Lawyers Gone Sad

Toronto Life's article, Exile on Bay Street is an intimate story from a young lawyer who left Bay Street after much heartache to find redemption as a journalist.

Writer Alec Scott is quite candid about his challenges as a junior lawyer, and pulls no punches in telling his tale of disappointment downtown:

Until an autumn day in 1998, I was headed along a well-travelled path, but, on that day, I was diverted. Three years out of the University of Toronto’s storied law faculty, I was employed as a junior associate at a downtown law firm—a civil litigation boutique with an odd mixture of specialties ranging from defamation to maritime law, from insurance to aviation. I was in my office, on the 21st floor of a ziggurat-like tower at Yonge and Queen, sending out e-mails to my colleagues soliciting work. I had just finished assisting a partner in a constitutional case at the Ontario Court of Appeal, and for the first time since joining the firm, I didn’t have much on my plate.

The phone rang. Would I come to the interior conference room, the one with the ugly pastels? There, looking sheepish, were two of my favourite partners: a courtly aviation specialist, a Louisiana native who always wore a fedora outside; and one of the firm’s few senior female lawyers, a soft-spoken Scottish-Canadian. At once, I knew what was coming, why I had no work. I was about to be fired.

....And so I shifted from the respectable, besuited profession of law into the relatively disreputable, turtlenecked trade of journalism. Some of my friends were bewildered, others filled with pity. But a few seemed envious.

As a first person chronicle of one man's experience, the article is worth a read.

(Thanks to Michael Fata for pointing out this article).

- Garry J. Wise, Toronto

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