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The principal you article under shapes how you practice law for years after your licensing year ends. Their habits, standards, and willingness to explain things become your baseline. Choosing well is worth more effort than most students give it.
What a Principal Actually Does
A principal is the supervising lawyer who signs off on your articling term with the law society. In Ontario, every articling student must have a designated principal who holds a current licence and has practiced for at least three years. The principal is accountable for your work and, by extension, for your professional development during the term.
In practice, the quality of that relationship varies enormously. Some principals are deeply invested mentors who review your drafts with detailed comments, walk you through their reasoning on files, and introduce you to the professional network they have built over a career. Others treat the articling student as a pair of hands for research and rarely explain anything. Both arrangements are technically compliant with the law society's requirements. Only one is useful to you.
This is worth stating plainly: the law society's oversight of the principal relationship is about minimum standards, not about whether you are actually learning. That part is on you to assess and choose carefully before accepting an offer.
Questions to Ask About the Principal During Your Search
Most articling candidates spend their interview preparation focused on what the firm does and how to answer competency questions. Fewer spend time developing specific questions about the principal they would be working under. That is a missed opportunity.
Before accepting any offer, try to learn the following: How many students has this principal supervised before? Do past students speak well of the experience, and can you reach any of them? How does the principal prefer to give feedback, and how often? Will you be working primarily on one practice area or across several? Is the principal's practice stable, growing, or in transition?
You can ask some of these questions during the interview process, framed as genuine interest in the learning environment. Others you may need to research independently. The articling interview preparation post covers how to ask substantive questions without sounding transactional.
Tip. Search the principal's name in CanLII and your provincial law society's public decisions database before your interview. You will see what they have argued, what areas they practice in, and whether there are any professional conduct findings. This takes twenty minutes and tells you more than any website bio.
What Good Teaching Looks Like in Practice
A principal who teaches does a few specific things. They let you observe before you draft. They review your work and tell you why a section needs changing, not just that it does. They give you files that push your abilities slightly past your current level, and they check in before deadlines rather than after. They introduce you to other lawyers and clients. They debrief matters that close so you understand the outcome and what drove it.
A principal who does not teach hands you research tasks without context and returns your work with changes made rather than explained. They are not unkind, necessarily. They are just busy, and teaching takes time they have not reserved for it.
There is a middle ground that is actually common: a principal who would teach if pressed, but who defaults to handing things off. With this type, you can often get more out of the relationship by asking specifically. "Can I sit in on your call with opposing counsel?" or "Would you have ten minutes after this file closes to walk me through what happened?" are direct requests that most principals will honour if you ask, but few will volunteer.
Firm Size and What It Means for Your Principal Relationship
At a large firm, you may have a designated principal but work across many lawyers. The relationship is often more diffuse: you learn from multiple senior practitioners, and your principal coordinates your overall experience rather than supervising most of your day-to-day work. This can be excellent or shallow depending on how well the firm manages the articling program.
At a small or solo firm, the principal relationship is almost the whole experience. You are working directly with one or two lawyers on everything. This can produce very intensive learning, or it can leave you without enough variety to cover the range of competencies the law society expects.
Boutique firms tend to offer deep learning in a narrow area. General practice firms in smaller markets often offer the widest variety of real client work. Neither is universally better. It depends on what kind of lawyer you want to be and how you learn best.
The post on the Law Practice Program versus articling covers how the LPP handles this question differently, offering a structured alternative for candidates who did not land an articling position in a traditional firm.
The Red Flags Worth Taking Seriously
Some warning signs are worth naming directly. A principal with a history of professional conduct findings, particularly for client neglect or trust account issues, is a risk to your own reputation and learning environment. A firm where the previous articling student left before the term ended warrants a direct question about what happened. A principal who seems reluctant to discuss what you will actually be doing during the term is not a good sign either.
Accepting an offer under a poor principal because the firm brand is recognizable is a trade-off some students make consciously. If you make it, go in with eyes open: plan to supplement your learning through bar association events, continuing education, and your peer network. The ten things to track during your articling year post includes tools for getting the most out of a term even when supervision is inconsistent.
When You Have Little Choice
The articling market is competitive. In a year when you have one offer, the question is not whether this principal is ideal but whether the arrangement is workable. Most arrangements are. A principal who is busy but not neglectful, practicing in an area adjacent to your interests, in a firm where other lawyers will interact with you, is a situation most students can navigate well.
What matters most is not the principal's prestige or the firm's size. It is whether you will leave the year having handled real files, having received feedback on your work, and having developed the habits a junior lawyer needs. You can fill gaps; you cannot recover a year that produced nothing.
For a broader view of the articling year and what comes next, see what to expect from your articling year, getting hired back after articling, and the articling and licensing hub.
What students value most in an articling principal
Illustrative figures based on general patterns in law student experience surveys. Confirm current articling requirements with your provincial law society.
If you are tracking your search and applications across multiple firms, A1 CMS gives you a structured way to keep notes, deadlines, and contacts organized across the recruit. Find out more at pricing.
