Reflections on a Career

Editor’s Note: This is the first article in the 2024-2025 Newsletter’s Reflections series, featuring reflections on extraordinary careers by senior counsel in the construction bar. We are grateful to Duncan Glaholt for inaugurating this series, and look forward to contributions from other senior counsel in the coming months.

I understand that these articles are to be reflections on a career. I’m happy to do that even though it feels a bit like a self-eulogy. It is one of those projects that is harder to stop than it is to start. There is so much to say and yet so little of it could possibly matter to anyone reading this. It almost fits the most perfect definition of a bore: “a person who when you ask them how they are, tells you”. Well, here we go.

I finished law school in 1977, articled in 1978, and was called to the bar in 1979. I practiced litigation, eventually specializing in construction industry litigation. I stepped away from my firm and the practice of law 40 years later in 2019 to become a full-time mediator and arbitrator.

So much changed during those 40 or so years that it is almost impossible to know where to begin. In the 70s and into the 80s many of our great judges were veterans of WW II and were people (men mostly, if not exclusively at the time) of stern temperament, quick decision, and few words. You got no more time on your feet than you deserved and were left in no doubt when you were wrong or advancing a bad argument. Arbitration was treated as a sideshow, the poor stepsister of the law, left sweeping while its judicial sisters went to the ball. Most law firms had emerged from the 60s virtually unreconstructed. Who you articled for mattered a great deal. Working a half day on Saturday was expected (but you didn’t have to wear a tie). It was all books and paper. Even a copier, telex machine, a memory typewriter was considered cutting edge. Everyone smoked everywhere all the time, in offices, on planes, in restaurants, everywhere. There was a lot of drinking. Drinking and socializing were a part of legal culture. Firms closed early on Friday afternoons so that lawyers could get together at the firm’s bar for a few shots before heading home. All that is gone now, and not missed. Remembering all of that reminds me of how far we have come, and how far we still have to go.