Sommer Law

About Sommer Law

Sommer Law is a solo Toronto practice run by founding lawyer Jonathan J. Sommer, who holds a B.A., M.A., and LL.B. and has more than 25 years in legal practice. Before turning to law, Sommer trained as a photographer and filmmaker, a background that fed into a practice built around detecting and litigating art fraud. The firm handles general business law, employment law, defamation, and visual art law, and is licensed to provide legal advice on Ontario law only. Rather than building a traditional associate roster, the firm contracts with a network of legal, business, financial, IT, art, and investigative specialists as each matter requires.

Sommer Law has drawn national media attention for its work on Norval Morrisseau art fraud cases. Jonathan Sommer represented Kevin Hearn, the Barenaked Ladies keyboardist, in a lawsuit over an allegedly forged Morrisseau painting purchased from Toronto's Maslak-McLeod Gallery, and the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled in Hearn's favour in 2019. The case was profiled in the 2019 TVO documentary There Are No Fakes, and Sommer has since been interviewed by CBC, the Globe and Mail, APTN National News, and CP24, among others, about art authentication and the Morrisseau forgery ring. In 2022, Sommer authored the art fraud chapter in the LexisNexis book Art Law: Cases & Controversies.