This article is an adaptation of a presentation given at the Law Society of Ontario’s Eight Minute Municipal Lawyer program held on May 1, 2024.
For the professionalism portion of the Law Society’s recent Eight Minute Municipal Lawyer program, I was asked to reflect on managing uncertainty in the land use planning process. Here are my top five tips, most of which come from advice I have received over my longish career. I note that these are written from my perspective as a private practitioner, but I think that the majority are applicable to lawyers practicing in-house as well.
Tip #1: Live beneath your means
In the early 1990’s, I had just joined my law firm, fresh from the Bar Ads and obnoxiously eager. A land use planner by first training, the only law I ever really wanted to practice was municipal law. I had finally arrived.
My first morning on the job, I found myself in the office of a very senior corporate lawyer. I didn’t know him very well but the word on the street was that he had been through the wringer: his last firm had dissolved in acrimony, there were bankruptcies and divorce. He was essentially a refugee with us. At the end of our conversation, just as I was leaving, I said, “Got any advice for a baby lawyer…. old timer?” I didn’t actually say the “old timer” part, but I think it was understood all the same. He sighed, leaned forward and said, “Yeah. As a matter of fact, I do, you obnoxious keener." He didn’t say the “obnoxious keener” part out loud either, but you know. And then he said, “Live beneath your means. If you do that, you’ll have space for everything else.”
Now much later in my career, this remains some of the best advice I have received. It can be hard when you are starting out, but do your best to leave yourself financial breathing space and it is so much easier to handle uncertainty. And everything else, for that matter.
Tip #2: Take care of your physical, mental and spiritual health
My second piece of advice was imparted to me by a mentor who has been practicing law longer than I have been alive (a fact that would be a little more impressive if you could see me while reading this). At the time, I was grappling with some serious questions about my life and career, and he said, “Remember, Scott. You take yourself wherever you go.”
Obvious, right? Except most of the time, most of us think and act in ways that don’t reflect this. “If only my associates were different, or my clients weren’t so demanding, or my spouse was more understanding, or the Government left the Planning Act alone for 5 minutes… I would somehow be different."
Dealing with uncertainty requires balance, wisdom and above all else, resilience. That’s deep, internal stuff that will not magically mature; it requires work. You and you alone are responsible for your physical, mental and spiritual health. Get help with it now, not when you crash. Seek out therapy, spiritual direction and mentors who you can be 100% honest with. Do you know why clients hire you or, more importantly, keep hiring you? It’s who you bring to the file more than what you bring. In the end, it’s principally your character that they want and need most. That requires attention.
Tip #3: Be careful with specialization in your practice
This advice may seem funny when my audience is municipal lawyers. But the first thing I did after being called to the Bar was an environmental assessment (EA) hearing about a proposed landfill in Tiny Township where I acted for the local citizens’ group. I was all they could afford. I spent nearly two years living in the Highwayman Inn in Midland, but I was on my feet every day examining and cross-examining experts. It was spectacular experience. I thought at the time that maybe I should just do EA work. In fact, one of my planners was an EA specialist. Not long after this, the legislative regime changed, and those long EA hearings were mostly a thing of the past. The planner had a terrible time adjusting because he had become so specialized in his practice.
Specialization is a mixed bag. It is essential if you want to be really good at something, but it is also fraught. Don’t hold things too tightly. Your skill set- and you (see Tip #2) – can handle changes in the regime but if you keep your hand in more than one subset of what we do, you won’t have to essentially start over should the regime change dramatically.
Tip #4: Yell at your clients at least three times more than you yell at the other side
We tend to represent spectacularly successful people, whether in politics or business or charitable endeavours. I have observed that these people invariably share one characteristic: they view life from their perspective, with phenomenal blinders against anything that might dissuade them. Someone who disagrees isn’t just a challenger or roadblock, they are the enemy. I had one client who was the Director of a wonderful charity that did amazing life changing work with a disadvantaged group. At a break in an OMB hearing, he referred aloud to the lawyer for the municipality as “Satan’s instrument of destruction."
In the face of the uncertainty that confronts our clients too, what we add is perspective. You need to be in the bird’s nest yelling “icebergs”! They won’t want to hear it. Too bad. That’s your job.
Tip #5: Be grateful for the uncertainty
The 18th Century Philosopher Jeremy Bentham said this, “The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law.”
If our field wasn’t so fraught with uncertainty, what would our clients need us for? We have this amazing privilege to work in a field that isn’t just about money. We toil at the intersection of principles of good planning and an amazing array of disciplines from hydrogeology to finance to acoustics to ornithology. I know what an Oven Bird is because of a hearing I did! And all of these fields are also in constant change, leaving us with a bubbling, frothing, spitting cauldron of uncertainty from which we hope to achieve a result for our client that we can claim is also good public policy. Be grateful. There’s no other practice quite like it.
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