Detail, anticipation and organization is more than just listening to Max insisting on taking napkins along with pizza to a hungry hoard at a bar (K-0007). It is in my mind the approach to the entire practice of law, wherever and however one practices law.
In the 1980s, there of course were no smartphones and a precursor, the palm pilot (of blessed memory) was not even yet invented.
My “go to” was a very small note binder with alpha dividers that I used as an address book together with the annual Canadian Bar Associaton pocket calendar. To this day, it remains the greatest thing the organization ever did for me.
Who I learned this all from was of course none other than (again) Stephen R. Coxford (K-0003).
Steve had taught me to keep track of people’s phone numbers alphabetically by company (not last name) and only in pencil. People move of course.
Within the “H” tab, I had developed over the years a pretty impressive list of direct dial numbers for hotels around the world. Hey, this was before the Google and a mobile phone. If someone was travelling to, say Hong Kong, there was a pretty good bet they were going to stay at the same hotel they had stayed at the last time. And if you needed to find them, you had to find them. And under “M” I had a notation fo the “Map Guy” who could create the maps needed showing mining properties in a prospectus.
On the last page of my beloved black book (which I still have – picture attached) I wrote notes to myself of things to always keep in mind. I have over the years pulled out the black book and shared my now barely legible notes (pencil of course) to any number of students and young lawyers. The notes include the following:
• Pay attention to the detail
• Read the boiler plate. It is often wrong
• Anticipate what will happen or what needs to happen next
• Have zero expectations of being congratulated but enjoy it when it happens
• Spell people’s names correctly. It is often the only thing in a document they may very well read
• When you have a point to make, make it.
• Shine
Use these or create your own and put them in your own black book or computer file, but keep going back to them. They will guide you through your entire career.
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This is addressed primarily to male readers in “Big Law”, whatever that means. I really do not like the expression. And why male readers primarily? Well, they are the ones that need more help on this to be honest. I may get some flak for this, but hey, it is my blog. And with that said …
For a number of years, I was a volunteer coach of the Boy’s baseball team (K-0005 – Be a Mench). The Head Coach, who unlike me actually knew what he was doing, was Rob (Fish the Magish) Fishbaum. Coach Rob very often implored our young charges to “Practice like you play.” Think about that for a moment. I believe the same goes for just about everything in life. Practice like you play. Come prepared for every day as if it was Game 7 of the World Series. It is hard and it is tiring, but practice like you play physically and mentally. (And I should also note that I was once told by my own personal coach, Karen Hanna, never to use sports analogies.)
And the same goes for how you present yourself. I would never get on my road bike wearing jean shorts and a tank top. I suspect that neither would Tadej Pogacar. (Recover strong, Tadej.) I would never go to a mine site (nor would I be allowed in mind you) if I was not wearing proper safety gear including a long sleeve shirt and reflective vest. There is a proper uniform for every situation, and I will confess as my mother and sister will agree, I always liked a uniform, even as a kid. In my world, you play a better game, whatever that game is, when you start the game in a clean and pressed team uniform (Sorry again, Karen)
Big Law had, and in my world should again have a proper and professional team uniform, that being a suit and tie. We are very well paid professionals and that is how very well paid professional lawyers play. Yes, there are always exceptions to the rule, such as maybe a face-to-face Sunday morning meeting, should they ever happen again or a Friday before a long weekend. Even then, those are not rationalizations for flip flops and shorts.
On uniforms, I am reminded of a Sunday morning of over 30 years ago being in the Air Canada lounge at YYZ going somewhere. In walked Don Lindsay, the then Head of Mining at CIBC and thereafter the long standing CEO of Teck, wearing a suit and tie. I asked Don where he was going, to which he responded, “Australia”. Practice like you Play. You never know when will be called into the game. And to me, it is not the same to keep a suit and tie and shirt (and shoes – don’t forget the shoes) behind the door in your office “just in case”. Don’t practice “just in case”.
My father was a lawyer as well. He was a municipal lawyer and was the long standing City Solicitor in Windsor, Ontario, a civil servant with a great pension. While for a good four years before his retirement he referred to his wardrobe as being in “shut down mode”, he continued to put on a suit and tie every day before going off to work at City Hall. No “just in case” and I don’t buy the “times have changed”. The pendulum has swung way too far to the other side and now it is time to move it.
And one last anecdote on this which goes back to my first mentor, Steve Coxford. One night at Smith Lyons, I walked into the washroom and saw Steve changing into a tuxedo. I had myself attended a black tie wedding sometime recently before that evening and had rented a tuxedo, as one would do, so I thought. And so, for a middle class kid from Windsor, I asked Steve what was the obvious question as to where he rented his tuxedo. He turned and looked at me and smiled with a little sideway shake of his head and said, “Jay, every gentlemen owns his own tuxedo.” Lesson learned. A few years ago I regaled his two eldest sons with this story. They looked at each other and one said to the other, “That is so our Dad.”
And so, practice like you play for Game 7 and as Barney Stinson in How I Met Your Mother always said, “Suit Up”. You will feel better and you will play better. Trust me. -
As I shared in K-0003 (729 am), the only reason I was hired as an articling student was that I wore down the co-heads of the Committee into submission.
The only reason I was asked back as an associate was a napkin. Here is the story.
The Smith Lyons students of 1986-87 had a brilliant idea to prepare a Statement of Claim naming as co-defendants all of the then partners in the Firm. The passage of time does not allow me to remember the causes of action, but said statement of claim was prepared and served by leaving a copy on the chair of each Partner, other than Bob Smith. We did not think he would appreciate it. Like good young trainees, we also though prepared and delivered with the Statement of Claim an Offer to Settle. The settlement was very simple – a summer’s night game of softball with bragging rights to the winner.
Our Offer was accepted and baseball game held. Again, the passage of time does not allow me to recall who won said game.
In the great tradition of Smith Lyons and no doubt other firms then and now, post game beers were to be shared at a local establishment and we gathered at the rather well known and pre/upgraded “Jolley Miller”.
I was dispatched along with fellow student Michael Koch to attend a pizza shop up the street to come back with the nourishment. We were the designated “pizza students” for the evening. Max (as he and I refer to one another to this this day) and I hopped in my car and off we went with clear instructions to return soonest. We had left the shop and were walking to the car with the pizza boxes and Max turned to me and said, “We forgot the napkins.” I was quite dismissive not wanting to take the time to return to the store, but Max insisted and we walked back to obtain napkins.
We returned to the Miller and handed out the pizza to the waiting hoard and a then senior partner (who was no doubt younger then than I am today) looked me in the eye and asked for a napkin. Of course he did.
I thank Max to this day.
The moral of the story is simple – anticipate and pay attention to the detail and the little things. That is a huge part of the job. And your job and future career may just depend on it. -
A number of years ago, Brian Rose, a then senior Partner at Stikeman Elliott, and I hosted Maura Lendon, the COO of Greenlane Renewables (TSX), at our office for a conversation with a number of our associates. At the time, Maura was General Counsel of a TSX listed mining company, Primaro Mining Corp. and she spoke to the group of her expectations of her legal advisors. What follows are her words, not mine. They resonate today with me as much as they did when she spoke them. They are simple and clear and I am guessing (we will see) that there will be violent agreement amongst General Counsel as to their application.
Read them and heed them.
The Things I expect from Counsel – By Maura Lendon
1. Communication, communication, communication.
2. If my counsel realizes an issue is much more complex than we first thought, I expect to be briefed on it before counsel delves into complex and costly pursuits.
3. Though I know my business and my industry, I expect my counsel to be even more plugged into the latest in terms of deal nuances, terms and conditions, fine points, regulatory changes and use them to my strategic advantage in a negotiation.
4. I expect my counsel to have a general understanding of our business and what our concerns are and provide me with unsolicited thoughts that might advance our interests or mitigate our risks. I expect counsel to “get” our business and provide context-savvy advice.
5. I prefer files to be staffed tightly with the Firm. The smallest appropriate team is the best – and to work as a team, not a bunch of sole practitioners.
6. I expect counsel to focus on solutions to issues, not get caught up in their complexity or pursue issues that are interesting but do not add value. I appreciate elegant, effective solutions.
7. I want to be asked at the end of a file/transaction how the Firm did and I will give honest and proper feedback. I expect counsel to always consider how they can be more effective/provide better counsel efficiently.
8. Remember, you are an ambassador to my Company.
9. Refer to Expectation No. 1 -
Of the billions of words we hear, if is funny in a strange sort of way that we have the ability to remember (or at least think we remember) word for word conversations or exchanges of years and years ago. I guess that is what is referred to as making an impression. I have shared a few already in other posts like K-0004 (Learn Your Craft)
This is another one.
At a funeral of a cousin I attended a good 30 years if not more ago, I was struck by a few words said by the Rabbi presiding over the service. She said, “I have never regretted going to visit someone in the hospital, only not. I have never regretted going to a funeral or a shiva, only not”. Those simple words have stuck with me to this day.
This is not about the practice of law. This is about the practice of being a mench – a kind and compassionate person, someone who does the right thing, even when difficult.
This is more than simply being nice. (K-0001 – Be Nice). This is about being a member of the larger community. And we do it not for glory, not for reward, but because it is the right thing to do.
Do the right thing within your firm or organization. Do the right thing and get involved within your community, whether it be with your time or your pocketbook, or both. Coach your kid’s team and help your local charitable organizations. They need your help. And take that extra time to go visit that someone who means something to you who cannot come and see you. The Rabbi was right ; you will not regret it.
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As a mid-level associate in the 1990s, I was the junior on the file to a then public company called Zemex Corporation. The CEO was Dr. Richard L. Lister, who would later became a very close friend and mentor. His then friend and board member, Paul A. Carrol was not only a senior partner at Smith Lyons, but hands down the most powerful parter in the Firm. Like many Smith Lyons lawyers at the time, he was simply referred to by his initials, PAC.
Associates like myself just looked at him as if he was God. In addition to corporate work (including theIPO I had mentioned in K-0003 –729 am), there was not an office tower in Toronto at that time that did not have his fingerprints on it somewhere.I had been working on a Zemex transaction and the plan, it being a US company and NYSE listed was to close it in New York after a shareholder meeting. PAC knew I was going to go to New York and told me the night before that he would pick me up at my house and we would go to the airport together.
As dark early morning arrived I was standing at the door of the house not wanting to be late. I heard the roar of PAC’s Acura NSX coming up
the street before I could even see it. Off to the airport we went like a
rocket, parked at valet parking (who knew such a thing even existed?) and
through the airport and to the plane for the quick flight to LaGuardia. As I
settled in to review some documents, PAC was reading his paper (a real physical newspaper) and sipping his coffee. At sometime thereafter PAC lowered his paper, looked over his glasses, turned to me and casually asked what I was up to generally.Here was my moment with God! I started to tell him what I was doing from a business development and marketing perspective and who I was meeting and what I was doing. He let me talk, waited for a moment, took off his glasses and simply said, “Jay, stick with the program. Learn your craft, be the best lawyer you can be and the rest will come.” I felt my heart pounding, and my blood pressure rising (it is even rising as I write this 35 years later) and I could have throttled him. Here I was trying to impress him with all the business development activities I was involved in and he not only completely dismissive but downright negative about it all. My day was ruined and I was just miserable.
But, with the benefit of years and years of hindsight, he was absolutely right, although the timing of the learning moment may have been better. One of the other truisms I have learned along the journey is that as Rod Barrett (my predecessor Stikeman Toronto managing parter) said and proved (but more on that another time) good work begets more good work. And by “good
work” I mean doing good work. And to do good work, you need to be a good lawyer and know the law and the process and the practice area and all that goes with that. If you don’t have that (and while there are always exceptions to the rule) none of the marketing and business development will matter. The clients and business development can wait and believe me, will come naturally. In the meantime, I implore you, as PAC implored me all those years ago, learn your craft. -
I am convinced that the only reason I was able to get an articling position in 1985 for 1986 at what was then Smith, Lyons, Torrence, Stevenson & Mayer (now part of Gowlings) was that I simply wore down the then two co-heads of recruitment, the Late Honourable Glenn Hainey and Stephen R. Coxford. I should add that Stikeman, Elliott (then with the comma), where I would join as a Partner in 1997 and where I became Managing Partner in 2012 never even gave me an interview. I wish I had kept that letter.
I spent the first part of my articles in the litigation group, working away primarily on a hearing in front of the National Energy Board where the issue at hand was to determine ying to whether a piece of pipe somewhere in Niagara Region was subject to Federal or Provisional authority. What a country Canada is.
Late in that rotation, I was toiling away one night in the library (yes, law firms once had real libraries) when the aforementioned Steve Coxford showed up and casually with a smile tossed a bunch of papers in my direction. He said that as I was shortly going to be joining the corporate rotation, there was an IPO that was about to start and that he would like my help. At that point, I thought I wanted to practice tax law, but that is another story for another blog.
In the mid 1980s, there was no voice mail. There were pink or yellow missed call slips. The desk phones did have a screen with one line of text and a missed call light. You could scroll and determine who had called you and at what time. Times have changed.
Having started working on this IPO (The International Pagurian Corporation Limited), I came into the office two days in a row to see that Steve had called me each day at 730 am. Now, I did not finish law school anywhere near the top of my class and I have never been the smartest person in the room, but it only took me two days to figure out that if I wanted to work with Steve (which I did) and to be like Steve (which I did) then I best have my tuchus in the chair at 729 am each morning, which from then on, I did. The strategy seemed to have paid off.
To this day, I continue to get up early (and I like to be in bed early too) and I try to be at the desk for 730am, wherever the desk may be. Now, it may only be for half an hour or hour to clear out overnight emails or write a blog post, but the discipline and muscle memory remains.
Determine who you want to emulate and learn from them and incoprorate their good habits. It will serve you well over your career and life and it will take you places you would never have dreamed you could get to. And when you have the time, pick up and read The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.
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When I first told people about my blog, they asked of course what type of things I would write about. I said without hesitation that the first blog post I was going to write was going to be called Pick up the Phone! As it turns out, I lied. The first blog post was on the importance of being nice. This is the second in the series. And when I sat down to write it, I realized that Pick up the Phone! may not be specific enough. Everyone is constantly picking up their phones and sometimes it is best (me included for sure) to put down their phone! That is for another day and another blog post.
What I mean to express here quite clearly is to the use the voice function on your device. It is there for a reason, and sometimes I believe that users forget that it is embedded in the technology. Evolution has not yet removed our ability to verbally communicate, although that may come. While we still have a voice, I humbly suggest that just as you were taught from a very young age, use your voice.
I have often found myself on a seemingly never ending email chain of back and forth where people are not following one another, and confusing the issue at hand. All can be avoided if people (we are all just people) reach out and sort it out quicky and professionally. You cannot convince me that email is always most efficient or subjectively “better”. I have quite literally seen people get physically uncomfortable when I suggest to them that it is far beyond the time to pick up the phone to sort something out. We are losing the skill to communicate orally. Pick up the phone, please.
And return a call as well. Within a few days if not the first day of starting back at Smith Lyons as an associate in 1988, a then young Partner, Steve Coxford came into my office and made it clear that as the junior on the original Franco-Nevada, that were Seymour Schulich or Pierre Lassonde ever to call me and I were to have missed the call, the call would be returned within 30 minutes. Expectation duly made (that is a lesson for another day) and noted. I only had to be told once. This was the time of the pink message slip. Technology may have changed, but the importance of a prompt reply has not.
Most of us enjoy personal interaction and engagement. And as busy as we are (or think we are) engage with your colleagues and clients. What a wonderful way of getting to know one another a bit better than the perfunctory “Trust you had a good weekend” at the beginning of an email. And maybe, just maybe it will lead to something else, perhaps a conversation about another topic, a business meal or drink and even more important, a better understanding of the person you are engaging with. Business and professional service, let alone life in general, is all about engagement.
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It is so easy and yet so many people miss the mark on this. Start now. Being nice is not being weak. Lawson Hunter, a former Stikeman Elliott Partner and member of the Order of Canada on his acceptance of the 2016 Chamber’s Lifetime Achievement Award said in part, “It never hurts to be nice to people.”
Over the course of my career, I can count on perhaps three fingers receiving some dispensation from a regulator that I was clearly not entitled to, with a firm warning of course not to ask for it again or to use it a precedent. Why? I really don’t think it was any great lawyering, but rather just being nice and treating people with respect. As to any matters won (or lost for that matter) in negotiations, that is for the other side to count on. I have no clue.
Be nice to everyone – your colleagues, your juniors, the staff who can make you shine (or not), counsel on the other side of the table, regulators, to say nothing of your friends, family and personal support systems, whether it be your dry cleaner, delivery person or the myriad of other real people you rely upon. It is such a better way to go through life and a career.
Your reputation will indeed proceed you and stick with you forever. Professionally, you will be working with the same people over and over again for much of your career. Believe me. Be nice to them. It will pay back in dividends.