Law Canada: A Place to Discuss the Professional Legal Experience in Canada

What follows is an account of one of my first fuck ups, , and possibly my biggest. Unlike my other fuckups, this one involves some pretty bad judgment on my part, and like most bad shit that people pull, it’s way easier to commit than to defend. I do not defend what I did. I’m simply here to tell you about it. The take away from this story is that all knowlege is a good thing, and I was saved from the consequences of my fuck up by a video game that I played at my desk at work. The game was called "Leisure Suit Larry" and it was a big deal back in the day, in the 90s when I was just starting out my career.

It was a Friday in late May. The weather had been shit most of the month, but today the sun was shining and I was happy because my articles were almost over. I’d be done in a week. I’d basically stopped doing any work and when my phone rang I was playing Leisure Suit Larry. I hit CTRL-B and picked up my phone, and heard the voice of the junior lawyer that was supervising me. He was supposed to be mentoring me, or at least, keeping an eye on me. We hadn’t spoken in two weeks.

“Calledinthe90s,” he said, “Accounting tells me that you haven’t handed in any dockets for the entire month. What gives?” My boss had not done that great a job supervising me. It had taken him the better part of four weeks to realize that I was doing no work, and he didn’t figure it out until Accounting told him.

I should have been expecting his question, of course; I ought to have known it was coming. Law firms worship billable hours, and in our firm it was a bad thing to miss quota, even once, and I had seriously missed quota this time. You can’t meet any quota, no matter low they set the bar, if you docket zero hours.

I suppose at some level I knew that there would be trouble coming, but I had persuaded myself that it would all be ok, that I’d finish up my time, that the firm would sign my articles and I’d be off to the bar ads before the firm realized that I’d done zero billable work in the entire month of May. But my boss’s simple question stunned me, and I sat at my desk with the phone next to my ear, paralyzed.

“What?” I said. I had been training as a lawyer for an entire year, yet the best I could do was mumble a little monosyllable. “What?” I said again. My mouth was dry, and it was hard to speak so much as a word.

Looking back, I think that sometime in the second half of my articling year, I’d settled into some kind of depression, which for me is kind of weird, given that my default setting is a cheerfulness so relentless that people find it annoying. But resentment had been settling over me for months, and by the end of April, I was basically done. I was done with the hours, with the commuting, with the poor feedback, with a boss that took credit for my work while slashing my dockets. I was so done, in fact, that all it took to push me over the edge was one last little shove, and that was when Accounting stopped reimbursing me for expenses.

As an articling student, I didn’t incur big expenses. I didn’t have to wine and dine clients or front the money for big ticket items. All I had to pay for were things like photocopying at the law library, or renting a car when I had to do some little motion out of town. But the expenses, however modest, were a burden for me, and when Accounting stopped honouring my expense claims, those expenses started to add up. Why would Accounting stop paying my expenses, you might ask? The answer is super long, but I’ll give you a TL;DR: at the firm’s Christmas party, the six articling students were compelled to provide the entertainment, and we had collectively used the occasion to mock the partners and some of the staff. The firm’s office manager was a main target. She also doubled as the firm’s controller. As I soon learned, it was a mistake for us to have made fun of her.