Rastin looking forward to the future after Gluckstein merger

By Tony Poland, LegalMatters Staff • Barrie-area litigator Steve Rastin says he is taking his firm and his career to the next level by merging with Toronto-based Gluckstein Lawyers.

“When you are trying to provide the best service and attempting to ensure you are ready to operate in the COVID world, partnering into a firm with the best lawyers, the most cutting-edge technology and the best support team is only going to enable you to serve clients better,” says Rastin in announcing the merger that took effect on Jan. 1.

“At the end of the day, my decision for doing this is because I thought it was in the best interest of my clients.”

He says the partnership creates a new entity in Barrie and Simcoe County called Rastin Gluckstein, with Gluckstein maintaining its flagship operations on Bay Street.

‘Continued expansion’

“This represents a continued expansion of the Gluckstein brand. They recently merged with Derek Nicholson in Ottawa and established Nicholson Gluckstein,” Rastin tells LegalMattersCanada.ca. “Rastin Gluckstein will service central Ontario with offices in Barrie, Midland, Collingwood and Orillia. We also hope to expand to all of Simcoe-Muskoka and up into the Sudbury, North Bay markets.”

He says he has been practising law in Simcoe since 1996 and has gone through different partnerships. In recent years, Rastin says he found he was devoting an increasing amount of effort to running a business.

“I was spending more and more of my time dealing with everything except law. I was concentrating on business issues, staffing issues and marketing issues. All those things that any small business owner deals with. I was too small to be big and too big to be small,” he says. “I had enough of a presence that I was attracting good cases and working on very interesting files. I was bigger than a small shop, but I wasn’t big enough to have the type of resources that a firm like Gluckstein possesses.

“Increasingly, I found the responsibilities of running a business were a distraction taking away from the practice of law,” Rastin adds. “I didn’t go to law school to become a businessman. This will allow me to focus on being a lawyer.”

Fiercely competitive field

He says personal injury law has “increasingly become a fiercely competitive space” and staying relevant can be challenging.

“The advantage for us, dealing with a business like Gluckstein, is that they are technologically cutting edge. They have some of the most advanced software and hardware of any personal injury firm,” Rastin says. “They have the ability to sign retainers electronically, they have a paperless system. They also have the advantage of having enhanced legal research skills and advanced accounting and marketing teams.”

Rastin, who is a certified specialist in civil litigation, a Lexpert ranked lawyer and recognized by Best Lawyers in Canada 2021, says he wanted to work with the best.

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“I was only going to make a transition like this if I could move to an organization where I had a high degree of confidence in the integrity, work ethic, competence and likeability of the people I am going to work with,” he says. “What Gluckstein offers is bench strength. They have leading-edge lawyers starting with Bernard Gluckstein, the founding partner, and Charles Gluckstein, the managing partner. They have a number of quality associates such as Jordan Assaraf and Richard Halpern, one of the leading medical negligence lawyers in Ontario, who recently joined them.”

Rastin says when he looked at it objectively, the merger made perfect sense.

‘Worked closely together’

“Another reason this works is because of the relationship I have with Charles Gluckstein that goes back 15 years. We got to know each other quite well when he was president and I was president-elect of the Ontario Trial Lawyers Association,” he says. “We have worked closely together for a number of years and I have great affection for Charles. He is a very good lawyer, a very good business person and he’s a very good human being.”

As senior counsel and lawyer at Rastin Gluckstein, Rastin says he will “still have a significant amount of autonomy in terms of recruiting clients and working on files.”

“This isn’t simply a matter of folding my practise in with their firm,” he says. “This is a situation where the Gluckstein brand is expanding into a different area of the province.”

He says he is looking forward to the synergies the merger brings.

“Since 2009 we have had a number of good service providers and good programs. There are things that we wanted to do with our system but we had really reached the limits of it,” Rastin explains. “Charles is an innovator. He has taken the time and invested in different hardware and software solutions that take things to the next level.

“In a lot of ways, this merger is a win-win for all of us.”