There is a certain kind of rivalry among siblings that is hard to describe. Perhaps it takes having siblings to truly understand experiencing un-vocalized love and very-vocalized competition, especially when your siblings make it to “high” places. So my dad and I often joke that he is the family’s parish priest, whose brothers have been made cardinals. While the priest has his ear to the ground, he advises those who are higher up and is careful to remind them on whose shoulders they really stand.
My first exposure to the law was when I was a child. It mainly involved getting candy from my father’s secretary. I remember the smell of his old office on Kilborn Avenue in Ottawa – a dry smell that I will always associate with rows of legal textbooks, grey carpet, melamine desks – and crayons. To be honest, in the early years the office was located on top of a fruit market in a Class C commercial rental unit, in a Class C building, from a Class D landlord – and my dad is the first to admit it. As an 8-year old, I was garbage-boy, paper-shredder, photocopier, pencil-sharpener, secretary-pleaser, filer and all-round office… gofer. As a teenager, I recall spending hours in the dimly-lit, concrete-floored and concrete-walled basement filled with row upon row of shelving units, where I would file away yellowed files into boxes as stale as the underground air. Oh, and the cobwebs. Over the years it got harder and harder for me to coax my friends into joining me for a Saturday afternoon in the “dungeon” with pizza and pop. And the boxes you were looking for were somehow never the ones that sat within easy reach on the middle shelves. I remember one thing that stood out about the law from those days. It was boring. And I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.
It took me until I was in my early twenties to appreciate the blue-chip machine my father and his brother had built, set in motion and manned. I learned to appreciate that he was offering first-rate legal services and that his reputation as a lawyer in Ottawa depended on it. Still, I used to wonder about the tall office buildings in downtown Toronto, like the ones seen in Hollywood movies, with the big office suites that shined with rich mahogany and overlooked gorgeous streetscapes. Somehow these didn’t compare to the perks of Judy’s desk-drawer candy. And the melamine boardroom table that my father and uncle affectionately referred to as Irish Oak. Eventually, though, I made up my mind that my father’s office was like one of those restaurants you recommend to your friends. “Oh, it may be a hole in the wall, but the food’s really good!” His office was no Sistine Chapel. It was more working-class tough, but it brought home the bacon.
My second exposure to the law was in the summer of 2010. I was a newly minted grad and I was excited to begin the second year of my M.A. in Philosophy. After that I would step forever more into the quiet, closed and serene stratosphere of academia. That summer, my father enlisted my help at the office. This time he was moving locations and we were all very proud of it. He had just finished gutting and renovating an old brick house and automobile body shop at the corner of Bank St. and Rockingham Ave. We called it The Rock, for short. Given my father’s fondness of calling himself “just a small-time lawyer,” an expression that evoked the idea of being part of the “bedrock” of the legal industry, the street name was apt. It was then that I decided there was something particularly rewarding about the law – about solving people-problems for problem-people. And I liked the work enough to pursue it full-time instead of flying from book to book sampling the nectar of Philosophy.
Like I said, my father revels in calling himself “just a small-time lawyer” despite his successes. So fond was he of the nomenclature that he once called himself that when testifying before a provincial legislative committee undertaking reforms to legal services in Ontario. He likes that it humbles him, and it helps keep the memory alive of our poor Irish forefathers. Hear it enough as a child and that’s what you’re ready to call him, without realizing the potential sting of it. Besides, my family has a dark, self-deprecating sense of humour that many people don’t understand. I reckon it’s what helped my forefathers get by on their once-forsaken island under the then-unforgiving thumb of England. And I guess it continued to help them when they landed on the unforgiving soil of Renfrew, Ontario. (While researching my family’s ancestry, I once came across the 1841 census for the Ottawa Valley. The census administrator actually wrote in one of the columns: “land is cold, hard clay.” So much for Irish luck. We were not so much immigrants to Canada as excrements from Ireland, and we were bound for farmland that needed lots of it in order to grow anything).
Whenever the topic came up, my father discouraged me from becoming a lawyer. “I don’t think you would like it. But maybe.” Well, when I told him I had made up my mind that I would apply to law school anyway, he beamed. “Email this fellow and tell him you’re interested in applying to law school. He practices Supreme Court law.” Knowing I was more the egg-head type who would enjoy settling arguments about unsettled law, he handed me an index of lawyers that had the name Eugene Meehan Q.C. highlighted in yellow (not that Eugene, or anyone else working with him, is an egg-head). If there is such a thing as contacting someone cold-turkey – and not just anyone, but someone who works at a big-time, mahogany-lined law firm – this was it. I still have his response:
Dear Dr. Meehan, [Mr. Meehan has a Ph.D., as does his colleague Marie-France]
After having been advised against it by a number of relatives (all lawyers), I have decided to pursue a career in law. Would you be willing to meet with me to share your advice about your practice area?
Yours very truly,
Dylan
Eugene’s response?
Dylan,
1. Not sure if we have met, so not sure why you are writing to me and no one else – but maybe you’re writing to a whole ton of other people.
2. I don’t give advice (outside of a legal context). People don’t want advice, they want corroboration.
3. But if you want to have a quick café latte, I can tell you some of my own experiences and give you some pros and cons, happy to do so as a courtesy.
Yours very truly,
EUGENE MEEHAN, Q.C.
Yikes! Almost made an ass of myself. I wasn’t exactly home safe though, because making an ass of myself would follow in due course. The day we met I wore my only suit and good pair of shoes. The pant legs were a little high, but I chanced it anyway. I remember it being a very hot day. I was sweating. And nervous. And when I finally walked into Eugene’s office (at his prior firm – he’s since set up his own firm), he was wearing an Adidas tracksuit. “I go the gym in the morning before work, and I just got here – haven’t got the tie on yet.” I could use one of those tracksuits right about now, I thought, to slow the sweat glands. “Now tell me how I know you. Who are you and who is your father who sent you here.”
The question came out less like a question and more like a statement you aren’t sure how to answer. I hate this question. I’ve been asked it countless times since I was a child. I am proud of my family, but you’ll have to understand that given the realities of public life I have been shouted at by strangers often enough at doorsteps, shopping malls and bus stops – even outside of election time – to know not to wear a name tag. And it never gets any less jarring. So, confronted with this question by someone you are trying to impress is like being one step away from incriminating yourself – and knowing it too. Besides, I wanted to meet Eugene on my own merits. So I twisted and stuttered painfully with many “um’s” and “uh’s.” Finally I replied, “oh, my father is a small-time lawyer in Ottawa, you wouldn’t know him.”
I’m pretty sure I heard storm clouds close over me. And then a pin drop. Eugene, staring at me sharply from across his desk, got up off his chair, walked deliberately around his desk and past me towards the door, and closed it slowly until it clicked shut. Then he slowly walked back to his chair, sat down and looked at me severely from his large office suite. “It’s not small-time law, it’s front-line law, and don’t you forget it! It’s real law, for real people.” Now I really needed the tracksuit.
Throughout my legal studies Eugene and I have stayed in touch so he can provide his “corroboration”. But when I phoned him in January of 2012 from my campus apartment, the lovely voice on the other end of the line explained that Eugene and his immediate staff had left the wide mahogany suites of his well-respected law firm – for good. He had renovated and set up shop inside an old brick house at the corner of Bank St. and Gladstone Ave., right across the street from an automobile body shop. So, I popped in for a visit during reading week, wearing the same blue suit and pair of shoes. (No, I hadn’t hemmed the pant legs). But this time, Eugene was in shirt and tie. When I walked in he had his sleeves rolled up past his elbows and his hands in hot soapy water doing the office dishes. “We all pitch in here Dylan. So why don’t you pick up that dish cloth over there and help me dry these dishes.” I felt right at home – body shop, dishes, the whole kit.
It is uncommon for careered people to start anew at will. But then again, the energy, enthusiasm and indestructible “no-sweat-off-my-back” and “I’m-not-looking-back” attitude are just as uncommon. Or, as Spinoza put it, all noble things are as difficult as they are rare. The lawyer I met in downtown Ottawa sporting a tracksuit in a large and well-respected law firm was the same lawyer I met further south on Gladstone Ave. washing dishes. Still the same sought-after lawyer who provides first-rate legal services. The venue may have changed and the office may be smaller (“front-line”, shall we say?). But it forms an integral part of the stonework that makes up the legal industry. How apt then, that it is located on a street named Gladstone.
One of Heraclitus’ mysterious fragments from the 5th-4th centuries B.C. states “the way up is the same as the way down.” Its utter simplicity is suggestive of greater meaning. Perhaps what he meant to convey was that one doesn’t know for sure whether one is heading up or heading down; towards success or towards defeat; towards richness or towards poverty; towards happiness or towards bitterness; towards greatness or towards smallness. Because when all bets are off, and the pains and pleasures of experience are tallied up, sometimes the small is big, the big is small and the last are first. So I do not have my eyes on the bigness or smallness of law firms, as I once did – just the lawyers who run them.