Lawyers (other than litigators, I suppose) don’t like public speaking much more than other people do, and most people rank public speaking as their greatest fear, just before death.
As best as I can tell, there are two potential audiences for lawyers to speak to. The first group is comprised of potential clients. The reason for speaking to them is obvious.
Back in the day, there was a law firm in which the partners were – how do I say it sort of nicely – not ‘culturally aligned.’
Sam was the Managing Partner. He was charming and charismatic, and nice to everybody, at least most of the time. Aligned with him were enough partners to vote with him on everything that mattered, sometimes more out of personal loyalty or ignorance than conviction.
Gordon was the other high billing partner with a huge client base, which qualified him to lead a group of dissidents. He and Sam tended to be competitive about things such as compensation.
I like to bake bread. In my opinion, and in the opinion of a family member named Aidan, the crust is the best part of my bread. When he was younger, Aidan would sometimes help himself to both end pieces. I did not like that.
Once, Aidan asked if it was okay for him to take a slice of my freshly baked bread as it was cooling on the counter. I told him to take just one slice. The next thing I knew he had sliced the entire top of the bread off and was happily munching way.
When I confronted him, Aidan was not particularly remorseful. He said, “you said that I could have a slice. You didn’t say anything about how I had to slice it.”
Back in the day, I used to teach junior lawyers how to practice law. I had me some rules. They went something like this:
These rules helped me train a number of junior lawyers to be pretty good at what they did.
It took me eight years after I first realized that my life in law was not working for me until I was fully retired. It went like this:
2012: Best financial year ever. Worked incredibly hard in the last quarter. My hours in November and December were insane. I was so proud of myself. Got a huge slice of the compensation pie.
January 2013: Went to the doctor worried that I was not well enough to go on a trip to Australia for a meeting of our international association. Diagnosed with a thyroid issue. The doctor said it had nothing to do with the stress of my career. I did not believe him.
When asked about my complaints about the legal profession, I am forced to admit that back before I escaped the profession and became happy, I did in fact have some good days. Three of them. (Okay, I am kidding about that last bit. There were more good days than that.)
As a recession may be looming and Banks may be enforcing their mortgages, I thought that I would share this story from the recession in the early 1990’s.
There was a law firm that did volume mortgage remedy work for a Canadian Bank. A somewhat junior real estate lawyer who I will call Barbara managed the files. The work was somewhat routine but required precision and organizational skills, and Barbara did it well and earned a reasonable salary.
My father used to ask, “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?”
There are probably a million things that are wrong with that question, but his basic point is worth considering. He was asking why it is that some people believe that they know better concerning just about everything, but they do not generate any results from their supposed brilliance.
I said and thought a lot of stuff while I was practicing law. I believed every single bit of it. Over time I figured out that some of it was kind of dumb. Here are some of those gems:
When I practised law in Mississauga, Ont., our fees were cheap compared to the Toronto firms, and kind of expensive compared to firms in places like Guelph, Belleville and Kingston. I occasionally wondered whether my clients might prefer to deal with firms in smaller cities at lower rates. Then I would reassure myself that doing so would be terribly inconvenient for them and that they would rather pay more to deal with me.
Now I am not so sure.