James Plotkin

About James Plotkin

Businesses, individuals and public bodies caught up in a fight over a contract, an intellectual property right or a government decision can turn to James Plotkin, a bilingual partner in Gowling WLG's Ottawa office. James's work runs across three connected fields: commercial litigation and arbitration, at home and internationally; IP litigation; and administrative law. Clients have included individuals, municipalities, multinational companies and even a sovereign state, and James is trained in both of Canada's legal traditions, the common law and the civil law.

The path here began with a clerkship for Justice Richard Boivin at the Federal Court of Appeal. Practice at an Ottawa litigation firm came next, and then the move to Gowling WLG. Called to the Ontario bar in 2016, James has since argued at the Supreme Court of Canada, in the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal, and at every level of Ontario's courts. That includes submissions in Vavilov, the Supreme Court's benchmark administrative law case, and in a Federal Court of Appeal case of first impression on whether novel website blocking orders are available against copyright infringement.

Arbitration ties much of it together. James acts for parties in domestic and international arbitrations, and also sits on the other side of the table: certified in 2022 as a Qualified Arbitrator by the ADR Institute of Canada, James decides commercial and IP cases and appears on VanIAC's Expedited Procedure roster and Arbitration Place's NextGen roster. Commercial and IP disputes can be mediated with James too. You'll also find James on television, radio and podcasts, and in English and French newspapers, talking about copyright.

There's a musician behind the lawyer. Before law school, James completed a jazz guitar program at Vanier College with a focus on composition and arranging, and plays guitar outside work. From 2011 to 2018, James returned to Vanier's music program to give a keynote about copyright and how it affects music creators. That interest shows in the writing as well, from an article proposing a new test for music plagiarism cases to one on the copyright side of book editing apps, and today James is Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Intellectual Property Review after more than ten years on its editorial board.