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Law Students and Young Lawyers

Lawyer, Know Thyself

One of my favourite clients was an engineering firm. I once wrote a letter of intent for them concerning the purchase of a business. They only had one comment on my draft document. They asked me why I had only taken the numbers to two decimal places, which is not a surprising question coming from a group of engineers. However, I found the question to be quite amusing, since the numbers in question were dollars, where the use of two decimal places is quite an accepted custom. (Did you ever have a store clerk say, “that will be $5.0156?). But at least they read the document, which is more than I can say about many of my other clients.

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Law Students and Young Lawyers

Keeping Your Options Closed

I was born and raised in Montreal. I started my legal education at the Faculty of Law at McGill in 1975. My plan was to obtain my Bachelor of Civil Law and practice law in Quebec.

In 1976, the Parti Quebecois was elected in Quebec for the first time. As an Anglo in Quebec, I thought that it was a good idea to also obtain a common law degree so that I could get the hell out of Quebec should the need arise.

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Law Students and Young Lawyers

About Those Soul-Sucking Jobs

I once represented a doctor who wanted to stop being a doctor.  He absolutely hated it.   He was a nervous type, and he just could not cope with the responsibility of practicing medicine. The stress was killing him.   I helped him disentangle from another doctor with whom he had set up a clinic.  As far as I know, he never practiced medicine again.  I also know another fellow who became a doctor, hated it, and became a paramedic working on ambulances.   

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Law Students and Young Lawyers

Ten Things I Liked About Being a Lawyer

Since I retired, I have been writing articles about the legal profession “from the safety of retirement”.  It occurred to me recently that many of them may have been a bit negative in tone. Someone carefully studying my growing body of work (and I do realize that absolutely nobody is doing that) might conclude that I have a negative view of the profession in which I worked for 40 years. 

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Law Students and Young Lawyers

Finding Your Path (Or Stumbling Along in the Legal Profession)

There is a well-known quote which has been attributed to various people to the effect that “if you are not a socialist at age 20, you have no heart, but if you are still a socialist at age 30, you have no brain.” 

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Law Students and Young Lawyers

An Article About Articling Students

I write this from the perspective of retirement after having practiced law for four decades and having had what I believe was a successful career.

I articled in 1979 for the now defunct firm of Goodman & Carr which at the time was an excellent mid-sized Toronto law firm.

I was not a great articling student.  What a ‘not great articling student’ does not need are some exceptional articling students to work alongside so that the comparisons are easy for everyone to make.

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Law Students and Young Lawyers

Lessons from my Loony Early Days of Practice

When I started practicing business law immediately after being called to the Bar, I had just been rejected for hire-back with the firm where I had done my articles.  I was told that the reason that I was not hired back was that I had not shown sufficient self-confidence.  Compounding my insecurity was the fact that I was younger than most first year lawyers, having entered law school after just one year of university.  Worse still, I had no prior business experience.

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Law Students and Young Lawyers

Ten Things that They Don’t Teach You in Law School

It is common knowledge that you do not learn anything about the business of practicing law in law school.

So, here are ten things that every law student or recent graduate should know: