John-Paul E. Boyd K.C.

John-Paul E. Boyd, KC is an accredited family law arbitrator, family law mediator and parenting coordinator. He is the principal of John-Paul Boyd Arbitration Chambers, providing services throughout Alberta and British Columbia, Canada, and counsel to the preeminent Calgary family law firm, Wise Scheible Barkauskas. He is a senior family law lawyer nationally known for his approach to family justice issues, contributions to public and professional legal education on family law, and special expertise in disputes concerning parenting, support and jurisdictional issues.

John-Paul practiced family law in Vancouver for 14 years before joining the Canadian Research Institute for Law and the Family, a non-profit organization affiliated with the University of Calgary, as its executive director in 2013. He returned to private practice in 2018 and was appointed Queen's Counsel, now King's Counsel, in 2019. He took his training as a mediator in 2005, as a parenting coordinator in 2006 and 2007, as an arbitrator in 2011, and as a collaborative practitioner in 2012.

John-Paul is a member of the law societies of Alberta and British Columbia. He is also a member of the ADR Institute of Canada, Family Mediation Canada and the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts. John-Paul was a founding director of the BC Hear the Child Society, the BC Parenting Coordinators Roster Society and the Family Law Arbitrators Group Society in Vancouver.

John-Paul is the founding author of the acclaimed public legal education resource JP Boyd on Family Law, published in its third edition in 2019, and its former companion blog, the first legal blog cited in a Canadian court judgment. His other written work has been published by the UBC Law Review, Canadian Family Law Quarterly, the Canadian Journal of Family Law, the International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family, the Journal of International Aging, Law and Policy, the Department of Justice Canada, the National Judicial Institute, the Nova Scotia Department of Justice, and The Lawyer's Daily. John-Paul is a member of the advisory board of the Canadian Journal of Family Law, and a juror of the Walter Owen Book Prize, awarded by the Canadian Foundation for Legal Research, and the Allan Falconer Memorial Essay Contest, awarded by the Canadian Journal of Family Law.

John-Paul is consulted by provincial governments and the federal government on family law matters and legislative and procedural reforms. He has served on the Provincial Court of British Columbia's Family Law Rules Committee, the British Columbia Attorney General's Family Law Act Advisory Group, Family Relations Act Review Advisory Committee and Arbitration Act Advisory Group, the Advisory Group on Public Legal Education and Information for Bill C-78 for the federal Department of Justice, and the Law Society of British Columbia's Licensed Paralegal Task Force. He has twice given evidence as an expert on family law issues to the Canadian Senate's Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs.