BarTalk August 2003
Volume 15, Number 4

An introduction to something completely different

by Tony Wilson

I was called a couple months ago by Someone Important at the CBA who had read a few things I had written for the Globe and Mail and Macleans magazine. “Would you be interested in writing a column for BarTalk?” she asked. Then she cut to the chase. “Please don’t say no. You see, I’ve actually been ordered to stalk you to get you to write a lighter column that doesn’t necessarily tie into being a lawyer. Something light so that lawyers can look at BarTalk and have a good belly laugh. And by the way,” she continued, “we’re not going to pay you, and if we get a lot of nasty letters about you or your column, we’ll fire you and have someone write a regular column on the Patent Act or the PPSA.”

Good grief. They want comedy. And for free!

So, I suppose, to spare you more legislative updates on more Statutes, I said yes and that’s why I’m here.

Until everyone gets tired of me, I’ll be parked somewhere between the Web column and Law Foundation updates. If I win the BarTalk lottery, so to speak, and the column is a success, then I keep my job as a columnist for lawyers and more or less get to say whatever I feel like saying. Hopefully BarTalk will be found more regularly in lawyers’ lounges and lawyers’ washrooms instead of on lawyers’ desks. Publications in lounges and bathrooms, I have learned, actually get read, but publications on desks normally get filed. Because I’d rather be read than filed, if BarTalk is found more regularly in the bathroom stalls of our profession, I’ll take that as a compliment and the CBA will let me keep writing.

If not, I suppose it’s back to the Globe and Mail.

Humour isn’t easy, and my track record in the genre is both poor and dangerous, as anyone who was with me at the UVic law school in the early 80’s can attest to. I edited the Law School newspaper back then, and in particular, a column called The Nose Knows. It was far more than a gossip column. It was a gossip column in which all the gossip was totally fabricated and so outrageous that it couldn’t be taken seriously by anyone.

I suppose that was its magic; it was actually meant to be unbelievable. When we circulated it every couple of months, you could hear the howls of laughter coming from all over the students’ lounge. Although the subjects of our satire were law students then, they’re now senior partners with big firms and there’s at least two judicial appointments who don’t appear to have suffered adversely by appearing in our little National Enquirer. They laugh with me to this day about being lampooned in the Nose whenever we see one another. When I left, nobody picked up the column, and the law school paper went legit. Somebody said the liability insurance got too high for what we were doing.

That’s not what I have in mind for this column. I have a mandate to talk about life outside the law and mid-life outside the office in the hope that my shelf life will be longer than yesterday’s news.

I have grand visions of disclosing what two married lawyers talk about when they’re forced to talk about the law. How you don’t have to leave your spouse or your law firm to enjoy your mid-life crisis, you can just change your operating system! As a solicitor, I may poke fun at my litigator brethren, (only because I’m jealous of their billings). And I’ll explain why 25 per cent of Vancouver lawyers think I’m a virus just because all the firms I’ve worked at have blown up. I’ll give wanna-be-novelists a heads up on how difficult it is to get a book published in Canada, even if you write a column for BarTalk and know the publisher’s personal e-mail address. I’ll talk about the collegiality of a bar in Vancouver (which I am a happy member of) where we’re competitors and good friends too, then I’ll explain about the same bar in Toronto issuing body armor and lessons in self defense to its members.

I intend to have fun at this. Because, as I used to say, the Nose Knows.

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 August 2003 issue of BarTalk and is reproduced here with permission of both the author and the Canadian Bar Association, British Columbia Branch.