hold money for their clients. These accounts must earn interest. 

The client money in these accounts might include deposits made for property sales, money from mortgages, assets from estates, or fees that clients have paid upfront for legal services. Lawyers can choose to put client money into separate interest-earning accounts at their clients’ discretion, but the administrative costs of doing so often outweigh the interest earned.

Lawyers are required to instruct their bank or credit union to send the interest earned on these trust accounts to the Foundation.

We work to arrange favourable interest rates and service charges for lawyers’ trust accounts. When these arrangements are made, consideration is given to the significant balances held in the accounts and the valuable work our grant recipients do to advance our mandate and access to justice. 

The amount of funds we receive from this interest has varied over time depending on the balances in the trust accounts and the current interest rates.

Although most of our revenue comes from this interest, the Foundation also earns money from its investments.