BarTalk December 2003
Volume 15, Number 6

Viruses I Have Known

By Tony Wilson

Why my partners are no longer nervous
I told this little story to another lawyer I’ve been on a file with for the last four years, and he laughed hard enough that I decided to repeat it here, giving me an excuse to share the “virus” story province wide.

Many years ago, I articled and then practised at the old tweedy, Vancouver firm of Douglas Symes & Brissenden, where I worked with one Douglas Clarke, a man with a knack for the piano and entertaining, though borrowed one-liners. He suggested over beer and Dad’s cookies one Friday night (DS & B being the only firm in North America where the beer fridge was always open but the Dad’s cookies were under lock and key) that he and I forthwith leave DS & B, and start a two-man shop called “Clarke Wilson”, where we’d live off the avails of misdirected mail.

For those of you outside the Lower Mainland, there is still a firm called Clark Wilson, and my nostalgic view of life suggests that Doug was right. You see, there is no Douglas Symes anymore. It’s dead. Blew up. Passed on. Ceased to be. It expired and went to meet its maker. It’s pushing up the daisies. Its metabolic processes are now history. It kicked the bucket, hopped the twig, bit the dust, snuffed it, breathed its last. Ceasing to be, it shuffled off its mortal coil, ran down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible. Bereft of life, it rests in peace, or more accurately pieces, throughout the Vancouver core. Which is a sad thing because it was a fine place to practise from and had the best Christmas parties in town.

I am blamed for this death. Which is an odd thing, because at least 15 years before its demise, I left it for Connell Lightbody (then called Ray Connell). So armed with this alibi, I see no reason why I should somehow be blamed for DS & B’s end. I was somewhere else at the time. But then again, Ray Connell blew up too. But I have an alibi for that one as well. I had moved to Ferguson Gifford.

Which also blew up.

All are gone. Connell Lightbody bit the dust in 1999, and Ferguson Gifford died the death of a thousand cuts around the same time. This is sad as well, because both were good firms filled to the gunwales with great lawyers.

I have worked at three medium sized Vancouver law firms in my 18 year career, all of which have, at some point in their lives, become resoundingly dead. I wasn’t there for any of the deaths. But because I am the only lawyer to have worked at all three while they were alive, I am tainted with the brush of scandal. I am the common element that links all three deaths. Based on similar fact evidence, I am the curse, the bad news, the thing in the night, the enemy within, the trouble at the Mill, the virus. It makes my current partners nervous. But because any publicity is good publicity (unless you’re Martha Stewart or Michael Jackson), I have lived with it, until now.

Well, all I can say is thank God for Campney Murphy. With its unfortunate demise last summer, the curse has been broken. I never worked there. I never had a file with anyone who worked there. I don’t even think I darkened its door. The curse is lifted. I am forever in its debt.

But what surprises me about my dead and defunct law firms is the level of camaraderie that still exists between most ex-associates and ex-partners of my ex-firms. I’m sure there’s some bad blood somewhere (otherwise they’d all be still in business). But I’m regularly invited to golf tournaments, reunions, lunches and other forms of wakes put on by my ex’s, where people who haven’t practised with each other in years turn up and talk old times like a Shriner’s convention without the hats. Hopefully, the alumni of Campney will learn what the respective alumni of DS & B and Ferguson Gifford have learned: keep having those golf tournaments.

Now that my curse has been broken, maybe DS & B will start having Christmas parties too.

Tony Wilson is a Franchise and Intellectual property lawyer at Cawkell Brodie, and has written for the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun and Macleans magazine. His e-mail address is twilson@cawkell.com.

This article originally appeared in the December 2003 issue of BarTalk and is reproduced here with permission of both the author and the Canadian Bar Association, British Columbia Branch.