Howard C. Cohen & Associates

About Howard C. Cohen & Associates

Howard C. Cohen & Associates is a small Toronto firm that combines criminal defence with civil litigation. Founder and senior lawyer Howard C. Cohen has held the Law Society of Ontario's Certified Specialist in Criminal Law designation for close to 20 years, and the firm says its two lawyers bring more than 40 years of combined experience to their work. Cohen's criminal defence career goes back to the late 1970s and has included drug prosecutions built on wiretap evidence, along with matters involving homicide, robbery, and major fraud charges.

Cohen practices alongside Avin Persad-Ford, who joined the firm in August 2015 and was called to the Ontario bar in 2023. Persad-Ford's background includes degrees in commerce, forensic accountancy, and international tax law, certifications as a Certified Fraud Examiner and Certified Executor Advisor, and ongoing study toward a Master of Taxation at the University of Waterloo. In 2022, Persad-Ford published an article on the jurisdiction of criminal law in outer space in the LSE Law Review.

The firm's core idea is that a single set of facts can trigger criminal charges and a civil, administrative, or regulatory matter at the same time, from a workplace investigation tied to a dismissal to an insurance dispute tied to a fraud charge, and that one team handling both can save clients from retaining separate lawyers for each side of the same case.