Connor Campbell is an articling student at McMillian LLP in Toronto, Ontario, and Editor Emeritus of Obiter Dicta. Connor previously served as a staff illustrator for Obiter during his 1L year at Osgoode, before serving as Editor-in-Chief during his 2L and 3L years. Connor was also the staff cartoonist for The Varsity, the school paper at the University of Toronto. Connor graduated from Osgoode in Spring 2020 with a Gold Key, for his significant contributions to the life of the law school.
Connor sat down for an interview with Obiter to discuss his articling experience, his experience as a recent Osgoode graduate, and his time as a student at Osgoode. This interview was conducted late November 2020.
Hi Connor – you are an articling student now, how are you finding the transition from law school to full-time work?
I have been articling for just over two months now. Due to COVID, articling was truncated, from ten months down to eight. The downside of that is, obviously, articling is now shorter. I don’t take it for granted that anybody gets hired back. Ideally that’s the case, that you put in good work at the firm and they find a home for you there as an associate, but in the most basic sense I acknowledge that I have eight months with the firm. And ideally I would like to have more.
In the two months that I’ve had, I’ve enjoyed it. It’s been a good variety of work. It’s been demanding. It’s been different than law school. I prefer it for three reasons. I’d say the three major differences come down to the amount of feedback you get, the sense of purpose, and to some degree the sense of community.
So, on the feedback side at McMillan LLP, my work is effectively a means to accomplish someone else’s end, whether that’s a client or our lawyers. So, you might have a file where somebody says go and do X. The point is you have a deliverable there and it’s quite clear how your work fits into some larger purpose there. When you compare that to law school, the point of your education is realistically self-improvement—you’re supposed to get a little bit better at whatever area of law the class is focusing on and ideally the professor’s lectures should do something to take you there.
During articling, I’d say the learning is more of a by-product. You can’t help but learn when you’re doing hours and hours of work for people, and you develop a set of skills the longer that you spend working with any one group.
I’d get a mediocre or poor grade if my work wasn’t good at Osgoode. During articling, I’ll be told that it’s not very good and I’ll be told to redo it and I’ll probably be given additional instructions on how to do it better. Somebody else is invested in making sure that I do a good job whereas at Osgoode, I always did feel to some degree that I was kind of waiting for somebody to plot me on the bell curve. So the point about the purpose is rather similar to what I was saying about feedback in that you feel like your work is contributing to some larger project that somebody has.
Now on the community point, and it might have something to do with my experience with Osgoode as a commuter, but I didn’t really feel a very strong sense of community at Osgoode. I went looking for a community, and that’s probably a large part of why I joined Obiter and why I stayed with it for three years. During articling I find that you form a community with your fellow students, and you spend a lot of time working with them and you make friendships. You’ll find there’s some people who you prefer spending more hours with than others and you kind of develop a rhythm there, whereas I found when I was a student at Osgoode, it could be an entirely solitary pursuit. You didn’t need to find a study group in many cases, and sometimes you were better off studying alone.
Any tips to our 3L students who will soon be articling themselves, or our 2L students who will soon hold summer positions?
I guess my tip would be that when it comes to time management, you don’t have a lot of control over how much free time you have as a student, but I would say you have more free time when you’re at Osgoode than you do when you’re working. So, you have to think about what you want to do right now that probably won’t be possible once you start work, as articling will be all-consuming.
So, when you’ve got this year—or the next couple of years—if there have always been things on your “I’ll do that later” list, get to them now. I was given that advice before I started my 3L year and I ended up deciding to double-down on my commitment with Obiter and with various other extracurriculars, such as trying a moot, and enrolling in a wine education course.
And prioritize seeing friends over doing readings. I don’t think I did many readings in third year. And as a point of principle, I refused to buy a single textbook. I would just say extracurriculars are incredibly important.
How do you think your time at Obiter prepared you for the workforce?
I think there are few better tasks than the layout and publishing process at Obiter for preparing someone to do the kind of work you’ll do as a corporate law student. Every two weeks, we all gather around the Google Sheet and figure out how we’re going to slot all these articles in place. Then we’re going back into Google Drive to rename all of the articles to match up. Then we’re going to somehow communicate this to our graphic designer. Then after a few days we’ll come back and it won’t be exactly what we’re looking for. In many cases things are the opposite of what we said, or missing entirely. Then we sort it all out and try to get it done right, on an incredibly tight timeframe. The publishing date is the publishing date; we have paying sponsors who need to see the paper out on time.
So, you promise to have it published, and deliver on that promise. And that’s how the paper stays around. That’s incredibly similar to what you’re doing as a corporate law student. The types of tasks that I’ve seen over the last couple of months have been very similar.
As an accomplished artist, can you tell us about the preparation it takes to create an Obiter cover illustration?
During my time at Obiter I was looking to add a little bit of whimsical joy to the paper and I think that Dr. Seuss is the best embodiment of that. It’s so relatable, so it’s an excellent genre to begin with, and it’s a drawing style that’s fairly approachable and easily adaptable.
So, the process usually includes flipping through my collection of Dr. Suess books from when I was younger, or going through Google Images and just looking until I find an illustration that seems like a good jumping-off point. From there, I’ll sit down and draw it out, and I’ll figure out what the purpose of the cartoon is going to be. Typically I’ll try to make sure that it matches whatever the tone of the piece or issue was.
When it came down to some of the cartoons I drew, I remember specifically doing one for the recruitment special. “What pet should I get” was the inspiration for the piece. A book about looking through a whole series of nonsensical animals to get as a pet seemed to me to be quite apt as an analogy to all the recruiters looking at a wide range of students to employ and figuring out which ones they’d like to hire. And the entire process being a bit wild and harried. Then, figuring out how to adapt that to just include a few subtle references to us as law students specifically.
I also always try to reward somebody who looks a little closer at the cartoon and notices one small detail or two that’s meant to be a bit of a joke on the whole process.
You are stranded on an island. You can only bring two former or current Obiter staff members. Who are they?
Probably Ian Mason and Emily Papsin, two of the Editors-in-Chief who bookended my time with Obiter. I’d say those two because they both have quite a habit of challenging whatever current beliefs I have.
Ian is probably one of the more outspoken editors that Obiter has ever had, but somebody who I don’t think tries to limit his political views. He actively goes looking for people who he disagrees with. And he looks for an argument with them. And I think that that’s a solitary quality that he has. He’s quirky, and I think that’s the sort of quality that would be useful on an island.
And Emily Papsin as well, on a similar sort of note. We were opposites in a lot of ways. Where I’ve got a habit of being quite impossibly impulsive on a lot of things, I think she’s quite “put together”. I’d like that dynamic of having a good variety of traits between the three of us. I think we’d probably try to kill each other after some amount of time, but it certainly wouldn’t be boring.
I’d answer this question entirely differently if the question was: “you’re locked in the Obiter office with two former or current staff members; who would they be?” In that case, I’m reminded very much of all of the mornings where you, Emmanuel, and I just sat around the Obiter office causing trouble and thinking up silly things to do at Osgoode. And I kind of wish that we had more time to do that, and it’s really too bad we were robbed of a month-and-a-half of it due to COVID, when we clearly could have blown through more of Obiter’s operating budget.
As a man with the requisite knowledge, may you recommend a great bottle of wine you’ve experienced over the COVID lockdown period?
Yeah, I can recommend one that’s kind of at an approachable price. I think it was probably one of the best wines that I’ve had under 20-bucks during the pandemic, and that was the Castello di Gabbiano 2015 Chianti Classico, which for $18.95 at the LCBO is absolutely stunning value.
It’s a five-year-old Chianti with a significant amount of time in oak, a long life ahead of it, a good amount of savoury qualities, but nice dark fruit notes with a bit of smoke. Just a lovely wine.