Uncertainties collide: lawyers and money laundering, terrorist finance regulation

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the tentative, highly contingent nature of the contemporary press to impose stringent anti‐criminal finance regulatory obligations onto Canadian legal counsel. Design/methodology/approach - The approach used in this work is to bring together problems associated with different areas of the anti‐criminal finance project in order to demonstrate how these problems compound in the context of the fusion of Canadian lawyers and anti‐criminal finance regulation. It draws chiefly on Canadian law and Canadian and international scholarship. Findings - This paper shows that the tasking of Canadian legal counsel with additional regulatory burdens continues the pattern of developing legal strategies without paying sufficient attention to the actual results that the strategies produce. Practical implications - This paper suggests that any continued construction of an anti‐criminal finance apparatus should be accompanied by enhanced study of its actual ability to generate results. Originality/value - Most investigations of anti‐criminal finance developments assume the effectiveness of a strategy focused on detecting and intercepting resources linked to crime. Rather than assume its effectiveness, this paper demonstrates that an extraordinarily level of uncertainty animates that development.