Kyla Lee
DUI and Driving Lawyer | Author | Public Educator | Advocate
Kyla Lee is one of Canada’s most accomplished and recognizable criminal defence lawyers. She is a partner at Acumen Law Corporation. Her career defies easy categorization. She is a courtroom force with a Supreme Court of Canada record, a published legal scholar, a children’s book author, a musician, a podcaster, and one of the most followed legal voices on social media in the country. She is also Métis, and brings that identity and its values to everything she does.
Kyla’s path to law was never conventional. After completing a Bachelor of Arts at UBC with a major in First Nations Studies and a minor in English Literature, influenced deeply by the late Dr. Linc Kessler of the First Nations House of Learning, she enrolled at the Peter A. Allard School of Law. As a law student, she sent her applications to traditional firms and received nothing but rejections. Rather than be discouraged, she recognized that her passion lay elsewhere. While quarantined at home recovering from H1N1, she cold-called every criminal defence lawyer she could reach, and ultimately landed an articling position at Acumen Law Corporation – the same firm where she works to this day.
What followed was a career that would reshape the landscape of impaired driving law in British Columbia and beyond.
A Lawyer Who Literally Wrote the Book
Kyla is the author of two seminal legal textbooks. Immediate Roadside Prohibitions in Western Canada is the definitive text on defending 90-day driving prohibitions in BC. Lawyers across the province rely on it. Her second book, Cross-Examination: The Pinpoint Method, published by LexisNexis, has become a best-selling guide to litigation technique used by lawyers throughout Canada and the United States. She didn’t just write about cross-examination in the abstract; she teaches it, regularly conducting workshops for defence counsel across North America and available to step in personally to conduct cross-examinations in cases where lawyers need a specialist to extract critical testimony from a resistant witness.
The Record That Speaks for Itself
Kyla has successfully defended thousands of Immediate Roadside Prohibition cases and hundreds of impaired driving cases. Her office has handled more IRP cases than any other firm in British Columbia. She has appeared as counsel at every level of court in the province and as lead counsel before the Supreme Court of Canada.
Her Supreme Court work is historic. Kyla made history as the first BC lawyer to argue an IRP appeal at the Supreme Court of Canada, introducing the court to the full complexity of BC’s driving prohibition regime for the first time. She was also successful in opposing the first leave to appeal to the Supreme Court in an IRP case, and later made the first arguments regarding IRPs in the landmark Wilson case. Her work didn’t merely win cases for individual clients – it changed the law, forcing the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles to abandon the use of self-made evidence at IRP appeal hearings, and exposing systemic problems with the calibration of breathalyzers in Port Moody that no other lawyer had caught.
The Scientist in the Courtroom
Kyla’s approach to impaired driving defence goes well beyond legal argument. She is one of the few people in Canada who owns and operates the same breath-testing equipment that police use in the field. Acumen Law was the first firm in Canada to obtain many of the breath-testing devices used by police, and to this day remains the only law firm to have obtained an approved drug screening device. She completed the manufacturer’s training to operate and calibrate the Alco-Sensor FST – the same device BC police rely on – and has undergone the same DWI Standardized Field Sobriety Test (SFST) training required of officers under NHTSA guidelines.
Kyla has also trained in blood analysis at the University of Arlington and a private program at Axion Laboratory in Chicago. She also has participated in scientific experiments involving the ASD breathalyzers and saliva drug testers used across the province. In 2022, Kyla presented to the international Society of Toxicology on the forensic limitations of the use of approved screening devices for punishment processes.
When she challenges a breathalyzer reading in court, she does so as someone who has personally operated the machine.
The Voice the Media Calls
Kyla is among the most sought-after legal commentators in British Columbia, and often across Canada. She is a regular source for every major news outlet in the province, appearing across print, television, radio, and digital platforms on matters of driving and criminal law. She has been a contributing columnist to the Huffington Post and Vancouver Is Awesome, and her blog is read by lawyers, government officials, and police officers across the country.
For years, she has been a weekly panelist on CBC Vancouver’s On the Coast with host Gloria Macarenko and co-panelist Mo Amir, contributing to the show’s beloved Soapbox Social segment, a freewheeling, often sharp-elbowed discussion of the week’s biggest stories in BC. It is the kind of platform that suits her: quick, opinionated, and never dull.
RadioNL in Kamloops also featured Kyla in a regular Monday morning legal segment for many years.
Kyla is also a regular guest on the Mike Smyth Show on CKNW, where she talks about current legal issues and frequently provides live advice to callers about their traffic court and driving law questions.
Kyla is also a regular panelist on the ChekTV show, This is Vancolour, hosted by Mo Amir. She participates in a segment called Kyla’s Court, where she provides legal insight on current political and social issues in a lighthearted and entertaining way.
Featured In
Driving Law: The Podcast
Kyla co-hosts Driving Law, a podcast that has attracted a remarkable roster of guests, including Attorneys General, Ministers and MLAs, former solicitors general, former police chiefs, leading toxicologists, prominent cannabis legalization advocates, and top DUI lawyers from across the United States. The show is known for treating driving law seriously as a window into broader questions about rights, evidence, policing, and justice. It has built a devoted following among both legal professionals and everyday listeners who want to understand the law that governs them.
Cases That Should Have Gone to the Supreme Court of Canada But Didn’t
One of Kyla’s most distinctive contributions to public legal education is her ongoing video series, Cases That Should Have Gone to the Supreme Court of Canada, But Didn’t! Drawing on her deep knowledge of appellate practice and constitutional law, Kyla examines significant cases that raised fundamental legal questions but have been denied leave by the Supreme Court, leaving important issues unresolved.
The series has attracted thousands of viewers from across Canada and has become a resource for law students, practitioners, and engaged citizens alike. It has even featured the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Beverly McLaughlin.
Published By
TikTok, Social Media, and the ChipGuru
Long before legal TikTok became a thing, Kyla was building one of the most distinctive and engaged legal presences on social media. Her TikTok account, @kylaleelawyer, has amassed over 100,000 followers and more than 2 million likes. Her content ranges from legal rights explainers to her beloved ChipGuru series, in which she delivers enthusiastic and deeply earnest reviews of potato chips and fast food. On Instagram, she brings the same energy. She has thousands of posts spanning legal commentary, cooking, advocacy, and the full texture of a life lived with unusual range and curiosity.
Kyla is unafraid of controversy, willing to wade into any public debate, and has built a following that extends well beyond the legal community.
Sit Still Jackson
In 2023, Kyla fulfilled a dream she had since she was eight years old, writing stories in pencil on loose-leaf paper and sending them to publishers, hopeful as only a child can be. Sit Still Jackson, illustrated by Nanaimo’s Lindsay Ford and published through Bread and Clutter, is the story of a squirmy little boy who discovers that sitting still makes him grow and grow, and grow until he’s far too tall and has to find his way back to himself.
It’s a warm, funny, and unexpectedly moving book about acceptance, the danger of getting exactly what you wish for, and the value of being exactly who you are. Before law school, Kyla worked as an education assistant with neurodiverse children, and that experience is embedded in the book’s heart. Sit Still Jackson never lectures. It just tells a good story.
A Musician, Too
Because apparently there was still room, Kyla also writes, records, and releases music. Her songs are available on Apple Music and all major streaming platforms. It is consistent with who she is: someone for whom creative expression is not a hobby to be explained away, but simply another dimension of a fully inhabited life.
Kyla’s song Softly has been featured in popular true crime and British Columbia history podcasts.
The Honours
In 2019, Kyla was named one of the Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada by Canadian Lawyer Magazine. That same year, the DUI Defence Lawyers Association awarded her the BadAss Award, the organization’s highest honour. She has been recognized by the Universal Women’s Network as a Woman of Inspiration Indigenous Leader, and Corporate Vision magazine named her the Leading Immediate Roadside Prohibition Lawyer in Canada.
Kyla is a multi-time Clawbie winner, including the organization’s top award, the Simon Fodden Award.
Acumen Law was awarded Leading Criminal Defence Firm in British Columbia at the 2020 Canadian Business Awards. Kyla is the founder and president of the Canadian Impaired Driving Lawyers Association, the Canadian Ambassador and Vice President Education and Events to the DUI Defence Lawyers Association, and a longtime member of the National College of DUI Defence. She is the British Columbia Vice President for the Women in Canadian Criminal Defence organization.
Kyla also funds the Kyla Lee Indigenous Law Students Award at Allard Law, supporting one student each year.
Awards From
The Lawyer the Government Sued. She’s Still Here.
Most lawyers spend their careers hoping to one day sue the government. Kyla Lee can claim something far more exclusive: the government sued her. Specifically, the sitting Attorney General of British Columbia launched proceedings against Kyla Lee and Acumen Law Corporation, not because they had done anything wrong, but because she was simply too effective at her job, and the documents that proved it had accidentally ended up in her hands.
Here is what happened.
In November 2015, the Attorney General launched a court application, ultimately ending up before the BC Court of Appeal in British Columbia (Attorney General) v. Lee, 2017 BCCA 219. The application sought to have certain documents that had been disclosed to Kyla in a Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act request returned and to have Kyla Lee and Acumen Law permanently banned from acting in any impaired driving or IRP case going forward.
Let that sink in.
The sitting Attorney General of British Columbia, having inadvertently handed a defence lawyer documentary evidence, responded by trying to have that defence lawyer removed from the field of play entirely. Permanently. For all DUI cases. Forever.
One might reasonably wonder why, if the documents were merely embarrassing administrative correspondence, the remedy required ending the career of the province’s most effective IRP lawyer. One might further wonder whether the unprecedented severity of that remedy suggests that what was in those 19 pages was considerably damaging to the government’s position. One might reasonably wonder if the government is actually afraid of how powerful Kyla Lee and Acumen Law are. But such wonderings are, of course, entirely speculative.
So what happened in court with the attempt to ban her from practising? That failed. The extraordinary injunction to remove her from DUI practice entirely was dismissed. The government did not get the career-ending remedy it sought. Kyla Lee kept her licence, kept her practice, and kept winning IRP cases.
The case itself, British Columbia (Attorney General) v. Lee, is now regularly cited in Canadian legal publications on the law of solicitor-client privilege and inadvertent disclosure. It is studied by lawyers across the country. It made law. And it did so with Kyla Lee’s name on it, in a case initiated against her by the very government she had spent her career holding to account.
Kyla did not choose to be the defendant in a landmark privilege case. The government chose that for her. And in doing so, it handed her something worth more than the documents they wanted back: a permanent place in the Canadian law reports, and the singular distinction of being the lawyer the BC Attorney General considered dangerous enough to try to permanently sideline.
She remains, stubbornly and successfully, in practice.
