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opinions
Big time lawyer, small time lawyer
DYLAN MCGUINTY
Contributor
THERE IS A certain kind of rivalry among
siblings that is hard to describe. Perhaps it takes
having siblings to truly understand experiencing un-vocalized love and very-vocalized competition, especially when your siblings make it
to “high” places. So my dad and I often joke that
he is the family’s parish priest, whose brothers
have been made cardinals. While the priest has
his ear to the ground, he advises those who
are higher up and is careful to remind them on
whose shoulders they really stand.
My first exposure to the law was when I was
a child. It mainly involved getting candy from
my father’s secretary. I remember the smell of
his old office on Kilborn Avenue in Ottawa – a
dry smell that I will always associate with rows
of legal textbooks, grey carpet, melamine desks
– and crayons. To be honest, in the early years
the office was located on top of a fruit market
in a Class C commercial rental unit, in a Class
C building, from a Class D landlord – and my
dad is the first to admit it. As an 8-year old, I
was garbage-boy, paper-shredder, photocopier,
pencil-sharpener, secretary-pleaser, filer and
all-round office… gofer. As a teenager, I recall
spending hours in the dimly-lit, concretefloored and concrete-walled basement filled
with row upon row of shelving units, where
I would file away yellowed files into boxes as
stale as the underground air. Oh, and the cobwebs. Over the years it got harder and harder
for me to coax my friends into joining me for a
Saturday afternoon in the “dungeon” with pizza
and pop. And the boxes you were looking for
were somehow never the ones that sat within
easy reach on the middle shelves. I remember
one thing that stood out about the law from
those days. It was boring. And I didn’t want to
have anything to do with it.
It took me until I was in my early twenties
to appreciate the blue-chip machine my father
and his brother had built, set in motion and
manned. I learned to appreciate that he was
offering first-rate legal services and that his
reputation as a lawyer in Ottawa depended on
it. Still, I used to wonder about the tall office
buildings in downtown Toronto, like the ones
seen in Hollywood movies, with the big office
suites that shined with rich mahogany and
overlooked gorgeous streetscapes. Somehow
these didn’t compare to the perks of Judy’s deskdrawer candy. And the melamine boardroom
table that my father and uncle affectionately
referred to as Irish Oak. Eventually, though, I
made up my mind that my father’s office was
like one of those restaurants you recommend
Monday, November 18, 2013
to your friends. “Oh, it may be a hole in the
wall, but the food’s really good!” His office was
no Sistine Chapel. It was more working-class
tough, but it brought home the bacon.
My second exposure to the law was in the
summer of 2010. I was a newly minted grad
and I was excited to begin the second year of
my M.A. in Philosophy. After that I would step
forever more into the quiet, closed and serene
stratosp here of academia. That summer, my
father enlisted my help at the office. This time
he was moving locations and we were all very
proud of it. He had just finished gutting and
renovating an old brick house and automobile
body shop at the corner of Bank St. and Rockingham Ave. We called it The Rock, for short.
Given my father’s fondness of calling himself
“ just a small-time lawyer,” an expression that
evoked the idea of being part of the “bedrock”
of the legal industry, the street name was apt.
It was then that I decided there was something
taking reforms to legal services in Ontario. He
likes that it humbles him, and it helps keep the
memory alive of our poor Irish forefathers. Hear
it enough as a child and that’s what you’re ready
to call him, without realizing the potential
sting of it. Besides, my family has a dark, selfdeprecating sense of humour that many people
don’t understand. I reckon it’s what helped my
forefathers get by on their once-forsaken island
under the then-unforgiving thumb of England.
And I guess it continued to help them when
they landed on the unforgiving soil of Renfrew,
Ontario. (While researching my family’s ancestry, I once came across the 1841 census for the
Ottawa Valley. The census administrator actually wrote in one of the columns: “land is cold,
hard clay.” So much for Irish luck. We were not
so much immigrants to Canada as excrements
from Ireland, and we were bound for farmland
that needed lots of it in order to grow anything).
THE NEW OFFICES AT BANK AND ROCKINGHAM, IN ALTA VISTA, OT TAWA.
particularly rewarding about the law – about
solving people-problems for problem-people.
And I liked the work enough to pursue it fulltime instead of flying from book to book sampling the nectar of Philosophy.
Like I said, my father revels in calling himself “just a small-time lawyer” despite his successes. So fond was he of the nomenclature that
he once called himself that when testifying
before a provincial legislative committee under-
Whenever the topic came up, my father discouraged me from becoming a lawyer. “I don’t
think you would like it. But maybe.” Well, when
I told him I had made up my mind that I would
apply to law school anyway, he beamed. “Email
this fellow and tell him you’re interested in
applying to law school. He practices Supreme
Court law.” Knowing I was more the egg-head
type who would enjoy settling arguments about
unsettled law, he handed me an index of lawThe Obiter Dicta