Looking in the mirror

Hey everyone,

It's been a long time since my last post - chalk it up to a busier-than expected July filled with work, friends, and most recently, moving. I detest the latter and find it terribly stressful, but fortunately things went quite well and I'm now starting to get settled in my new pad, which has the advantage of being closer to school and just around the corner from a really cool place called the Wytchwood Barns, which is a reclaimed TTC industrial site that now houses a farmer's market, community events, and affordable housing for local artists.

In any event, I know that I promised legal content in my last post, but there's something else that I wanted to share instead coming out of the past few weeks. In my last entry, I talked about the course selection lottery (which fortunately I won, so I've got into the courses that I talked about above, except the moot that I still have to try out for in the fall). The focus at the law school has now shifted towards recruitment season, which hits its peak frenzy in the fall of a law student's second year. Firms and agencies of all shapes and sizes conduct their interviews around then, and it's not uncommon for law students to apply to 40-50 different places, interview at 15-20, and then finally settle on one.

Unlike some career fairs though, this process is very highly structured, and in fact is even regulated by the provincial Law Society. Firms have extremely defined time windows in which they can call students to invite them for an interview (the infamous "call day" morning where students can expect to have their phone bombarded at exactly 8:00am until about noon with invites). The interviews themselves (for Toronto employers) nearly all occur in a 2-day period in October at the big convention centre downtown where the G20 was held earlier this summer. The content of a law interview varies wildly - for private firms, it's essentially a 20-minute conversation which may or may not be substantive questions at all,while government interviews tend to be highly structured with pre-defined questions and scorecards.

An aspiring law summer student isn't out of the woods with just the applications and interviews though. For the private firms, it's very common to do 2nd-round interviews at the firm, and also to invite candidates out for dinner. This is where things get interesting, because unless a student has applied very narrowly, it's likely that they'll receive more invites than they're able to accept, and will need to start prioritizing. Firms all want to get the impression that they are a student's first choice, and so they expect attendance, while students don't want to put all their eggs in 1 or 2 baskets in case they don't ultimately get an offer from a given employer. At this stage, the process is not unlike a bizarre courting ritual, with students and firms dancing around each other and trying to read each other's intentions, not unlike a couple of awkward teenagers at a middle school dance. Finally, offers get made and students accept them. The good news is that more than half the class will get a posting through this formal process, while the others will pick up a job in the winter where other employers who (perhaps wisely) choose to avoid this madness conduct their recruiting.

With all this coming up, I've dusted off my CV and started getting ready - but with the process ahead of me, I also thought for a long time about where I wanted to apply. The reason fall recruiting is such a big deal is that the agency where you summer in 2nd year tends to be the place you article, and in turn, the place where you begin to practice law. For me, the decision about where to apply made me take a long look in the mirror and kept me up for more than a couple nights deep in thought.

On one hand, I thought that I should apply to as broad a range of places as possible - after all, one reason why I came to law school was that I wasn't ready to "settle down" in one career path just yet, and wanted to see what else was out there. Wouldn't it be cheating myself not to explore all the options before me? On the other, I had my values and priorities about the place of work in my life and how I want to spend my working years. Many of you know that my favourite novel of all time is Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and in that story, there's a time where Gandalf,speaks to the hobbits and tells them "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us" - and it's a message that's stuck with me. Law is a profession that involves long hours no matter where you practice, and for me, it's very important to be doing something that I believe in if that's where so much of my productive energies will be focused. And I was concerned from the impressions I got from upper-year students and at the "firm tours" I attended that private firms are really only driven by making huge profits for partners. I know that those institutions do important work and have a lot to offer (in terms of experience, networks, and of course, ridiculous compensation) but they failed to convince me that they are also making a contribution to the broader public interest.

I didn't really know that this was a deal-breaker for me, until now. I've reflected back on my time with the federal public service, as well as with the various non-profits that I've volunteered with over the years. I've remembered all the people back in Nova Scotia as well as the Canadian Merit Scholarship Foundation who did so much for me in my youth and helped me make it this far. And with all that in mind, I knew in my heart that I couldn't walk away from who I am or where I came from. So while I'll still have a busy fall recruitment season, I've made the principled (if financially ruinous) decision to restrict my applications to government and public interest organizations. I'll be looking hard at the federal DoJ, the provincial Ministry of the Attorney General, Legal Aid Ontario, various Crown offices, and even some similar organizations back out East. While I'm currently leaning mostly towards returning to the federal government, given the wonderful colleagues and experiences I've had with it so far, I'm going in with a reasonably open mind.

Ultimately, I think this is the best of both worlds - I'm going to get a chance to interview with some other employers and explore some prospective futures, but they'll at least all be organizations that I can feel good about working for. And if I decide to return to the federal public service, I'll not only have no regrets, but I'll hopefully bring back a new set of skills and experiences to help our country respond effectively and confidently to the challenges that will confront us in the years ahead. Thanks for reading everyone - I didn't realize that this blog would become so personal over the year, but it's been a great forum for me to reflect on this interesting and exciting journey through law school. Until next time!