Anything But Law
We love law, but we don't always want to talk about it. Who are we outside the boardroom and courtroom? In this show, we explore how our multiple purposes collide and ask the question: where does our motivation to work come from? Community and business leaders join us to share personal stories about their passions, how they stay driven, and what makes them tick.
Anything But Law
Bridging the Gap: The Realities of Practicing Law and Legal Education
In this special episode of Anything but Law, host Mark McAuley takes a rare deep dive into the realities of practicing law—exploring what law school doesn’t teach you but should. Joined by Lerners colleague Mitch Brown and Acting Dean Andrew Botterell from Western Law, the conversation unpacks the "hidden curriculum" of law school, the practical skills gap many young lawyers face, and how legal education prepares—or fails to prepare—graduates for the real-world demands of private practice.
Drawing on their own experiences, Mark and Mitch discuss their transition from Toronto to London, Ontario, and the differences in legal markets, firm structures, and mentorship opportunities. Acting Dean Botterell provides insights into the evolution of legal education and the growing role of technology, while Mitch and Mark reflect on the importance of practical training, mentorship, and the skills young lawyers need to succeed.
The episode also takes a candid look at mental health and burnout in the legal profession, why so many junior lawyers leave private practice within five years, and what can be done to improve retention, job satisfaction, and work-life balance. With engaging anecdotes, real-world insights, and a focus on solutions, this discussion is essential listening for law students, new lawyers, and anyone curious about the challenges of legal practice.
Tune in to gain a deeper understanding of the legal industry, the expectations of law firms, and how to navigate the transition from student to practicing lawyer with confidence.
Presented by: Lerners LLP Hosted by: Mark McAuley Executive Production: Natalee Davis Project Management: Dylan Willems Audio Engineering: Aaron Murray – Charterhouse Studios (Season 1,3), Chandra Bulucon - Puppy Machine Recording Studio (Season 2) Graphic Design: The Branding Firm Inc. (Season 3), Jen Luchka and Dawn Yan Theme and Underlying Music: Mark McAuley and Randy McAuley
Welcome to another episode of Anything but Law, where we usually talk about anything but law. It's literally in the title, but today is different. We are actually going to talk about law, more specifically, the practice of law. Don't don't you dare change the channel or switch episodes. I'm looking at you, mike. This is very important. Today, I'm joined also by two very brilliant people, and I feel so fortunate to have borrowed some of their time this morning. I'm sitting here with Mitchell Brown, who's one of my colleagues at Learners, and Acting Dean Andrew Botterell from the Faculty of Law at Western Law, and before we get started, I would like to have each of you introduce yourselves. Mitchell, how about you go?
Mitch Brown:first, sure. So yeah, my name is Mitch. I practice at Learners here in London, ontario, mostly practicing in civil litigation, with a pretty big focus on commercial lit, partnership disputes, director disputes, contract fights, that sort of thing. I also do a smattering of defense work for professional regulated individuals physicians, dentists, accountants, that sort of thing. Like Mark, had a journey that sort of took me to other careers pre-law, found ourselves to Toronto for the early years of our growth and matriculation practice and now landed here in London.
Mark McAuley:We're going to get back to this question about the difference between practicing in Toronto and practicing in London, but first, Acting Dean Bonnerill, thank you for joining us today. Thank you, it's a pleasure to see you again. For those of you who are listening at home. Acting Dean Bonnerill was my CRIM law professor. I did not do well in that course, through no fault of Professor Botterell, but I wonder if you could introduce yourself a little bit. Let people know you know your journey. I have lower questions about that. Go ahead.
Andrew Botterell:Yeah, my name is Andrew Botterell. I am the acting dean at Western Law. I've been at Western since 2007. Acting dean at Western Law. I've been at Western since 2007. When I first got to Western, I had a joint appointment between law and philosophy and moved to law full-time I think in 2019, just before COVID hit and I've done, as I reflect back, quite a bit of administration or leadership. So I'm currently acting dean, which is a lot of fun. Previously, I was associate dean, academic and associate dean, graduate studies and research at the law school, and then, before that, I chaired the Department of Philosophy for three years.
Mark McAuley:You're also leaving out some accolades there. Weren't you professor of the year or instructor of the year? I was, yeah.
Andrew Botterell:That was very exciting actually. Yeah, that's an SLS award.
Mark McAuley:Yeah, I think you got that one before I came. I mean, you could have easily earned it while I was there.
Andrew Botterell:Oh, you're kind yeah, it's always worrisome when former students I reconnect and they say, oh, you taught me criminal law. I'm like no.
Mitch Brown:It's okay, Andrew, he's a corporate solicitor now.
Andrew Botterell:That's why I just did. That's true. It's true we might talk. There's one story I remember about Mark in that class that still sticks with me.
Mark McAuley:I hope it was a good one. Yeah, yeah, we might get to that. So what brings us here today is this you know, I get this question often from friends and family who are not lawyers and not practitioners and they'll say you know, what is it like to practice law? The strangest thing is when you get that question from legal students, from people who practice law, people who have already, you know, been in a law firm setting and I think this is what brings us here today. We, mitch and I, had the pleasure this fall of teaching a course called the Private Practice of Law at Western Law, and it's something that I thought you know, mitch, and I both thought it would be something we'd love to chat about and also talk about the future of legal education here with you, dean Botterell, acting Dean Botterell. So, mitch, this course was really your brainchild. We've been talking about this for some time after we connected here in London, but tell me, kind of, what brought you to this course, this idea?
Mitch Brown:Yeah, I mean I was privileged to have an incredibly accelerated sort of mentorship trajectory when I was in Toronto. I was at a very good firm with exceptionally talented litigators and I had so many opportunities to get on civil trials and appeals which is just unheard of these days, even pre-COVID backlogs and so I sort of learned at such an accelerated clip and I didn't really appreciate it until I came to Learners and realized how much I was able to carry files independently, manage client relationships, you know even things like tracking, you know billings and recovery and being aware of those dynamics of practice. And I was pretty involved in sort of the mentorship side of things the minute I got here because I realized there was this sort of not just a skills gap in terms of, you know, getting experience doing examinations, getting in trials, but the transition from being a first-year associate to feeling comfortable and not feeling distraught. And so I did a lot of work internally at the firm in those first couple of years on the mentorship side sort of. You know we completely revamped our mentorship policy internally, did a lot of sort of one-on-ones with associates kind of of all vintages, sort of supporting them through that transition and you sort of realized. I mean anecdotally, this is how we started talking about it.
Mitch Brown:So many practitioners and law firms acknowledge that there is a transition gap or a skills gap from law school and articling that's just not bridged. A skills gap from law school and articling that's just not bridged. And you know, we tell students all the time when they're interviewing for summer positions and articling that it's unfortunately kind of a roll of the dice. Every firm has better mentors and worse mentors. Every firm has certain practice groups that run a tighter ship than others. And learning the business side of practice, learning the client management side, most lawyers do it by making a thousand mistakes over six years and that's such a difficult strain to carry on top of the substantive learning curve of learning the parts of your job that you need to know. So we sort of yeah go ahead.
Mark McAuley:So I was going to say I agree.
Mark McAuley:And I think something that really resonates with me was this conversation I had with you, andrew, during the last homecoming, where we discussed the course. You were talking about the hidden curriculum and this is the I think the way I've described it to our students is the things that you will be evaluated on that you don't even know, you need to know. So I was wondering if you could speak to that or if you've ever had students come back and kind of echo the same thing that I've heard from many other people, which is law school didn't prepare me for what I'm doing right now, which I think you know. The presumption when you walk out of law school is that you know how to do the research, you know how to, you're smart enough and you're quick enough to do the things that are going to be required of you. But the gap between the skills that you develop in law, which you still use every day, and the skills that you're kind of evaluated on has anybody ever, have you ever had these conversations with graduates? I assume you have.
Andrew Botterell:Yeah, yeah, I mean I think I first heard the phrase hidden curriculum. You know, if you're thinking about a first generation university student, for example, who's going to classes for the very first time and the professor says, oh, you know, I'll be holding office hours on Thursday afternoon at 4 pm, the student has no idea what that means. And so you know, if you came from a family where university study was expected, that might mean something to you and that might not mean something to someone who's just coming to university for the first time. And I think the same thing is true of law. So I remember when I got to law school and people were talking about the seven sisters, I had no idea what they were talking about. It doesn't really matter, right, whether you understand or I don't even know if that's still a.
Mark McAuley:I've met six of the seven sisters You're quite fetching Performed at one of their Christmas days. Yes, I did. I did perform at one of.
Andrew Botterell:So there's that kind of thing, right. Just understanding you know, all this kind of below the surface stuff. That is certainly helpful. But then there's the I think with law there is this other piece, right. So most students who go to law school want to practice law and yet there's not a whole lot of instruction on what the actual practice of law is, and I'm sure we'll talk about this more. There is a bit of a tension.
Andrew Botterell:Practice of law is and I'm sure we'll talk about this more there's a bit of a tension. I mean, law schools are parts of universities and you know law professors are expected to do research and publish and I am not I'm very much an academic lawyer. I mean I spent a summer, you know, practicing at, I guess, what was then a mid-sized Toronto firm. So that 125 lawyer seems pretty big to me, 700 support staff. But you know I have colleagues who practiced and you know they can talk about the rules of civil procedure and things like that, but nobody comes out of law school knowing you know how to create a practice or sustain a practice. What does it mean to do a client intake interview? We try and do some of that through clinical work, but of course, that's just kind of a small window into….
Mark McAuley:Yeah, and just a handful of students who can actually get that experience as well. You're being modest again. You clerked.
Andrew Botterell:I clerked at the Supreme Court, which was fantastic, but that's a different experience than articling.
Mark McAuley:Yeah, agreed Different setting and I think setting expectations is one of those things that you know, we said in our first lecture that one of the things we really wanted to look at was modifying expectations for the students To allow them to well, to give them a better chance of success. You know, I've said to Mitch before you know when you're doing something brand new, when you go to a new country, you might hire a tour guide and the tour guide will show you, you know, places to go places, not to go places, not to be after dark. You know, or you'll read a guidebook, and law is a little different in that sense.
Mitch Brown:Yeah, I mean I really appreciate your comment, Andrew, about you know, first generation and that skills gap, because that's the boat I was in from a legal perspective no lawyers or licensed professionals running in the family, transitioning not only into Toronto, which was a new environment to network of firms. You know, leave aside the logistics of you know you do OCIs and infirm interviews and you've got to navigate the path which I still never mastered in the three four years I was there by the path.
Mark McAuley:He literally means the path, the underground, yeah, the rat maze or ant tunnel underneath the city of Toronto.
Mitch Brown:So you know, Mark, and I really hoped for this course that you know everyone sort of acknowledges that there is more that can be done to sort of supplement the kind of skill transition or the practical transition, fully appreciating sort of the different roles. I think you mentioned the tension and I'm a massive sort of theory junkie, like I do think that the role of law school should still lean sort of theoretical and have that foundation. All my grad work was in law, literature, interdisciplinary stuff, and so I love that that foundation is there. But for folks who want to go into private firms, just the basics of the roadmap, you know, what does your day-to-day look like?
Mitch Brown:You know we had students ask just describe a normal day, like literally what is a single day practicing in your area? Look like what is a docket, I mean really set of stuff, and so we really wanted it to be kind of a crash course on the minutiae that you know some folks would think are. You know it's too small to be worth attention, but when there's a thousand of those small things that nobody's taken the time to just give you a 10 minutes explaining, that creates an aggregate weight that you carry through, that articling and first couple year transition. That's really tough.
Mark McAuley:Yeah, I think it's one of those challenges, and I've spoken to consultants who've worked for other law firms and they've said before you know, there is this knowledge gap, obviously from the top to bottom, because people who are, you know, very senior in the firm tend to forget that there was a period of time where you didn't even know where the bathroom was, and so, you know, leaving that aside the ability to just say to somebody you know, this is how a docket works, this is what the clients are going to read these are the pieces where the rules of professional conduct kind of intersect with our day-to-day life. And so I think you know from the very beginning not only what does your day look like, but what does a lawyer do. You know, on a couple occasions, you know, kind of a hand goes up and says so, like what does a lawyer like, what do you do? Yeah, you know, and the joke, my job is email. But yeah, I, I mean, there's this piece.
Mark McAuley:I know both of you. This is actually great. I mean listeners at home. You missed an awesome interaction where I had. I did not know that Andrew and Mitch had not met and in person they're sitting across each other and I said, oh, mitch is busy working, and just like, oh, is he back the office? And I I kind of put him.
Mitch Brown:You know he's the guy hiding behind his laptop firing out fire drills. Before we start the podcast there you have.
Mark McAuley:You both have a real passion for for pedagogy and legal pedagogy. I know I I've watched you instruct and I watched, but I've watched both of you instruct. So I was wondering if you could speak to that kind of passion for legal pedagogy, how it ties into a course of this nature, and also kind of passion for legal pedagogy, how it ties into a course of this nature, and also kind of like the future of the practice of law. I had read some articles where you spoke about kind of the intersection of tech and how these other pieces are going to start kind of affecting the way people practice law and the way to kind of discuss, you know how that's going to interact with how we train people in the future.
Andrew Botterell:Yeah, I mean, I think I came from a family of teachers, so my parents were high school teachers. My mom taught English and history. My dad was a visual artist. He taught visual arts for a while and then, so what went so wrong with us, scott, sorry, no, he moved into, he became a vice principal and then eventually he was the coordinator of visual arts for the Toronto Board of Education. And yeah, it's too. I mean, he passed away six, seven years ago. So I am curious, like if he was around I'd say so.
Andrew Botterell:You know, I'm starting to do all this admin stuff, what you know? What was your journey to it? But I have to say I really enjoy teaching. I think when it goes well, it's incredibly rewarding. When it goes poorly, it's incredibly frustrating. You always have those days where you think, oh, that was a terrible class and a student comes up and says, oh, that was the best one yet this semester. Thanks for yeah.
Andrew Botterell:So I mean, I think with I don't know that there's something special about legal pedagogy as opposed to just teaching English or sociology or something like that. There's doctrine, of course, that you have to be familiar with, but I think you know I think hard about how best to present information in a way that will make sense to students. Knowing that I typically teach 1L criminal, which is a required course, I bet in a class of 80, maybe five students think to themselves I want to practice criminal law. I think most students this is something that they have to do in order to get to the courses that they're interested in in their upper year, and that's absolutely fine with me. I still think it's worthwhile knowing and I think the skills that you kind of acquire, studying that, of acquire studying that In terms of technology.
Andrew Botterell:I mean I don't know what the future of legal education or the future of education is going to look like. I think at the university much so, there's the use of technology in teaching. I mean, this is kind of a use of technology in teaching. I assume that people listening to this are listening to it if they're still listening to it in part because they're interested in this course and you know how you delivered it With AI. I think the greatest fears now are about academic integrity and how do you actually develop meaningful assessment tools that aren't easily gamed. So at the law school, in a way, we're lucky because we still do these big in-person exams, typically at the end of the year, and I think that's a good way to do things because I think probably you can rest assured that the students have written the answers.
Mitch Brown:I mean, I remember in undergrad writing exams by hand. Oh, yes, and pure. You know, literature, stream, english, only three exams apiece, three essay questions and as much paper as you want. I absolutely begrudge the profs had to read my handwriting and don't envy that. But you know that gives you your integrity right there. You know the person wrote it, checked the student card and they write it by hand.
Andrew Botterell:But I assume that the same law firm I mean you could use some sort of AI assistant to generate, I don't know, a client letter or to do document review, and you know how do you bill for that. Do you want to do that?
Mitch Brown:I mean, ultimately, I assume the lawyers- are still responsible for anything that they produce. I mean to sort of take your two-parter, Mark, the pedagogy piece and the teaching piece was a really interesting challenge for me. It was kind of an itch. I did a bit of TA work in grad school and TA's of course is in law school. Actually, for the joint there's a JDMHA program at Dow and I was close with one of the profs there doing sort of med mal research and work. So I knew I had sort of a teaching itch and that translated into doing litigation work and oral advocacy.
Mitch Brown:But the way we dissect oral advocacy from a skills perspective, from a delivery perspective, you know to your point, Andrew, how do I present information and in particular this information for this audience in this context. We're so meticulous about how we think about that in our work. It was really engaging to apply that same dissection and analysis to a different context. You know where there's sort of a premium in the context with students on. You know transparency and openness and clarity and sort of structure. A lot of those same principles sort of apply.
Mark McAuley:You know when we're trying to persuade a court or a jury in that context? Yeah, I taught preschool. No, I did. I taught preschool for all, but it was very different. I mean, I don't love public speaking. This is something that people might be shocked to hear.
Mitch Brown:Yeah, we said before, you love public speaking when it's in a dark room with black walls and nobody can see you. There's a microphone, there are hands and their heads.
Mark McAuley:That's probably speaking. Yeah, I mean, I think kind of drilling further down on that was the idea of and it's kind of a weird pivot. So it's kind of like a strange pivot. But I mean, you know, there's something that you have said before, mitch, about fully formed, like fully formed lawyers. There's no such thing as a fully formed lawyer out of the womb of law school and I think that kind of animated part of this like this approach to teaching this piece as well.
Mitch Brown:Yeah, I mean, like we said at the outset, and we'll talk a bit about sort of which weeks really resonated with students and some feedback we got, and I think the week on mental health and burnout was one of them but the data is pretty bleak. Um the CBA studies, um pieces written by the judiciary, you know, senior council, uh, members of the bar the picture on mental health and sustainability and attrition in private practice is abysmal in North America in general but in Canada in particular. And attrition in private practice is abysmal in North America in general but in Canada in particular. And so Mark and I said look, if this course reduces the addiction rate, burnout rate, mental health risk of this batch of 25 students and brings it from staggering numbers in the 50s and 60s percent down, then it's a successful course. And so we set kind of a low bar. You know practicing what we preach. You know practicing what we preach. You know set the client's expectations low and then exceed them and they're really, really ecstatic about it. But that, I think, was a big motivator. You know, we know it's a tough transition, no matter what city you're in, no matter what firm you're in. If this 10-week round robin of micro practical tips and advice is helpful at taking the edge off of that transition, then it's a success.
Mitch Brown:So is it? Mostly three L's? It was a mix, yeah, and there were actually only like probably count on one hand the number of students who had worked in firms their previous summer, and so there were a lot of folks who genuinely had sort of the most basic questions, and you know express basic questions and you know express their appreciation for you know even the top down on the basic financial structure of a law firm. You know associates get a salary. That's part of overhead, billing generates revenue, clerks also bill Like all the basic components that sort of keep the engine running. That nobody ever sort of teaches you. And I think that's as much on law firms as it is on anybody else, because everyone acknowledges the gap but nobody's really done much about it and I think firms are probably better situated than anyone else to help with that transition because they're the ones who are sort of engaging in that day-to-day stuff.
Andrew Botterell:But I guess I mean one thing you would have wanted to establish right at the beginning was, you know, no bad questions right when we learning. Even if you think it's a silly question, I encourage you to ask it because yeah.
Mark McAuley:Oh yeah, it was a very open kind of, and it was interesting to see the evolution of the class over the course of Sylvester and their kind of willingness to realize that we're actually not judging them for not knowing these things and especially for providing input on things that you would need to. You know what is it that you need to know? You're about to summer, you got a job, you are about to move into this environment. What are the top three things that you're most kind of anxious about? We'll work that into some of the next bits and pieces so we can actually provide you with some tools and some other kind of practical guidance as we work through the rules of professional conduct and how the kind of systems of a law firm kind of function.
Mitch Brown:I mean that was kind of an eye opener for both of us. And I'll say this candidly the biggest difficulty that I found in building this course was finding enough readings, because Mark and I just wanted to talk like and not to devalue what it was we were planning to share and not to say that we weren't structuring weekly topics and subtopics within those topics to break down into digestible formats all of the anecdotes we wanted to share, but we wanted to not just have slides with bullets of concepts Every time there's a concept on the screen. We wanted to give an example this is what this actually looks like in practice from something that happened to me last Thursday no-name's basis to sort of demonstrate what these things look like. And so building out and sort of my grad school muscle was actually the most anxious about the fact that it wasn't a very academically heavy course, and so we had a couple cases a couple… there aren't academic papers on Rahkshi no, really.
Mitch Brown:Well, and you know truly, we just kept coming back to the rules of professional conduct. You know, each week we sort of made a decision, structurally, to say one of the foundational readings will be to actually close read, not skim read, the various sections of the rules in Ontario that apply to this topic. And what was so interesting is Mark and I learned a lot.
Mitch Brown:Because how often do practitioners go back to the frigging rules Like you don't frequently get confronted with a need to check in on whether you're like self-auditing on compliance with the rules, because for the most part you're just kind of following what you've been taught. For the most part your senior practitioners are mostly following the rules, so you don't really consult them in that way. So it was an interesting foil to say here's the topic, here's the anecdotes, here's the problem, here's how we manage it in our day-to-day and here's what the rules say. And sometimes Mark and I had different answers. He has different practices and that was a compliment that I think helped the course, because your practices are different than mine as a solicitor.
Mark McAuley:Well then, the resources themselves would sometimes say not enough has been written about this particular issue that seems to be facing lawyers all the time. So here's an issue, we've identified it. Here's a scholarly article on the lack of coverage of this piece of practice, which I thought was really fascinating, because then I kind of thought, oh well, where are these? And I keep saying kids, I'm sorry students, but where are they going to get it Like otherwise, it's just kind of quite by accident.
Mitch Brown:Well, and to your point, Andrew, about students being unsure what this course was going to be or what it was going to mean or what it was going to look like. And we saw that a lot in the assignments, because we created these practical demo assignments that were not really academic in nature. They were just mimicking things you do in practice all the time and the number of times where students would ask, and we wrote these like two paragraph long descriptions of how we were evaluating and grading these assignments, stressing emphatically that these are not being poured over as if you're a partner at a law firm, to be perfect. And the number of students who still said so, like are you actually looking for X, are you looking for Y or you know what is the room to? And we just didn't know because we hadn't A.
Mitch Brown:We haven't done these assignments, but you know, one of them was dock at a week of law school. Submit an invoice to us as if someone's paying you to go to law school. Track it in your point ones, just like you would, and we showed them examples of what an invoice looks like. We talked about the sort of more art than science balance of a docket entry that has enough information that the client feels like they're getting service but isn't so exhausted that they feel like you're overbilling them and all that stuff. But like we actually didn't have a clear sense of all of the minutiae, you know the invoices looked wildly different, but that's okay Cause we weren't evaluating. For you know, McGill guide formatting Right.
Andrew Botterell:Yeah, but I think that that's I mean. Students are anxious, they want a rubric, they want to understand what it is Like. I say to my students I think I might have said this to Mark, you know, on an exam I kind of don't care what the answer is. What I'm looking for is the process right, the reasons that you provide me. So I mean, occasionally, if I gave you a set of facts, it's clear that you know Fred murdered Barney and you concluded otherwise. I think that you didn't really understand what that meant. But otherwise I'm kind of indifferent to what the actual conclusion and I assume you guys felt the same way right, you weren't looking for a particular answer.
Mitch Brown:One of the assignments was like a written reflection on sort of your ideal practice trajectory over the first five years, because we talked about the importance of checking in with yourself and evaluating your environment. Am I getting what I need at this stage of my career? And assessing, and like four students asked well, do you prefer footnotes or in-text? I said the court of appeal doesn't care as long as it's hyperlinked. So if I can access everything that you're citing and all the information is there, I will not be cross-referencing McGill when I'm grading. You didn't, I did 100% Solicitors.
Mark McAuley:Actually, it wouldn't be us, it wouldn't be.
Andrew Botterell:Do you guys you agreed on what the topics were going in, or was?
Mitch Brown:that a negotiation no no, no, not at all, absolutely. We had to cut was the issue.
Mark McAuley:Yeah.
Mitch Brown:I think we had 15 weeks worth of stuff that we wanted to cover.
Mark McAuley:I think the big challenge is and I mentioned it earlier is the farther away you get from law school, the less you realize how much they don't understand about what it is that they're about to do, the less you realize how much they don't understand about what it is that they're about to do, so the farther away from that experience it's.
Mark McAuley:You know you realize sometimes you've internalized certain processes and so you have to go back to basics on those for the people you're instructing and, like Mitch, I genuinely have a passion for this within the law firm context, and so it was really nice to be able to kind of spread that around to students who I will never have the opportunity to work with, you know, outside of classroom setting and in a perfect environment for them to exercise this, begin, this process of learning in a judgment-free zone. You know how many times have you been in a meeting in a practice group and somebody says so-and-so doesn't know how to, they don't know how to. Their dockets look horrible. And I'm thinking to myself well, this person's been practicing law for a month or maybe two months. How would they even know what that is?
Mitch Brown:I mean, one of the things we noticed through the course is we were pretty frequently kind of mid-class, quick to parse, just on the fly. This thing that we're talking about will apply more once you hit the five-year curve and you're starting to do things more on your own, acknowledging that particularly at large firms the first few years, in some environments and some practice groups. You're third chair, you're fourth chair, you're doing a lot more of the law school oriented kind of legal work or doc review or factual work, rather than leading the client intake or reviewing the bill and deciding what the write-off is going to be or choosing whether to fire the client, deciding whether you should self-report to law pro. So we sort of realized that all of this primer stuff and all these topics, we had a lot of content that was sort of reflecting on our growth journey. But we're to Mark's point.
Mitch Brown:We're now into the partnership transition where we're focusing a lot on the business side and managing a practice well and we still thought that was all really valuable stuff for students to know, even though we were adding these little asterisks all the time, saying, as a student do X, check in with your principal, do Y, do what your principal says.
Mitch Brown:But keep in mind that these are the things that your principal is juggling and that's valuable for you to know in terms of how your work will interface in a streamlined way that doesn't create more friction or whatever else.
Mitch Brown:But the other thing that I think to circle all the way back to the technology piece probably the most consistent refrain I see on the litigation side is that automated sort of AI or technology support services are going to potentially disrupt a lot of the grunt work in litigation and at large firms that's predominantly done by your juniors. So if you're now you know one of 25 class of articling students at a massive firm in Toronto and historically those 25 of you would be billing you know your 1,500 to 2,200 hours, whatever it is, over the course of a year doing high labor but low complexity legal work. If that work is going to be going somewhere else, then the actual day-to-day stuff you're going to be doing, even as a junior, may be changing pretty drastically in the next couple of years, and so I thought it was important for students to understand more than just what do I need to know as an associate who lives in doc review hell for two years, but like, how does this law firm actually functioning?
Andrew Botterell:But does that so that means it frees up the juniors to do other stuff, or it means that we don't need as many juniors to? I?
Mitch Brown:think it could be either and to do other stuff, or it means that we don't need as many juniors to I think it could be either and different firms will be pivoting different ways. I guess, and I think there's an opportunity to say I can now be carrying as a partner with a book of business, I can be carrying a higher file volume if I deploy my associates in more substantive and meaningful ways, because the high labor it just takes a certain number of hours, doc-type stuff cannot be handled with technology. So I think there's an opportunity to integrate juniors sooner. I don't know whether every firm will transition.
Mark McAuley:See, and my concern is, you did the doc review and on my side of the street a lot of the capital markets kind of churned through corporate structures and that type of thing and as much as it seemed like a slog, it's actually very valuable being able to spend that time digging through all that. So I think you know, conceiving of a day when you walk into practice as a junior and you already have to have some advanced understanding of law firm operation, carrying a practice, practice management, that type of thing, being able to kind of leapfrog some of those pieces, I thought would be kind of very valuable and I think technology is.
Mitch Brown:I mean, it's already happening a little bit, but I think we'll see more of it. Legal support services and technological options are going to make it easier for people to run small and boutique practices, because the massive infrastructure of a law firm is no longer going to be presumed to be necessary. And we're already seeing it.
Mitch Brown:The Toronto market is now every three months I'm seeing notice of another colleague or connection I know who's leaving a big firm and starting their own shop. And these are very good lawyers who've learned their skills, they've done their growth and they're realizing that they can run a firm much leaner and they have enough of a book of business which doesn't need to be enormous when you're on your own. And they have all this supportive technology to help them with that transition. When normally you might think, well, how could I handle a you know 2 million documents, litigation file and a corporate dispute? Well, now the technology can support that, can support that, and so understanding that your growth and what you can gain working at a law firm is not just an opportunity for partnership track, but it's that opportunity for growth and for learning. But you got to know what the environment is sort of, what the expectations are.
Andrew Botterell:So you guys sorry, so you guys started in Toronto, yeah, and you're practicing in London, which is a. Now, of course I've got students who are practicing in Owen Sound, or you know Of course I've got students who are practicing in Owen Sound, or you know they might be in. I mean, there are various different markets and legal practices, different ways I assume firms are structured. I mean I got the impression some firms there's kind of the rainmaker in the corner office who brings in the clients and everybody else does the work, versus a structure where everybody basically is running their own little business under the umbrella of Lerners or whatever it happens to be. I'm not sure whether that's true, but yeah, curious, like what's the difference between practice?
Mark McAuley:in Toronto and practicing in London. It's so funny because I was going to. Actually what you were saying kind of lends itself to this transition, even though I wanted to come back to something else, You're just a really good host.
Mark McAuley:Mark, you're just seeing trends. I was just come back to something else. You're just a really good host, Mark. You're just seeing trends. I was just sitting back. I'm letting each of you talk. No, because I wanted to ask you that question, Mitch, because we both did the same transition. I'm from London so I was coming home, but you know we've mentioned this before to students in the class, but you know what do you see as some of the main differences? Let's say one or two examples of practicing down in the Financial District of Toronto versus practicing La Militaria.
Mitch Brown:I mean there's a couple like core categories that students can sort of sort for themselves in the early stages. That I think are helpful stages that I think are helpful If you want to do big budget securities, capital markets, sort of national charter lit type stuff. There are certain markets that have more of that. It would be hard to be a securities litigator in a smaller market when the core of that work at the OSC is done in Toronto. And so I think substantively there's some differentiators in terms of what area of law you want to go into, in terms of how firms are run. I mean we've only had smatterings of exposure in the shops that we've been at. I think there's a ton of variety. I think most firms probably are some mix of the Rainmaker plus folks working on that book versus everyone having a little bit of their own.
Mitch Brown:We did have a lot of students ask actually what is partnership? First of all, what is it In terms of like? What does it actually mean? What are all these variants on the partnership model, non-equity income, counsel, senior, whatever? But also, how are associates evaluated for that transition? And you know we talked at length about the variety, like there's no one size. Every firm approaches it slightly differently, um, but pretty consistently, firms will value an ability um in an associate to show that independence, either in the book of business that they're able to bring in, whether it's starting at a trickle, or just their ability to manage top to bottom um without just being someone who's a support person to somebody else. And so that was kind of how we um pitched the relevance of talking about some of the skills transitions that we've been going through, even though you know this batch of students may not be going through that themselves, you know, for a few years down the road. But just understanding the dynamics of it's not just whether I found the right case. Okay, I build 35 hours on that research.
Mitch Brown:Client was told there's a tight budget. Client was told X is coming down the pipe and so now we're going to manage. Do we do a write-off? Do we defer it? Do we have a conversation about reviving the retainer? Client blows a gasket when they see the bill. How do I run the analysis of whether it's worth firing them or we're about to go to trial? What are the risks of getting stuck on the record? The sort of practice management stuff that you're not making the decisions as an associate, but the more you can show that you're thinking about those things. I think firms can see that and appreciate that, because the reality and we talked about this a lot and it's part of why there's a mentorship gap, I think in general in the profession it's still a very billable driven industry and most of your partners are already stretched really thin. That's also part of what all the mental health stats and data show when they show high attrition rates and addiction rates and mental health concerns.
Mitch Brown:They're also talking about the partners who are too busy and so if everybody is just constantly strapped with their 0.1s and 0.2s getting in their time, it's harder to make the extra time. You know, not all firms recognize or give financial comp. You can't bill, quote, unquote for taking that extra half an hour to explain to the associate why you made the decision that you did or to unpack the strategy on that thinking.
Andrew Botterell:I've heard too that COVID didn't help because I assume to be a good mentor you have to be physically like. I guess you could mentor over Zoom. But my sense is that you know, in the olden days you could walk down the hall and you could poke your head in and ask somebody a question. We had certain people disappear from a firm setting.
Mark McAuley:So those people who thrived in that setting with the door open, you know always with a sympathetic ear, time for a mentee, formal or informal that those people I think they were starved out. You know, not emotionally, you know to put it, but they were. It became the thing that we not that we valued less, but it became harder to do that person and this is yeah, yeah, it became harder to be that person. And then those people, many of those people, left, which I think is the terrifying part, because you need those people, you need somebody who's willing to Left the practice of law, leave the practice of law Okay.
Mark McAuley:Yeah, leave the practice of law.
Mitch Brown:I mean we had some of the older partners at my last firm and at this firm as well, who also you know the technology floods in. It fundamentally changes the way they do think there's a lot that can be done to facilitate better mentorship remotely and virtually. It takes a lot more energy, it takes effort, it takes intention in using the resources that you have, in scheduling planned quarterly meetings with the people that you're wanting to grow and develop and checking in with their growth and how they're doing and what skill metrics and boxes are ticking over a year or two years, and being intentional about the work that you give them. And debriefing. We talked a lot to our students about the value of a debrief, both from a substantive learning perspective, from a venting perspective and if you're in an environment where they don't and a lot of firms that again my experience on the lit side do this really well.
Mitch Brown:You know you're walking back from the courthouse. That's a debrief, like just talking about what the hell just happened and what worked and you couldn't believe. And did you notice the body language on X? You know I learned more about trial strategy and execution in the evenings after the day in court, when you're prepping for the next day, because everyone's just locked in the boardroom for four months and you're just constantly digesting and parsing through what the plan of attack is for the next day, and that's that in-person stuff. But you can still debrief on Zoom. It sucks, it's draining, it takes a lot out of you, it is somehow more draining, it's worse and it takes work, but it can be done and so I think there's a balance of you know, there is a new normal quote unquote in hybrid work and you want to attract really good talent and I think candidates are being choosier. I don't think that's a bad thing. It adds more competition and it forces firms to be more reflective on how they offer their services.
Mark McAuley:But the folks in the mentorship chair just have to rethink how they do it to try and fill some of those gaps. Yeah, you said Zoom was exhausting. Some of you mentioned it. No, but it's. I mean, you taught on Zoom during COVID. I did. How was that?
Andrew Botterell:It was hard, yeah, I mean I think well, the initial pivot it was like oh, this is kind of interesting. But you know the prospect of two years of teaching remotely. You know, I mean, yeah, you know you encourage students to have their cameras on. Many of them didn't want to, for you know, if they're zooming from their bedroom, they don't want to do that. You know, even when we were back in person with masks, you couldn't figure out what people were thinking. You know you rely on people's kind of quizzical looks oh okay, that didn't go over, I'll do that again.
Mark McAuley:But when all you can see is sort of masks and eyes, it's very hard to judge whether students are engaged whether Somebody had explained to me to this point that it's actually a psychological phenomenon and that is that you can only hear. You can only it's a one person at a time conversation, so you can only like it shuts down. When I'm speaking, we can't hear you. When you're speaking, you can't hear me, and it takes a lot of the dynamic parts of conversation and it slows them right down, which means it's actually quite exhausting. There's no spontaneous but, Professor Botterell, like you know, somebody shoots up their hand and they just start talking about that. That goes away.
Mitch Brown:Well, so we've talked about energy, um, that, the energy that we've gotten in teaching this course, um, and you lose so much of that sort of reciprocation when you're teaching on Zoom or when you're mentoring on Zoom, because I mean even just the body, like you're not getting the physical connection of being within 10 feet of somebody and having their. You know, I mean, I'm not a psychologist, I did lit studies, but you know we're always, we're always processing the. You know the million, you know micro cues and body language. You know that says somebody's engaged with us and we're having a conversation. And when you lose that it becomes so one-directional I'm giving a lot but I'm not getting a lot and that's what contributes, I think, to that drain when you're having to give and you're not kind of receiving all the small stuff.
Mark McAuley:Yeah, I think back to a couple of the classes we had where we had live debates in the class, you know, on core concepts of practice.
Mitch Brown:Between the two of you or with the students. Oh yeah, between two of us. Well, we would pick. I mean, that happened every week, but there were a couple of times.
Andrew Botterell:So, just to be clear, the two of you were in the Co-teaching, co-teaching every week. It wasn't that you had weeks one and two and Mark had weeks no and four and five, or something like that.
Mark McAuley:And the idea here, which I think is, you know I have to give Mitch a concepts, whether they are kind of, you know, theoretical, or even the rules of professional conduct or academic. The way they impact a litigator's practice is different from the way they impact a solicitor's practice, and we know that there's people in the room who want to be a litigator. People want to be a solicitor. So the idea was, you know, give them the opportunity to see how this kind of happens in their practice, or at least be able to recognize it and have the opportunity to ask a question.
Andrew Botterell:But that can be challenging too. I remember I co-taught a course with a colleague in philosophy years ago and it was fantastic for us. But we would go down these little rabbit holes for 25 minutes and then you know you'd recognize that the students either weren't following or had kind of tuned out. And I assume the same could happen with you guys right, talking about I don't.
Mitch Brown:I mean, part of this course in our minds is that it was a rabbit hole course. Like the plan is, we have slides that, if just delivered as slides, would cover an hour. There's two hours of lecture each week. That extra hour is we don't click next slide until Mark and I have both shared at least one example or practical anecdote about that slide, so they can see both perspectives. So there were tons of times where we ran into rabbit holes. We basically ran into full two hours every class and had students staying for more questions after every class, which a bit of a pat on the back for a night course.
Mitch Brown:I might not have stepped a full two hours every time, but part of it too was to help demonstrate that there isn't a right answer to a lot of these things, and so, even if Mark and I were both litigators, we might have very different strategies for managing different stressors or responding to different practice wrinkles, just based on what works for us as people. The way I think the one that we laughed about is like you carry unread emails, and I am appalled by that concept, I might admit. Thank you, yeah, you're correct. Share. So even just recognizing within individuals there's always going to be variation and demonstrating that to the students so they don't feel that they have to figure it out. A way they got to figure out what works for them.
Mark McAuley:Yeah, yeah, I was stepping way back here because you were talking about the ability to be in court as a junior and I was thinking, you know, while you're clerking so I want you to mine your memory bank here. If you were watching people like us juniors well, people like him, not like me. If you were watching people like us juniors well, people like him, not like me. If you could see kind of from your vantage point where you were, like your front row seat, on some pretty awesome I can imagine incredible experiences. If you could see a marked difference between the person who's first chair, second chair, third chair, and if you ever kind of noted that, like if that was, if you ever had a chance to kind of be in that moment and kind of observe the entire.
Andrew Botterell:Yeah, I mean, you know, as a Supreme Court, I mean usually it was just first chair, right, so there were other lawyers there supporting. Yeah, usually, like after the case was heard, my judge, justice Chiron, would, you know, call me down and she'd sort of go over the hearing and talk a little bit about you know where she stood and what was going to go on next, and occasionally she said, you know, I thought that advocate was fantastic. Every so often she would say that was atrocious, you know. And there were a couple where I thought, oh, I bet she's going to be upset with this person. You know the standard kind of stuff where one lawyer was asked a question and basically his answer was I'll get to that in a moment, but I'd rather talk about this other thing now. You know, just roll your eyes, but it was, you know. It was an interesting experience. I think most of the Supreme Court judges are pretty nice advocates. Occasionally they would kind of lose their cool. Are pretty nice advocates Occasionally.
Mitch Brown:They would kind of lose their cool. I mean, yeah, we talked about we had a week on civility and I think it was probably the week that overlapped the most with what's already covered in ethics. From what I understand, the students read GROIA. They engage a little bit with some of those concepts and so we tried to focus on sort of the other aspects of civility. You know, responding to a sharp email from opposing counsel that is littered with every font adjustment available on a typewriter. You know bold, all caps, underline, strike through. You know you get those emails.
Mitch Brown:Sometimes your judge hasn't had breakfast and you get reamed. It's no fault of your own, it has nothing to do with your preparation. They just don't like your position or why you're there and so managing the kind of day-to-day not civility to the extent that the law society would be noticing or that it would ever be litigated, but the sort of micro-civility frictions that contribute to the stress and the things you have to manage. And again, going back to debriefing, having people tone, check your reply emails before you hit send to make sure that you're not getting baited into a fight with people and extracting what's needed to move the file forward. You don't like a good email war, obviously Loaded with town, yeah.
Andrew Botterell:I know, I remember my dad Years ago, when I was a kid, I did something very stupid and I got caught and I remember him sitting me down and he said you know, at the end of the day, Andrew, all you have is your name. You know, and I think for students, you know, it's one thing to think about, you know, this term, or over the course of a law degree, but for somebody who's going to have a 30 or 35-year career, you know, I think it's extremely important for them to think about, you know, civility, how you treat other people. It's amazing how many times, oh, that person who was a, you know, classmate of mine or, you know, I was sitting on a committee Now there are some fancy pants, such and such, and you know, I mean, you know, you never really know who you're going to come across and people remember whether you're trustworthy, whether you were nice, whether you cut them a break. You know they probably remember sending the cranky email and appreciating the fact that you didn't call them on it.
Mitch Brown:Yeah, yeah, you know we talked about particularly on the lit side, but for you as well, a big source of business for a lot of lawyers is other lawyers. You know things get conflicted. Folks don't have capacity, it's not their area of practice. And if you're someone who's left a strong impression positive, civil, competent, trustworthy you know you don't rush your work. All those things contribute, so you know. So Earl always says the best business development you can do is to just do good work and everything else is secondary to that.
Mark McAuley:Earl also said about. Earl Treniak is who we're referring to here. Earl also said before you send that email, ask yourself what would your mother think? And I thought that was like-.
Andrew Botterell:Well, I frequently I don't know whether you do this I'll write an email. I won't address it, I'll put it in my you know drafts folder, I'll sit on it and then typically the next morning I delete it. So you sort of you vent, but you know you think twice about whether or not it's.
Mitch Brown:You know it's kind of number one, essential for advocacy in leading court too. Right, you know the bench needs to trust that you are being accurate, that you're presenting the facts fairly, that you're acknowledging upfront your weaknesses and you're not hiding them or trying to pull a fast one on them because they remember so vehemently every time they get burned by counsel who says A but the answer is B, the car was green but actually it was blue. And so the importance of that integrity, even if you know your client is sort of suggesting if we just avoid X or avoid Y. I was at the Advocate Society's dinner for Peter Griffin, a former mentor at my last firm. I had a big commercial trial with him and he won the Advocate Society medal this year.
Mitch Brown:And he said at one point in his speech and it was the week I think we were talking about billing and finance in the course and so explaining to students your bill of plower and how it gets calculated and the fee tables that firms use and all those things.
Mitch Brown:And Peter said at one point in his speech you know that he tells his clients that his hourly rate is the rental fee for his reputation with the bench because he has spent an entire career building that trust and rapport. Then they really listen when he's talking and you know everybody talks about, you know the hourly rates being high and the access to justice issue and that's a whole nother conversation, particularly when talking about Toronto markets versus London markets and what services we can offer outside of bigger cities. But, yeah, understanding that your entire career, if you want to do litigation work, even though it's so infrequent that we're in court compared to criminal litigators, you know, a couple times a month. You know if you're particularly busy you don't have as many opportunities to be building that reputation and so you really have to be conscientious of it and maintain it so that you don't lose it. And then you know what are your prospects going to be going forward.
Mark McAuley:I'm conscious of time, so there are a couple of things I wanted to ask to you. Acting Dean Botterell, so you'd mentioned before that your current role is a continuation of some of the other administrative roles you've had in the past, including your time with the philosophy department. How do you kind of see I understand the decanal process is undergoing somewhere in the background I love saying that word they're searching for a dean. Did I pronounce that right? Yeah, Decanal. I'm on the Young Law Alumni Council and I was not selected to be the person sitting on the committee, so I have no vote. But I was wondering you know what kind of your view of the near term and then long term of a faculty like Western Law, like how, what? Your view on how that would change, how that would evolve, like what?
Andrew Botterell:your thoughts are on it, if it would evolve at all. Yeah, I mean I think, yeah, we well, I mean, like any law school, we aspire to be the very best law school we can possibly be. And so their questions you know, can we do that with the size of our current faculty? I think you know, lots of law schools would look at U of T. Right, they've got kind of 60-ish people. We've got what? 35.
Andrew Botterell:You know, do we need to grow? If we do need to grow, can we grow in our current space? If not, what would a new space look like? All that kind of stuff. So you know, those are the kind of questions I think that every law school asks. I assume law firms ask the same things, right? So you know, do we want to merge? Do we want to grow? Are there specific practice areas that we think are good places to grow? So you know, they're very practical questions of that sort. You know, I guess you'd call them political questions within the university about how the university sort of thinks about its own aspirations. You know, reading the tea leaves with the provincial government, is there likely to be more investment in post-secondary education? Less. If there is investment, is it going to be in arts and humanities? Probably not. Do you know? Will it be in the STEM disciplines? Probably.
Mark McAuley:When all arts and humanities people at the stable. Strong advocate for more funding for that area.
Andrew Botterell:Yeah, so you know it's complicated. I think Western, like you, were a student. I think it's an excellent law school. I think we've got some terrific researchers. I think everybody takes their teaching responsibilities very seriously. You know we have the small group program, which is fairly labor intensive, and every so often you'll be in a meeting with somebody a bit higher up and they're like you know, is that really the best use of your time? You know small groups and I think the answer is yes, it is actually. I think it makes for better law students and eventually the hope is better lawyers when they finally graduate that environment was a very valuable space to ask questions in a kind of kind of similar to our class.
Mitch Brown:So, yeah, I want to pivot on this because we've talked about the potential for continuing to run this course in future years and also the potential of either increasing how many hours it runs in any given week but potentially increasing the cap on students. So I'm curious if you've ever scaled a course. So if you've taken a course that started at, I think you said, 25 is the small group that's basically our batch we were pretty much full registration with a couple of students auditing. So we know that there's potentially the room to add more seats to be able to offer the course to more students who would have an interest, but I don't know what that would do in terms of the dynamic that we had in the class, because we were able to replicate it sounds like something of that small group field, given that we had 25. So have you ever scaled a course and what worked, what didn't?
Andrew Botterell:Yeah, so one issue and this is totally internal to Western law law is that we have this rule that says in the upper year, if it's, I think, 25 students or fewer, you can grade to a B plus average. If it's over 25, it's got to be a B average. So that shift between 25, let's say, and 40 does have implications for grades, because you won't be able to hand out as many higher grades, so some you know so frequently.
Andrew Botterell:Right, we'll set up a course in a given year and we'll say it's 25, and students will say, well, could you raise the cap? And the answer is always is, we could, but it means that the students that signed up thinking that they were going to be graded to a B plus curve are now going to learn differently. I think the question for you two would be are there specific things that you do in the course, and it could be sort of exercises, it could be assessments that require, I don't know, groups of four or six students, and there's only so much that you guys can do, right? So imagine, yeah, we have this exercise, it requires groups of six students, but realistically we couldn't do more than six of those. Okay, so that would cap it at, you know, 36 to 40 students or something of that sort.
Andrew Botterell:I think you know good teachers can create a kind of intimate atmosphere, even with 80 students, where students are happy enough to put up their hand and ask questions. But that's hard work too, it's obviously grading 80 students is different from grading 25, right, and you've got busy practices, and so I guess a question would be, you know, is that is the grading. Is that something that you want to take on? Do you think that you could deliver the same kind of quality of course and scaling it up In principle, right, yes, more students should take this course. Maybe there are different iterations of it. I mean, you could imagine, you know, uh, the private practice of law, uh, colon solicitors, you know, versus litigation. I don't know whether that mass order, yes, but but really that's a question for you too, like thinking about how the course was delivered and and what you thought worked well and what you thought could be improved. I mean, could you imagine doing it to 50 students?
Mark McAuley:I do think it's possible. You know, I was thinking back to my time in your class in the large lecture hall, which is does it have a name? I should know this. Is this 38? The Fancy Mood Room? No, not the Fancy Mood Room. I love the view. I was very jealous of the Fancy Mood Room. So jealous, yes, but you know that 38 felt pretty intimate at times. There are ways to have pretty meaningful discussions, I think, in there, so I think it's possible.
Mitch Brown:Yeah, I mean, I think on the grading point, well taken, just the volume, I mean we were pretty intentional structuring the assignments in this course that they're not particularly labor intensive to grade. In the same way that you know, once a month I'm marking up, you know 50 invoices to go out to clients. You know, marking up, you know 25 invoices from students and you know feedback and scratch marks and all those sorts of things, because they were structured to be practical, hands-on assignments. I don't have to be checking research sources and checking the sort of traditional academic sort of vetting that you would do for some of the written work you know. I think about our. I think the first assignment we did was a role play of a client intake. So we had scripted secret bios and every student was given a bio as a prospective client and then one is a prospective lawyer, one was solicitor, one was litigator or litigation specific. Did students appreciate that distinction? I don't know at the beginning, but certainly by the end.
Andrew Botterell:I think.
Mitch Brown:So you know the one. I think it was like the client intake was a personal injury matter and we had a bunch of issues spotting things that you know. He also wants employment advice and tax advice and I think it was an older gentleman so he's hard of hearing. He didn't like DocuSign. You know all these little flags for things to catch in an intake when you're trying to get a retainer replaced For the solicitor. It was someone's trying to rush a deal. He doesn't want to tell his other partner, all these things.
Mitch Brown:But then we gave bios for acting as the lawyer. You know you're an X year lawyer at this firm. Your practice group mandates this type of retainer. You don't have flexibility here but you do have flexibility there.
Mitch Brown:And we paired them up and said find somebody who's got the other hat to you, gave them half an hour in class to do an intake, but then what we graded was their memo to file.
Mitch Brown:So after their intake they had to write out just a memo to file for the one of two sessions they role-played where they acted as the lawyer. They sort of gave the summary and we talked about you know what things are important to cover off in an intake before you retain your size, before you're legally retained and shouldn't be giving advice and all those things, but also what goes in a good memo. And so we were able to grade the role play without watching every role play to a certain extent, because we were seeing from their memos what they did or didn't cover. So we tried to be crafty even in this iteration, knowing that we didn't get time off our practices to teach the course, and so we were just going to fit it in. But I think, yeah, like every assignment we've done, we've thought of ways to tweak a little bit just to increase efficiency for our own sake, but probably that would extend.
Mark McAuley:I think increasing impact was one of the most important parts for us too. We were trying to figure out ways that we could teach them how to do something that's going to make sense relatively quickly out of the gate. So even I think the week of marketing is going to be. It was lined up in and around the time that the students would have been doing infirms. So you know marketing broadly and then how to market yourself within the rules of how you're supposed to market and how to market yourself.
Mitch Brown:How to navigate a cocktail hour and you know how to navigate the politics of multiple competing interviews and how to pitch yourself, how to smell out culture, which I think the answer was who knows it depends, you know lawyerly answer, but we tried to time that week around. I think the answer was who knows it depends, you know early answer, but we tried to time that week around. I think the November recruit stuff, yeah, yeah, to make sure that they kind of the culture fit piece.
Andrew Botterell:I mean, it's kind of you know when you see it. I think you hope. That certainly was my experience. I remember going to a couple of firms for you know, OCIs and getting to one and I was like, yeah, I don't think this is right for me. And getting to another one thinking you know what, yeah, I could see myself here right, and this is my kind of people, the analytic for it. Is that the one?
Mark McAuley:that you picked. It was Because yeah.
Mitch Brown:You know, the forensic part of our brains that's supposed to be good at legal analysis just cringes at the thought of you know something that is gut. You know something that is gut. You know what is the feel that you got from a particular environment. But that's certainly a huge piece. We also talked about how firms aren't monoliths. So, to your point, different practice groups or even just different practitioners within practice groups some of the firms in Toronto in particular, are so large there are distinct cultures within four walls and so, depending on who you work with and who you connect with, you know generally you need one to two mentors and one to two champions, which are slightly different roles or hats within a firm. At two major stages, you know you need a mentor and a champion who's a couple years ahead of you and one who's five, 10 years ahead of you. And in a firm of 300, it doesn't take long to find that number of people in your camp, to feel like you're supported and have that trajectory.
Mitch Brown:But yeah, it was. I think it came up multiple times. We kept deferring it. Students asking about culture. We said, well, we're going to talk about it during the marketing week. Wait until the marketing week, wait until the marketing week and do you so?
Andrew Botterell:you've mentioned mental health a couple of times. So I mean, and it sounds like you did a week on sort of mental week. So I guess some advice would be you know, take time off. You know take care. You know, physically take care of yourself. You know it's okay not to work seven days a week or something. But I wonder, like personally, I mean, do you think that talking about docketing, let's say, or mentorship, is that going to have an impact on lawyer?
Mark McAuley:My thinking is that we and we said this almost every single week is that the primer for each of these subjects in my mind, whether we said it explicitly or not, from each week was, instead of mystifying those concepts, a docket, the billing, all those other bits and pieces that are things that, anecdotally, I have had.
Mark McAuley:You know, coworkers and colleagues come to the office, close the door and just like break down and sob over not having failed at something that nobody showed them how to do in the first place. The idea is that, broadly speaking, equipping people with the tools to understand the situation that they're in at that time. So, whether it's your docketing, your billing, how you're capturing your time, are you taking breaks for yourself? Are you checking in with yourself? So, providing them with skills hopefully demystifies the things that would normally cause anxiety. The idea was to make you aware of those things. There's nothing more stressful than being in an environment that's completely alien. If we can just reduce some of the things in the environment that are alien to you, or at least give you some sort of skills to navigate those bits and pieces, then we can step down the mental health, the blips.
Andrew Botterell:And did you get the sense from the students I mean, I know that there are sort of evaluations, but just in conversations that the students felt that this was helping them. I mean it's hard to say because they've never actually been in that environment.
Mitch Brown:I mean the mental health week. I think we had the most ongoing questions and engagement throughout and we thought it was going to be the opposite because it was a heavy week. You know, we gave them content disclaimers and gave them a heads up. We're going to talk about some heavy topics. We specifically didn't want to just summarize the data, so we said you have the reality in the readings, we're not going to talk about it because it's there for you. We're not the data scientists who pulled this together. You can go see what the picture looks like. We're going to talk about the day-to-day in our experience and what things we feel as stressors and what strategies we've developed that help a little bit, things that we've tried that don't help to sort of help build that roster for them.
Mitch Brown:And that was one of the weeks where students were the most vocal and it was an ongoing dialogue, not just during the designated segments where we had time set for questions, but everything we were saying was prompting something and we were pretty frequently, when giving those micro anecdotes from our own practice, when we transitioned to say, okay, this is a stressor. Here's, in my practice, ways that I found useful to de-escalate that or reduce the impact of that At least one of those strategies was always something practice management related. At least one of those strategies was always something practice management related, like a small administrative logistic thing that, if you're consistent and maintain as a habit, reduces the impact when that stressor peaks up. There's other things you have to do, of course, as well, like you mentioned time off and debriefing and all those things but we sort of hope that our mental health week was like a show rather than a tell you sort of give them a sense of what these things look like in practice, because reading a bunch of data doesn't really help you understand how you'd get there.
Mark McAuley:And then highlighting some resources that are available at LSU as well, to make sure that you know the idea and I get what you're that you're. That kind of question was like does this actually cause more? No, it's quite interesting.
Andrew Botterell:No, it's interesting to me because if someone had said, well, what's the point of Mitch and Mark's course, I wouldn't have said mental health, right. I would have said, oh, to facilitate practice-ready lawyering or to make the transition from law. But of course, by making the transition from law school to practice more seamless, you are contributing to stress and you would help happier, more productive.
Mitch Brown:Hopefully right. Yeah, that's what we said at the beginning of the course. Like I want more young lawyers to stay in practice. Like the attrition rates are astronomically high After five years of practice, post-articling or post-graduation. The numbers are staggering for how many people are actually still practicing law as opposed to transitioning careers entirely or moving in-house or going to other gigs. And so you know a lot of firms internally. When you go back to culture, how do we change culture? How do we evolve? How do we grow as a firm, as a community, as colleagues, as partners?
Mitch Brown:A lot of firms talk about needing new generations and succession planning and sort of critical mass of new like-minded people who want change to enter the partnership and to join the firm. And if staggering numbers of folks are leaving the practice at year five to seven which is right when you're kind of hitting your stride and you sort of know what you're doing and you can start having a voice and participating, it makes it hard to see hope and have optimism for the profession generally moving in certain directions or otherwise. So I said pretty openly to the students I just want more of you to stay in practice longer. We talked about the five-year hump many weeks and I said I want as many of you to not quit before five years and if all these little things help, that's great to make sure that we have more sustainability in the folks who are graduating to think, yeah, I can see myself practicing longer, even if this environment's not working.
Andrew Botterell:But the five-year hump isn't that? That's when you would be sort of that would be the partner track, right? If that isn't that the point at which it's. So I assume that some people leave at that point because they recognize, you know what I'm this isn't for me, or I'm actually not going to succeed in becoming a partner, and so I'm going to do something else, or is that the?
Mark McAuley:I mean I think you might not know by then, but I was even talking to one of our students last week about this and I said there's this it's the period of time in which your skills ramp up to the point where it doesn't take you as much time to do the work that you're supposed to be doing.
Mark McAuley:It's a point at which you become pretty proficient or relatively proficient and I say relatively, because I always say that with a bit of a chunk of humility. Law is the one area where I feel like I'm practicing within a very narrow sliver, operating within with 5% knowledge. At any given time, that might be completely changed by the input of some other party, and so, at that point though, you feel pretty comfortable in your ability to do various things very kind of like, kind of fluidly, and so the idea would be stay around long enough to the point where some of these things we're telling you right now are actually become quite natural to you. It might actually mean that you state that you're on the partnership track, but, more importantly, you're going to feel a little more comfortable in your skin, because you will feel very uncomfortable in your skin, and that could lead to more.
Mitch Brown:You know more folks because the partner track varies wildly firm to firm.
Mitch Brown:Sure, you know, sometimes it's 10 years, sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less 10 years really it depends and there's, you know, there there's concerns about sort of balancing equity and succession planning and the cost of entering versus exiting. So I mean all the politics, I mean part of it is, if students are aware of all of those dynamics, they'll be better equipped if what they want is partnership track to sort of pursue those things. They'll understand how firms are evaluating and what those metrics look like and sort of how they're assessed. But it also just sort of equips them to do more of what I think we're already seeing in some of the most competitive markets.
Mitch Brown:In late in Toronto, where you're getting boutiques, You're getting folks who say, okay, I've learned a lot from this firm, a lot of opportunities. I would like to do things differently. I'd like to build something the way that I want to do it and I'm going to keep just providing client service to justice. Piece of. If all we have are massive you know, 300 lawyer firms and we don't have smaller shops that are willing to take on more interesting files or don't have as high fees or, you know, don't bill in the same way or practice in the same way, there's a massive influx of efficiency and accessibility when you have lawyers who persist long enough to get the substantive competence they need and then transition if they want to transition or bring their energy and vitality and new ideas into their own firms.
Mark McAuley:And this might sound strange coming from the solicitor at the table but I appreciate the idealistic young lawyer and giving them skills so they can maintain the idealistic kind of bent as they move through this process, as opposed to becoming calcified.
Mitch Brown:I would prefer that we give them skills so they can still have a passion for the thing that they say they want to do and I'll say this as a soft pitch for other practitioners who thought about teaching, which I know we said was sort of one of the signal points we gave in this podcast. As much work as it was to build the course, to run it every Monday, to grade, to engage with students, you know between classes, Mark and I every single week on the drive home and you know in our pre-class tomato soup with the wave and the tomato soup is outstanding. The tomato soup has no business being that good. Our wives said we're 80 years old because we got a 4 pm tomato soup every Monday.
Mitch Brown:But the amount of energy we got into teaching this class and the buoyancy that gave to our practices, which are busy there's lots of shit going on because the students were so engaged and so appreciative and so vocal about valuing the things that we were helping share with them and engaging in questions and discussion. We sort of analogized it and most lawyers will sort of know what we mean by this Like when you do your firm recruit each year you get this big bump of energy because all the students are super excited. Everybody was really jazzed about the law and they have no idea what the hell that means, but they're still really excited. They bring that energy, they bring that vitality and you as an interviewer or taking folks for coffee or sort of doing that whole process you get energy from talking about all the things you love, about where you work, and you talk about all the positives and that doesn't mean there aren't negatives and hard days and other things that balance.
Mitch Brown:But we don't often stop and just articulate to ourselves, let alone others, the things that we like about what we're doing. And we did so much of that in this class to make sure that we were balancing. You know, here's what's difficult, here's what works, here's what we jive. I mean the mental health week. We were very intentional First thing we said in the class and the last thing we said in the class to bookend. It was one thing we loved about our job because we were going to talk about some heavy stuff in the in between and so first thing was we're not psychologists and the second thing was something was here's a
Mitch Brown:little job so. So there is, um, there's a massive amount of kind of energy and and momentum that you get engaging with students and I'm sure you experience this all the time, for sure one of the joys of teaching right now, um, and so we felt that immensely and that's kind of that energy that we feel in firms when a new Articling batch starts. You know they bring that energy. They're so keen to learn, they want to see, they want to observe everything, they want to come to every motion, they want to watch every discovery and to see the numbers that we see of junior lawyers who, in such a short order of time, are so disillusioned with the job they don't want to do it anymore. That's kind of part of the transition.
Andrew Botterell:And do you think you learned from teaching the course, or are there things you're now doing differently in your practice? Because I always find it. You know, every time I teach, I think I know everything about everything. No student's ever going to ask me a question that I don't know the answer to, and of course that always happens and I'm always grateful for it. But I wonder whether you guys feel the same way, oh yeah, yeah, Every week.
Mark McAuley:I think I you know we would be jazzed. And then I'd kind of go back and I a practice group leader a couple of times coming in and say, Professor McCauley, I'm like, ah, nope, it's Mark, but you know, and you know how's that going. And I'd say, you know what the funny part is? We teach best practices, we discuss with them what the obligations are, we talk every week about all the bits and pieces that are expected of us from a regulatory perspective and then almost every Tuesday morning, the day after, I go back and make notes on things that are not things we do every single day, which probably should be integrated into practice.
Mitch Brown:So, yeah, we just audit ourselves for months, like we just conducted a practice audit by reading the LSO rules once a week in very fine detail and having to articulate what best practice looks like, whether or not we actually achieve that in every one of our files. So, from a practical standpoint, I mean that massive practice audit, you know, certainly is part of the exercise that we took away from it.
Mitch Brown:I feel like I became a pain in the neck because I go back to the practice and be like you know. So listen, having taught this I think there's like a couple was to Mark's point about, we're so disconnected from what the position that we were in in second and third year law school now, even though it wasn't too long ago, it feels so far back given the amount of work and experience that we've done and how quickly you learn in this job, that it helped sort of recenter my understanding of where they're at at that moment which I can now take into our firm in terms of how we do our onboarding training for Articling students and summer students. I know we just rewrote the mentorship policy. I now want to write it again.
Mitch Brown:You know we're talking about adapting parts of this course to be part of our mandatory onboarding. You know it's not just WMIS and IT and how to get into the DMS system and security and getting your phone and your door tag. And then here's a session on legal research which is kind of the bread and butter, most firm integration and onboarding. But let's do some of this stuff for all of our lawyers as they come in, whether they're laterals or whatever else. So sort of understanding the value from the student's perspective and hearing from them after class every single week, coming up and saying we have these questions. I really like this.
Andrew Botterell:But about this helps us understand and was your sort of organizing question. So, as lawyers, here's what we would like incoming students to know. Or was the question when I was a law student I wish I knew, I wish I knew. Okay, yeah.
Mitch Brown:I'm more saying a latter, I think, but by the I wish I knew. I wish I knew, okay.
Mark McAuley:Yeah, I'm more saying that latter, I think. But, by the way, I think that those are mirror. No, they might not be inconsistent. Yeah, no, I think it's the things that you know coming in. These are the things that I wish I knew and these are the things that law firms wish. Hope that these people know and never take the be to get them ready, as Mitch says, you know, fully formed. We can't make them fully formed, but the idea of getting them practice ready, or as close to practice ready as they can be, we know that they have the intellectual horsepower to do the intellectual pieces that are handed to them and, frankly, some of the practical bits are confounding and quirky, depending on where you are. So you know understanding how to navigate those quirks.
Mitch Brown:Recognize the because Mark and I both came, having chosen Toronto to start and we both have agreed we would not have done anything differently. Um, the training and experience we got was phenomenal, um, but encouraging students to sort of think proactively about what different markets mean, um, again, as a first year lawyer, the law school debt load was significant, um, and I only looked at Toronto, just assuming that's where firms were that were going to pay enough to cover my debt and my rent and save up for a house and all those things. But you know, I think as the province in general sort of continues on the track it seems to be on with housing affordability and all those things, I think more students probably will reflect on markets outside of Toronto and what that looks like. And one of the bigger differences I think is needing to be well-rounded on the practice management side of skills, because you might not have an enormous firm infrastructure supporting all of the admin side of your practice and so if you're going to work in a smaller firm or a smaller market we wanted to sort of talk about.
Mitch Brown:You know there's pros and cons to both um and there's benefits to others, and we had a number of students say I never thought of applying anywhere outside of Toronto. This has been really interesting. I think I'm still going to apply, I think I still want to try it, but I'm now thinking for the first time that I could practice anywhere in the province or I could look at other places and I could consider different practice areas. It's not just Toronto or bust and we say that with a tremendous amount of love for Toronto and what it did for us and so that was something that I didn't expect to be picked up by the students. It was something on our radar so that we knew, because we were bringing that background of having transitioned from the city, but it was something that sort of students sort of tracked right away, I think.
Andrew Botterell:Yeah, it's interesting.
Mark McAuley:Okay, mark's looking at his watch, I am. I'm just cognizant of your time. You two are both so much more important than I am. And so the question uh, I guess you know this is something that I've been. I've asked everybody this season, and I guess this is a continuation of the season. So, like it's, um, my favourite question? Um, no-transcript learned a lot more from making errors? Um, what was that quote? The? Uh, I think I threw it up on the board this uh, this semester, um, I can see his face. Warren Buffett, it's always good to learn from your mistakes, but it's always better to learn from the mistakes of others. So what's your favourite mistake, if you could look back on something and say that was one of the most valuable errors or mistakes that I learned the most from. We tend, by the way, to redact these things from our memory.
Mitch Brown:Yeah, I mean I'll go first, I'll buy you some time, and also because Mark and I Performed this exercise in the one class, so I have an anecdote ready. I'm not going to assure you that this is the one that most fits the question, but it's one of the mistakes we talked about. This came out in our week on Law Pro, which talk about how to creatively flex pedagogical muscles to find a way to make a course interesting, and we were trying to talk about and get students to care about what's in the Law Pro policy, just so they can understand what it is and what role it functions and the value it has and how that should interface with how you practice in terms of reporting and tracking and paperwork and all those things. But one of the through lines of the course was the importance of being able to recognize and own when you've made a mistake, because a mistake only gets worse in snowballs if you try to hide it. Cover it up, fix it yourself, just tell somebody else, talk through it, debrief, get somebody else's perspective on assessing it. And so at the beginning of that class we had prompted them the previous week for everyone to think about one not insignificant mistake they had made in their lives Didn't have to be law related, but just any big mistake they'd made and be prepared to share it. And we always started each class with kind of an open discussion. But then we pivoted that week and said, okay, we want you all to get up and find someone to sit with who's not the person you sit with in any other class, because of course students come in and they sit with their friends and whatever and so we said, okay, find someone else to sit with who you've never sat before in any law school class and that's the person you're going to share your embarrassing mistake with. And vice versa, because you need to get used to talking about and owning. Yeah, I screwed this up. That's part of why we have insurance coverage, it's part of why we have policies, but it also is part of the law. Society rule is you've got to be honest and transparent. You got to tell clients when you make mistakes, all those things. Big wind up because I'm deferring sharing my mistake. I just really enjoyed that in the class and the students loved having to share with somebody else and they all kind I had at my last firm.
Mitch Brown:I did a couple of trials with him and I think it was on an application that we had. It was in Kitchener, really contested messy record, one of those commercial files where there's like four versions of the same document and different people's affidavits but sometimes the email is missing part of a thread and this page is missing here, whatever. So it's a bit of a doc management nightmare. And I was responsible for putting together all the final versions to get everything commissioned and Matt had vetted all the content and then we were going to file with the court and off we went During the hearing of the application. So this is weeks after everything is filed, everything's done and dusted. You know my work is done.
Mitch Brown:I'm just kind of watching and supporting Matt's in the middle of his argument and gets to a certain section and he says okay, your honor, if you could just turn to you know, exhibit whatever of this person's affidavit and go to the 10th page and see the continuation of this email chain. And the judge talked to him and said oh, mr Lerner, I don't have that page in my like in this document you just directed me to and that's like okay, could you just take a five-minute recess? We found our copy of that email. Luckily it wasn't contentious from an authenticity perspective. And opposing counsel was like, yeah, that is the full thread, ripped it out of the book we had handed it up to the judge and went along our way. And when Matt and I were talking about it afterwards I was like, okay, that's on me. I didn't check every single page of every exhibit of each version of these affidavits. I was just as the final vet, you know, going through. Look at the first page exhibit paragraph reference in the affidavit. Yes, that is that email done, next one. Yes, that is that email done, next one.
Mitch Brown:And it taught me to just slow down. And that said you need to be more paranoid. And that's not necessarily going to make you feel better. It takes time, but when you're doing that final check, just turn on your paranoid switch, track every minutia so that it's perfect. Because that little hiccup, I think we still won the application. But those little moments it's tempting because it often doesn't bite you in the ass. In practice to do the kind of 80% is good enough. You know, 20% is not going to make a difference, particularly when you're extremely busy and you have a lot on the go. But he said you know there are certain things and you parse them, where you put in that extra 20, and you just meticulously track and be more paranoid so long. You won, though, so we still won, it didn't matter, but, and we had the piece of paper to just tear up and hand it and hand that yeah.
Andrew Botterell:Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. I'm trying to think what you know they're the kind of I used to. My exercise of choice is road cycling, and so I used to race my bike not terribly well, but you know every race, you know there'd be that moment where you have to decide, oh, am I going to go with that break or no, am I going to wait? When do I start my sprint? And usually you would make a mistake. And so, yeah, learning from that, I mean I think I've been quite fortunate, you know. I think you know they're the kind of decisions you make given the evidence you have in front of you, and sometimes that's the right decision. And then you reflect back and you think, oh, you know what you know. Maybe that wasn't the right thing to do, but I just, you know, I graduated, when I have a PhD in philosophy, I graduated. I got a job at a small liberal arts college in California, which, objectively, was a pretty good job.
Andrew Botterell:But you know what? I was not happy for a bunch of reasons, and at some point I said you know what I was not happy for a bunch of reasons, and at some point I said you know what? I need to try something different, and that's when I took a leave and I went back to law school. You know people talk about a sunk cost fallacy. Right, you've invested all this time and energy in this thing. You just need to see it through. I think sometimes the right answer is you know whether something is working or not. You can do your very best to change your situation, but sometimes the answer is you know what? I've done my best. This isn't working out the way in which I wanted it to, and so it's time for me to try something new. So you know you do your very best to learn from your mistakes and not repeat them.
Mark McAuley:That's her. I'm not sharing mine. I never do Unacceptable.
Mitch Brown:Because I know what your story is, because you shared it in class.
Andrew Botterell:I know Because Kaylee, who's our communications person, would kill me if I didn't say that. One thing to keep in mind I mean Lerners has been a terrific friend of Western law. It's no accident that the two of you are teaching this course for us. I think we probably have more Lerners lawyers teaching for us than any other law firm, and I think it's really a benefit to our students that they can interact with quote unquote real lawyers right, and ask questions about. You know what it actually means to have a practice, what it means to you know have clients, what it means to manage clients? Those are questions that I think many, many law professors aren't really well equipped to answer. So partly— Well.
Mitch Brown:I mean, I think, reciprocal to that. Mark and I are tremendously grateful for your own sort of vote of confidence and Western trusting us with this course. Neither of us had taught a law course before, Neither of us had built a law course before. Um and uh, it's something that we have gotten so much out of, both from that buoyancy and that energy we described having the impact that we hoped to have on this batch of students and beyond. As folks sort of talk about the course and things circulate on social media, Um, it's having the, the impact we wanted, Um, and it's it's giving back in the way that we wanted, right, Like we framed this as part of our public service time. Um, you know that all firms sort of encourage folks to engage in, and so you know that requires a certain amount of trust to even have the opportunity to do it in this way, and so I'm very grateful to the faculty for letting us Couldn't agree more taste a swing at it.
Mark McAuley:This would have been a lot harder if I was still working in Toronto. Obviously it's great to come back home and it does feel like being back home, back at Western Law. I grew up less than 10 minutes away and I work less than 10 minutes away, so it's nice to be involved and to continue to kind of get back to the school and I'm very grateful for what I got from the school, so I'm very happy to give it back.
Mitch Brown:Right on, terrific All right.
Mark McAuley:Well, that's it. Thank you all for listening. Thank you for your time today. And those are your home, mike, I know you're still there. We'll see you soon. Take care.