Bradley Crawford is counsel to our Business Law Group in Toronto, having retired from the partnership at the end of 2001 after 30 years as an associate and partner. He joined the firm after teaching at the Faculty of Law of the University of Toronto for 10 years. He continues to provide advice to a small number of clients on projects that he began but was unable to complete while a partner.
During his years of practice, Mr. Crawford acted as senior outside counsel to The Canadian Bankers' Association and as advisor to a large number of individual Canadian and foreign banks and payments systems on matters of banking law and financial services regulation in Canada. He has advised the federal government and various of its agencies on numerous issues in the past, and continues to do so, on issues involving banking law and regulation, as well as the law and practice of various electronic clearing and settlements systems. He was the author of the report on which the federal Depository Bills and Notes Act was based and is currently preparing a report on a proposed Cheques Act for Canada.
Mr. Crawford is retained as counsel with respect to the development of new clearing and settlement systems by The Canadian Depository for Securities and foreign exchange settlement by CLS International Bank. He was also a member of the Canadian delegation to The Hague Conference on the development of the convention, opened for signature in March 2003, to govern the choice of law for the recognition in cross-border transactions of dispositions of interests in securities held through foreign intermediaries.
Mr. Crawford was awarded the 2009 Walter Owen Book Prize for The Law of Banking and Payment in Canada, the leading authority on the law governing Canadian payment systems and instruments (Canada Law Book, 2009.) It is successor to the renowned and often cited Crawford & Falconbridge on Banking and Bills of Exchange, Eighth Edition (1986) and Payment, Clearing and Settlement in Canada (2002). Mr. Crawford was appointed one of Her Majesty's counsel by the federal government in 1990.
He obtained his LLM from the University of London and combined B.Comm. and LLB from University of British Columbia. He was called to the Ontario bar in 1966.