Evan Clemence

About Evan Clemence

Evan Clemence is a family lawyer at Gelman & Associates, and that work includes cases where domestic violence is involved as well as child protection files. Bilingual in English and French, Evan chaired the Ontario Bar Association's Comité des langues officielles in 2019-2020. In June 2020 Evan was among the committee members who led a webinar, run with RÉCLEF, urging law students and new lawyers who are fluent in both of the courts' official languages to make that skill count.

Family law has been the main focus of Evan's practice since 2013. Before settling on it, Evan built a criminal law background as a per diem lawyer with the Durham Crown Attorney's Office and took on a number of civil litigation files. In early 2017 Evan was practising at Creighton Law LLP in Oshawa, where the work also reached into construction law and estate litigation, and later moved to Gelman. While still practising in Durham, Evan sat on the Durham Region Law Association's Best Practices Committee under Justice Paul Nicholson, which wrote child protection policy for the Oshawa courthouse.

Evan was born in Toronto, grew up in Brampton and comes from a family of artists. A University of Toronto degree in history and Canadian studies came in 2009, followed by law school in Saskatoon, apart from one semester in Tromsø, Norway. The Anne Marjorie Beer and High North scholarships made that time in Norway possible, with a focus on the rights of Indigenous peoples and on human rights, and Evan earned a Juris Doctor in 2012.

Music matters a great deal to Evan. Every week Evan hosts Célébration Jazz on CHOQ FM 105.1, Toronto's French-language radio cooperative, and in spare hours Evan sits down at the piano to play classical pieces.