Matthew Tran (1L) sat down with Aidan and Amani to discuss life after UV
Hi everyone! Welcome to another edition of Ultra Vires’s (UV) Alumni Spotlight series. This time we’ve got two special guests joining us: Aidan Campbell and Amani Rauff. At the time of the interview Aidan was an associate lawyer at Mahon & Company, and is now working at Edelmann & Company in Vancouver while Amani is a lawyer at Dewart Gleason LLP. Aidan and Amani were co-Editors-in-Chief of UV in 2017-2018. We talk about student journalism, students tanning their “exam-soft bodies” on the shores of the Dominican Republic, tuition costs, and how we’re all generally tired.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
UV: Could you tell us a little bit about your journey following law school?
Amani Rauff: It hasn’t been long since I graduated, but I articled at a mid-sized union-side labour firm and then moved to a boutique labour and civil litigation firm, where I’ve been for the last year and a half.
AC: I had a similar experience, but since I practice immigration and refugee law, things are always done at a much smaller scale. I moved out to Vancouver and articled at a mid-sized immigration firm. I then went to work for the last year and a half with Frances Mahon who was previously a sole practitioner. As of March 1, I’ll be working at Edelmann & Co. doing immigration litigation and refugee law.
UV: That’s awesome. Congrats! To jump right into things, do either of you reflect back on your time at UV? How do you feel about it if you do?
AC: I remember UV more for the people and for some of the really dumb shit we got to do. I think the years that Amani and I were there were quite fun and it was a nice little escape. I think of Kevin’s [Schoenfeldt] dumb jokes, and Maud [Rozee] and Amani holding the ship together, while I screwed around and made the whole class mad at us. We tried to cancel the grad trip…
UV: Oh, don’t worry we’ll get to that.
AC: [laughs] So yeah, I remember that sort of thing. I remember the people who managed to bring us together, the contributors, and just sitting eating pizza in the room, which I guess is now no longer an option.
UV: To be honest, because of COVID, I don’t know if my relationship with free pizza that everyone’s grabbing at will ever be the same.
AC: I would assume that they’re sending around coupons at any Zoom lunch and learn. They better be mailing you a little sandwich.
UV: Yeah, we don’t get free lunch. Instead we get free, unsolicited comments from Faculty members. What about you, Amani?
AR: When I think about UV I think about my friends there. I have thought about how, at the time, it was going to ruin my chances of getting a job…Wait, don’t put this in…[laughs]
AC: No! You’ve got to put that in! It’s very important that people understand that nobody cares about what you write in your law school newspaper.
AR: Aidan knows this. I have to Google myself every time I need to get my phone number, and every time I do this, all these UV articles pop up and I’m so glad no one has read them. Like, I have a job!
UV: [laughs] That’s reassuring. What are your perspectives on the nature of student journalism then?
AR: Participating in UV made me get out of my comfort zone. It made me more comfortable asking difficult questions and putting my name on things. At the end of the day, I don’t think I would have had the same confidence coming into the legal profession if I hadn’t done UV. I didn’t come from knowing a bunch of lawyers. I came to law school thinking “shit, everyone’s smarter and better than me!” But then I got to know the Editor-in-Chief in 1L and he got me to go to Alexis Archbold and ask some tough questions. Student journalism gives you those tools to question things in situations where you might otherwise be afraid, which you need later on in your legal career.
AC: I second that. Brett [Hughes] also put me up to requesting a bunch of budget documents so I also had a very uncomfortable conversation with Alexis Archbold in my first year.
Look at something like the IHRP scandal that broke over the last year. Events like that show that the stuff that’s happening at the law school matters. I mean, there’s an active judicial inquiry going on as a result of it now. Independent student journalism is important because it allows you to critically report on the stuff that’s happening directly at the law school. Any law school in Canada is an important institution and we need reporting about how lawyers are trained and the atmosphere they are trained in.
I will say I was a bit disappointed to see how UV handled that situation. Maybe I missed some really interesting writing on it but I feel around that time it was mostly like “here’s a roundup of what other people are saying!” but there wasn’t a lot of independent student journalism. Somebody should have just been going around and talking to every Faculty member and IHRP participant until somebody said something that they wouldn’t have otherwise said. They’ll often say stuff to students that they wouldn’t say to a Globe and Mail reporter.
But I definitely understand that because of the pandemic it’s been hard to keep UV functioning as an institution. And you know, far be it for me to talk about it, because you can’t drop in on a professor’s office the same way you used to. That’s usually how you could get interesting facts into the paper. They’re not going to book a Zoom meeting to talk about this stuff so I think it’s very difficult.
UV: Speaking of critical pieces, I was going through some of what you both have written and both of you co-wrote a really thoughtful and critical piece about the 2018 class trip to the Dominic Republic. What was the fallout like? Did you receive remarks from students? How did you deal with them?
AC & AR: [laughs]
AC: The best joke I ever wrote is in that piece. “Sunning their exam-soft bodies on a tropical beach” is my favourite joke. It’s the best pun I’ve ever written. That article is the thing I think about most from law school because of how pissed we made a bunch of our fellow classmates. There was a hundred-post Facebook thread of people talking about it. I had a bunch of friends outside law school be like “What’s going on? Who are these people? The article was just asking for basic moral consideration?”
On reflection though, it was not the kind of thing you needed to do in the pages of a school newspaper. It was snippy and kind of shitty and a little too woke for the room. While I still stand by it, nobody else should do that. It pissed off and hurt people that I know. They were putting a lot of work into organizing a fun trip for their classmates and felt betrayed that we wrote about it in the newspaper instead of sending them a note. If we reached out first, maybe we would have actually made some change instead of having a bunch of people pissed off at us. For me, it’s jointly a lesson about feeling proud for saying something outrageous and sticking to my guns but also realizing that bloviating in the pages of a school newspaper doesn’t actually create a lot of change. It mostly just pisses people off.
AR: Like Aidan said, there was a Facebook post, where everyone was saying, “I don’t have a dog in this fight” and then writing five paragraphs on how they felt about it. I guess at the time I felt kind of bad about it, but after law school it sort of became a running joke with everyone I knew from school. Most of the people I liked didn’t say mean things so… I don’t know. At the end of the day there was fallout. It seemed sort of natural for law school to me. It seemed natural to the student journalism experience and I probably wouldn’t change anything.
UV: You both have also written articles about tuition, financial accessibility and student debt. Do you have any comments on the system as it is now?
AR: Still bad. By system do you mean in terms of…
UV: High tuition entrenching students in debt, and how many racialized, first-generation law students feel worried about having to take a Bay Street job to pay off debt or apply broadly to these corporate firms, because they’re afraid that they won’t get an articling position to even convert their degree.
AR: Yeah, I mean I thought it was a real concern at the time and I still do. Your options in terms of what you’re going to pursue are limited by the debt load that you have, and obviously it’s different for different people but it disproportionately affects people who don’t come from backgrounds where they can just choose where they want to work. High tuition just creates another barrier for people who want to pursue lawyering that benefits the communities that they came from.
AC: It’s as bad or worse than when we were there. I was lucky enough to graduate without debt, and my intergenerational privilege has allowed me to take pretty risky jobs. I know so many people who want to be working in the field that I work in and haven’t, either because it’s a difficult field to break into or because they just can’t swing the finances; you end up working for quite a while without getting paid because you’re almost always on a fee-split model and it takes time for files to start billing out.
If you don’t want to do corporate law, or work in a New York firm, or do big international law stuff, go anywhere else and you’ll graduate with less debt and be fine. Even though I was able to graduate without debt, I often say that going to U of T was the worst financial decision of my life. When you haven’t ever made decisions of that financial magnitude, the numbers feel quite abstract. $100,000 is a lot of money. As it pertains to equity, you’re going to naturally have a richer, whiter, student body.
AR: An area that I see that this has had an effect lately is when I’m speaking with articling students. During the pandemic, it’s not easy to get rehired, so I keep having to ask them “what’s your ability to, just, hang out for like four or five months?” This really affects your risk tolerance and whether you’re just going to jump at the first random job that pops up rather than sticking to your guns until you get what you want.
UV: Both of you seem to end on a slightly optimistic note in your farewell letter writing that “this generation of lawyers is forcing a deeply conservative profession to rethink its relationship with a public that it is meant to serve and represent. ” Do you still feel this way and well, are you both still tired?
AR: So tired.
AC: I can’t believe you read that as optimistic. That’s such a downbeat article. This was Amani’s line, so she gets to take this.
AR: Oh, my God, I was thinking that line was so annoying. This was me?
AC: You wanted it to end that way. To pull back the curtain, at the end of law school, I was gassed and really beat up from everything, and about to move across the country, and I wanted to end on a very downer note, and Amani was like “no, stuff’s changing! I can see it happening!”
AR: Someone actually asked me about this recently in a CPD [Continuing Professional Development] course about EDI [Equity, Diversity and Inclusion]. I don’t have the long view, but it seems that since I’ve been a lawyer, I’ve seen changes in my bar in terms of people holding the establishment accountable for being unresponsive on equity issues. I guess I’ve been pleasantly surprised? I know that article was supposed to end off on a hopeful note, but I didn’t think that I would fit in in this profession or that there would be space to be anything less than the most risk-averse and conservative version of myself. But I’ve found that, at least in union-side labour, that there is some space and it’s getting bigger.
AC: I think I take another view. The Globe and Mail just did a piece about the power gap at the top of Bay Street firms, and the focus is still on trickle-down feminism. Paniz [Khosroshahy (3L)] wrote a great article in response that I think was really on point. The gender pay gap for people making half a million dollars a year doesn’t matter. It’s not the thing that matters.
On a personal note, I started transitioning after law school and use they/them pronouns. There was a recent change at the BC courts to ask counsel to state their pronouns for the record before starting any court matter. Somebody wrote an op-ed about how this was compelled speech and how sometimes you need to misgender co-counsel or their client because it’s the substance of the legal dispute and it was just horrifying and hit close to home.
I think the legal profession and the law are always going to be innately conservative because we’re guardians of the status quo. Going to law school, you sort of hang up your radical card and you start leading from behind. You start doing movement support. You’re not the tip of the spear anymore — you’re a Band-Aid. The work that I do is a Band-Aid on a country that actively tries to deport people of colour to countries that they have fled for their lives, and no amount of crusading litigation from me or my esteemed colleagues is going to change that, because they’re policy decisions, not legal ones.
I think there is a bit of a ground swell and progressive statements from our cohort and some noise within firms that may change the make-up of a lot of these institutions, but I don’t see any deep institutional change taking place. I’m very, very happy that there are union-side labour firms where a young woman of colour like Amani can feel comfortable being herself, and it should not be otherwise. But the diversification of law doesn’t change its basic structure in any meaningful way.
UV: So I guess you’re still tired?
AC: I’m still very tired. There’s a pandemic going on. We’re all tired.
