Learning to live past unfortunate nicknames
By John Aziz (2L)
I still vividly remember the putrid stench of rotten fish that had spread throughout the entire school’s basement locker area by the time I had arrived there from my last class of the day.
As I walked toward my locker, the smell became overwhelming. A group of students had congregated around my locker and eagerly looked on as I pulled it open to find that a long-forgotten thermos of Manhattan Clam Chowder had exploded at the back of the upper shelf.
The nickname “Chowder” stuck with me for the rest of high school. I’m pretty sure that a number of people from my graduating class never actually knew my name and would still yell “Hey! Chowder!” if they saw me on the street.
My point is, don’t let an unfortunate nickname prevent you from getting to know someone. This lesson applies equally to law firms.
With the 2L recruit looming, many second-year students are busily preparing for OCIs and trying to figure out which firms offer the best “fit”. Given the uniformly slick branding and broad overlap in practice areas among corporate law firms in Toronto, it can often be difficult to discern how the student experience varies from one law firm to another.
While I don’t intend to provide a complete picture of Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP (Davies), I hope that a description of my experience as a 1L summer student will help other students in their own decision-making.
Davies is a highly regarded corporate law firm that describes itself as “a law firm focused on high-stakes matters”. It is the smallest of the so-called “Seven Sister” firms in Toronto and does not purport to be a full-service firm.
Rather, Davies specializes in corporate transactional work and related practice areas (i.e., Tax, Competition, Litigation, Real Estate, Insolvency, Environmental). The firm embraces a “generalist approach” to legal practice and encourages students and younger lawyers to develop a broad skill set. In fact, the summer student program is structured without rotations to facilitate broad exposure to various practice areas and to allow students to work with a wide range of lawyers.
I was initially attracted by the firm’s strong reputation for high-quality work and its self-directed student program. Admittedly, I was intimidated by the prospect of door-knocking, but I was pleasantly surprised that the lawyers were eager to include a student on their files and to explain foreign legal and financial concepts. Either way, work always found me, and there was the reassuring support of the student program coordinators.
At the beginning of my summer term, I primarily worked in the corporate practice area. My tasks largely involved due diligence for M&A deals and proofreading and summarizing agreements for other corporate matters. Even as a student, the expectations are high and there were times when the work piled on, but I never felt overwhelmed, and I appreciated the trust that the lawyers put in us as summer students.
One day in June, I received a call from a litigation partner who had seen that I was available on the student work allocation report circulated among the lawyers. He had a discrete task for me to complete and, although it had never occurred to me that litigation would be an area of interest, I found the work extremely compelling. As a result, I continued to seek out work in litigation and found great opportunities to take on substantive legal work involving interesting disputes. A highlight of my summer was a litigation file where I largely drafted two external client memos.
My summer experience at Davies exceeded my expectations. The quality of the work was top-notch, and the lawyers were equally talented. I was given broad leeway to pursue my interests and to take serious responsibility on files. The student program was well-organized, and we had several fun student events. All this, and I went to sleep at a reasonable hour every night.
