I often find myself speaking to law students and young lawyers who are having difficulty deciding what area of law they should practice. I also hear from older lawyers lamenting their original choice and thinking about making a change.
For a bunch of smart people, many of us lawyers choose how to spend most of our waking hours in some pretty dumb ways.
Few lawyers would disagree with the statement that “law school does not teach you what you have to know to be able to practice law.” I imagine that the general public would find that to be surprising. It is called “law school” after all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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: