In my early years of practice, I received a phone call from a friend who practiced union side labour law. He had a question about Civil Law and having recently graduated from McGill with a Civil Law degree in addition to my Common Law Degree, I was able to answer his question. He appreciated my help. Or so he said.
Eleanor practiced family law. She was pretty smart, and she knew all of the technical stuff cold. What Eleanor was not that good at was the part about dealing with clients. Especially vulnerable clients. Such as people going through a separation or a divorce.
Patricia was a good lawyer. She knew her law. She worked hard. She produced billings. She brought in clients.
We all have character flaws. Even me. However, Patricia had more than most of us. She was uber competitive. She liked to win. She hated to lose. Patricia and others saw these attributes as positives. If she had been able to keep them under control, they might indeed have been assets. She was not, so they were not.
They say that the Americans are tougher than we are when it comes to business. I think that it is probably true.
I met John in the early 90’s, shortly after he had arrived in Toronto to set up a Canadian branch of his large Buffalo law firm. John was a very senior lawyer by then and he was the managing partner of the Toronto branch office of his firm, and in charge of the firm’s cross-border practice.
When I started out in the legal profession many years ago, becoming a Partner at a law firm was the dream of every new lawyer. At the firm where I articled in 1979, each new Partner received two gifts from the firm upon being admitted to partnership. The first was a gold sculpture of Sisyphus, pushing the boulder up the hill. The second was a speakerphone, which at the time was new and exciting technology.
In the summer of 1976, I worked for the largest law firm in Montreal, which was Ogilvy, Cope, Porteous, Montgomery, Renault, Clark & Kirkpatrick, as a student doing research. You likely do not know that name, but you may recognize the name of its successors Ogilvy, Renault and Norton Rose.
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.
Back when I started practicing law, I used to record my time on a docket sheet stapled to the inside front cover of each file. When it came time to bill the file, all of the information that I needed was there for me to use, but I was the only one who had it. Firm management did not have it. They could not tell me that my docketed time for the month was too low, or that I had recorded less time than last month or how my work in process compared to the same month of the year before. They could not easily compare my docketed time to what I had billed and tell me that my write-offs were too high, and they certainly could not look at my work in process and easily tell me how I was doing compared to other associates.
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.”
Quite some time ago in Toronto, there was a major retail landlord who had some very desirable space in the downtown core past which walked thousands and thousands of commuters on their way to and from the subway every working day. The space was leased to a large number of small boutique tenants who were quite delighted to be allowed to locate their business there.