Ranjan Agarwal

2I'm great, I'm great. Thanks for asking me to be on with you. It's it's a real honor. I've watched some of the episodes. I've seen and learned from a lot of lawyers that you've interviewed.

4I think, I think I also put in what criteria I was looking for and then they matched us, I think.

6No, so I, you know, so if you'll just indulge me a little, I'll just, I'll just tell you the story a little bit, but You know, in my first few years of practice, you know, I was really focused on skills development, and I think that's good advice. I always tell young lawyers, really focused on learning the craft. But when I got to year 6, year 7, you know, I looked out into the profession and I became a little more aware of some of the equity issues that were present in the profession, and I was really blind to a lot of that. And I think in a good way, right? Like, I'd grown up in Canada in the 1980s, you know, with the CBC and multiculturalism and this real sense that merit was going to drive the success of immigrants and the children of immigrants.

7But, you know, when I was sort of a senior associate and then made partner at a big Bay Street firm, I was just so impressed by how many people were reaching out to me and were impressed by the fact that I made partner, whereas I think I just did a very ordinary thing. Like, I was not a Supreme Court clerk. I didn't have an LLM. Like, I just was a an ordinary guy that worked hard. And so one of the ways I wanted to give back, and one of the ways I like to give back, is I wanted to mentor lawyers from diverse backgrounds. You know, I'm not, I'm not opposed to mentoring really anybody.

8And so I, I often would volunteer for mentorship programs through the Law Society or through the Ontario Bar Association, through Osgoode Hall in part just because I understood that making a connection with a lawyer can be hard. I mean, I When I was a law student, I didn't know— I knew one lawyer who's now a judge. He was my next-door neighbor growing up. But I didn't have any lawyers in my family. I was really fortunate that it turned out my roommate in law school was a couple years senior to me. So he was able to educate me a little bit on how Bay Street worked and big firms and things like that. And I really valued that connection.

9But I thought, you know what, there's lots of people out there who just have zero connections. If I can provide them a little bit of an anchor into the profession, that'd be helpful. So I would sign up for mentorship programs. I still do. I'm happy to be paired. You were a great example. We kind of hit it off. We had a good relationship. You know, you really impressed me because you're one of those people who, you know, I think in some ways I wasn't able to mentor very well because you really had a goal in mind that was different than what my career experience was. But I've had an opportunity to follow your career.

10I've been really impressed with that, and I'm glad we had a relationship all those years.

13That's a great question, Pulat. I didn't think you'd ask me that, but I love the history of our firm. So the Bennett in Bennett Jones is former Prime Minister R.B. Bennett, You know, East Coast born and raised, travels to Calgary, sets up a sole proprietorship there, works as a lawyer, has a number of partners over the years, becomes the Prime Minister of Canada in the 1930s. You know, sort of real extraordinary Canadian, and in some ways, a real extraordinary Westerner, right? Like, that was really the beginning of the West in Canada's kind of history, right? Calgary was like this nascent city. And Mac Jones, the Jones in Bennett Jones, a preeminent energy lawyer from Calgary, a solicitor, but well-known for advising some of the biggest energy companies at a time when Alberta was really beginning to explore and become this energy powerhouse.

14And so the name Bennett Jones, the Bennett law firm kind of has different names over the years, different partners, but over time grows to become the preeminent firm in Calgary. Like, to the extent there are, you know, and I personally don't like the description "Seven Sisters," but to the extent there are Seven Sisters in Toronto, you know, there's one sister in Calgary, and it's Bennett Jones. And, you know, what's really interesting to me is because I was born in British Columbia, raised in Alberta, and Bennett Jones was like a well-known name even when I was in high school. Like, there were scholarships and moot courts, and candidly, if you go through kind of a who's who of Alberta government and politics, and even leaders in other law firms, in-house counsel, the president of Alberta corporations, you're going to find this universe of Bennett Jones alumni, because the real training ground was Bennett Jones.

15It was the preeminent, the white shoe, the gold chip. That's where you went to train. And then in the '80s and '90s, you know, I think the Bennett Jones partners in Calgary had really good foresight. I think they realized that to be a successful law firm in a new economy, you have to diversify your practice, you have to diversify your client base, and that led to expansion into Toronto. And there were a couple of iterations, you know, Bennett Jones, like, it's hard to expand a law firm. The '80s and '90s were a tough, tough market in lots of ways. There were challenges from provincial regulatory bodies. But I think eventually what happens, and, and this story kind of dovetails with my story with Bennett Jones, In the late '90s, early 2000s, you have this greenfield operation.

16So as opposed to merging with another law firm or acquiring another law firm, Bennett Jones sends out to Toronto a young, a reasonably young lawyer named Hugh McKinnon. He's the chairman of the firm, and he's sort of charged with growing the Toronto office. And I, I have a lot of affection for Hugh McKinnon. He hired me at Bennett Jones as a very junior lawyer. I was a second-year associate when I came over as a lateral, right, to meet the chairman of the firm. That doesn't really happen nowadays. But we were a tiny firm even back then. I joined in 2006, 79 lawyers, you know, maybe 15 or 20 on the litigation floor, not that well known in Toronto circles.

17But, you know, very quickly, like already there were a couple of litigators of great repute there. You know, big files were coming in the door. We hired some big litigators and we kind of grew organically. And so you asked a question about our practice. We are a general service firm in sort of every way possible. We have a big corporate department, a big tax department. In Alberta, we do a lot of regulatory work, a lot of energy. You know, we are a lot of dirt law, right? Mining, energy, the kind of bread and butter of Canadian industry. But we have lawyers doing privacy and cryptocurrency and cannabis and all of those new markets. You know, I sit on the 32nd floor at First Canadian Place where the litigators in our firm sit.

18Our litigation practice is probably like a lot of big law firm litigation practices. We do almost everything under the sun. It's not really industry-specific. We act for banks, we act against banks, we act for cannabis companies, construction companies, other law firms, the full gamut. And so today, we have continued that aspirational growth with offices in Vancouver. We've had offices in the Middle East, in Bermuda. We've had offices in— we have an office in Ottawa, obviously an office in Edmonton, which goes back to our Calgary days, but a national general service law firm that I, I'm really proud to be a partner of because I think it's just an extraordinary place to work.

20No, I— no, no, I, you know, I think I was like lawyer 79 in Toronto, you know, and now we're, you know, I think we're 180 or 200 in Toronto. But you know, back then we grew really through laterals, like lawyers coming to the firm from other offices, whereas today all of our growth is out of our student program and our associates, our junior associates.

22You know, I might have been. So I was really attracted to public law litigation because— and again, if you'll just indulge me, I'll tell sort of the medium-long story— but in law school, I thought I was going to be an international lawyer. You know, I went to law school in the late '90s, early 2000s. You know, there was all this talk about the end of history, The International Criminal Court had just been established. You know, there was this real hope, I think, that we were going to be reaching into a new vanguard when it came to international law. And, you know, I never really got to scratch that itch. I mean, I studied international law, but I ended up on Bay Street for lots of different reasons.

23But a couple years into my practice, I realized what I really liked about public international law was that it was about the interaction between the state and the citizen. And so though I couldn't practice really public international law, I became attracted to human rights law, equality law, public law, administrative law, because again, it's about the interaction between the state and the citizen. And a couple years into practice, I had the opportunity to junior for a couple of our senior lawyers on different interventions or public law files that they had been asked to do pro bono. One was a case that ended up going to the Supreme Court of Canada, which had to do with the sponsorship of family immigrants to Canada, which was near and dear to my heart because my family had come to Canada as sponsorships.

24Another one had to do with family rights and equality rights. And a mentor of mine, Rob Staley, who was the head of the litigation department at the time, When I told him about my interest in public law, he said, look, every big Bay Street firm has kind of one lawyer that does constitutional public law. You can be that guy. And he actually really championed me going and doing my LLM at Osgoode Hall on a part-time basis where I did constitutional law. And that really kind of cemented my place in the firm as someone who does public law, administrative law, constitutional law. So it continues to be a part of my practice in the sense that You know, I try to find a case or two every year that I can do a piece of public law litigation.

25You know, I want to have balance in my practice. I tell that to a lot of lawyers. I say, you know, a big public law practice isn't probably going to get you doing examinations for discovery. It's not going to get you into motions court. There's probably not going to be a trial. So if you want to practice all those skills, you probably need a balance. But on the other hand, Public law really gives me an opportunity to kind of scratch that academic interest I have in the state and the citizen and how they work together. And I should also say, I'm especially interested in equality rights because, of course, you know, I have a special interest in diversity and inclusion and equality and how the law operates in that way.

27It was, and I have to really give full credit to an associate a colleague of mine, Doug Fenton. I've always really been interested in litigation funding agreements. I just think there's such a—

29a neat part of the law, right? Like, they're, they're kind of venture capitalists for litigators, right? And so, you know, him and I wrote this article. Really, I had the idea and he was the engineer for writing it, and we published in the Canadian Business Law Journal. It was an article really about litigation funding agreements in the non-class action context. There's lots been written about it in the class action context. And it was written a few years ago. And then lo and behold, Doug emails me on the morning that the Callidus decision comes out and says we were cited by the Supreme Court of Canada, which, you know, it was just an incredible, like, privilege and, and, and honor to think that the Supreme Court of Canada read something that we wrote and went so far as to actually think it was worthy of being cited in one of their

31case.

33Yeah, I know, it's great.

35I know, I know the purpose of this conversation is to humanize lawyers. I'll tell you sort of the candid human truth of it. You know, my parents, like a lot of immigrant parents, and they were very accommodating, but you know, they had one goal for my brother and I. We had to become professionals, right? It didn't matter whether we were accountants or engineers, but they wanted us to be professional. That was the great promise of why they had immigrated to Canada. And I didn't quite know what—

37Yeah, yeah, a lawyer at Lax O'Sullivan.

39Yeah, yeah, no, he's, he's the smarter one of the two of us. So, you know, if you harken back, it's the mid-'90s in Edmonton I'm a high school student, I don't know much about what I want to do with my life, and I, I, I joined the debating team in high school. And I actually, like, I'll be immodest for a moment, I was a pretty good high school debater, pretty good intercollegiate debater. And almost automatically what happened is, you know, once I started kind of becoming active in the debating team, my friends just assumed I was going to be a lawyer, and my teachers just assumed I was going to be a lawyer, because that was sort of the skill set that kind of matched up with that.

40And as I said a moment ago, I grew up in a very middle-class suburban neighborhood in Edmonton, like very middle class. Our next door neighbor was a senior partner at what is now Dentons, back then in Edmonton, Milner Fenerty. And he is now a Justice of the Court of Appeal in Alberta, Justice Fian. And it was just extraordinary growing up next to him. Like he was just this nice, kind of simple, straightforward guy. I would go to him when I had a question about the law, you know, we'd talk across the fence and he'd answer it for me. You know, when I graduated from my BA, he came to the graduation party with his wife Mona Lee, and he gave me a copy of Black's Law Dictionary, and I still have a copy of Black's sitting on my desk.

41So I say that to say, like, how I find myself in the law, you know, it was kind of by happenstance, right? It was sort of like the thing I was going to do because people said I was good at that. And then so I end up at the University of Alberta and my parents really wanted me to do a business degree because they thought it was a good kind of fallback if law didn't work out and a B.Com had a little bit more kind of credential to it than a BA. My mother always used to say, well, she's like, I did a BA, like a BA is a nothing degree, you should aspire to something better.

42But I loved political science and I really didn't like accounting. And so, you know, after a couple of years of sort of struggling through the BCom and struggling with my parents, you know, in a friendly way, I just enrolled in the BA Honours program. And then it sort of all clicked together, right? Notions of justice and rule of law and how the law interacts both in a private and a public setting, like it all kind of came together. And then that led me, you know, obviously I knew I was going to go to law school, but in some ways what I was interested in law school was fed by that, that study. And I did, you know, I did my honors essay, my honors thesis on the International Criminal Court with Professor Dr.

43Andy Knight, and it was all about sort of the need for a criminal court. And so that obviously really inspired my interest in international humanitarian law, international criminal law, international public law.

45I am.

48Yeah, and, and, you know, full credit has to go to our executive director Betsy Hall and her staff. You know, Betsy came to the OBA, she'd worked at the OBA, she had a tremendous amount of experience with the organization, but in part She, prior to that, had worked in government and with a minister. And so I think Betsy brought to bear, like, you know, you get the leaders you need, right? And she brought to bear that really important understanding of how the justice sector operates and what tools were at the OBA's disposal. And so I remember in those first few days, you know, her pivoting the organization and pivoting the way in which we were thinking about what the organization was going to do to how can the OBA provide assistance to the justice sector.

49And the easiest example was the OBA had actually been using Zoom for many, many years for its section meetings, for its board meetings, sometimes for CPD conferences, and the OBA had this really easy-to-use video conferencing technology at its disposal. And I don't quite know all the mechanics of it, but my understanding is that, you know, Betsy was able to get to the Chief Justice and able to get to the Ministry of the Attorney General and said, look, We've got 200 Zoom lines. If you need them, they're yours. Like, we're ready for you. Like, we're ready to serve. We're happy to get lawyers into your courtrooms. We're happy to get the machinery of justice moving.

50And here is a tool we can use. We'll train you on how to do that. It was the OBA's IT director that was out doing the training of judges on Zoom. In some ways, it's why Zoom has become, you know, the go-to technology for the courts, because I think all the judges knew it. But also, you know, Betsy and her team were involved in a lot of roundtable discussions about the practice directions, about the rules that were going to be employed, some of the technology, you know, the formalities of it, all of that. I mean, the other part of it, you know, Betsy and her team turned towards procurement. You know, my firm was one of the beneficiaries of this, but lots of law firms were looking for masks in those early days.

51Like, they didn't know what was going to happen, but we knew we needed masks. The OBA was able to procure masks and then get them to law firms so that they could then give them to their staff. So there was just a ton of work being done there. I mean, the other example I'll give you is a ton of training, right? Like, I work in a big firm. Like, I'm, I'm so fortunate and privileged to work in an environment where we have machinery that can get rolling when it comes to IT or training or office support. But if you're in a small practice, a sole practice, You know, if you're the managing partner of a 4-person law firm, and, and, Pulat, this might appeal to you or, or resonate with you, if you're the managing partner of a small firm and you've got staff that you're responsible for and you've got a practice and now you have to think about like masks and safety protocols and getting up to date on the practice directions, you know, Betsy and her team rolled out this tremendous amount of resources, online resources, so that people could know quickly what they needed to know, not only about how to keep their staff safe but also what do they need to know that the courts were doing today, you know, because it was changing every day.

52So, and I'm going to put in a little bit of a plug for the OBA, you know, I think the OBA is in a lot of ways like that old couch, you know, you love sitting on it. When you sit on it and remind yourself like how cozy it is and it's been there, it's in every family photo, but you forget that it's there, right? And you're enamored with that new appliance or whatever it is in your house. You forget that that old couch has just been there with you through all these times. And so, you know, I think over the years people have forgotten about the CBA and the OBA as like the homeroom for lawyers.

53You know, I think even 20 years ago, 15 years ago when I started practice, everybody was a member of the CBA. It's just what you did when you became a lawyer. Got called to the bar, got your CBA membership. That's what you did. And over time people have forgotten about the importance of the OBA and the CBA, but I hope people remember that, you know, when the profession was not in trouble, but when the profession was struggling to figure out how they were going to meet the challenge of access to justice, the OBA stood up and was there for them. And I hope people will find their way to the OBA and the CBA again, even when the pandemic kind of comes to an end, because there are just tremendous resources from lawyers of all walks of life— big firm, small firm, in-house, government that just makes practice easier and makes you a better lawyer.

56Yeah, you know, if you think about 2003, 2004, 2005, when I was called to the bar, like we just didn't talk about D&I. And I'll be really honest, I never thought of myself as in any way disadvantaged because of the color of my skin. Now, there's a reason for that. Pulat, which is that I myself am really privileged in that I was born in Canada, I went to law school in Canada, you know, I don't have an accent, you know, I'm a Hindu by faith, but my faith doesn't require me to have any outward signs like a turban or a head covering of any sort or a beard. And I say that because I think in the mid-2000s there weren't a lot of, you know, South Asians, for example, who felt comfortable, if their faith required it, practicing in a big Bay Street firm or even in-house if they wore a turban.

57They just wouldn't have gotten hired, or a woman with a hijab. Like, that was very unusual. It still is unusual, but it was just unusual. So in some ways, I was privileged because, you know, I grew up in Edmonton. You know, the Oilers were the big thing in the '80s. Like, I could talk about the hockey game. I had grown up around majoritarian culture, so I probably had— I could wear the kind of coat, if you would, of being part of that majority culture. And so in some ways, I wasn't really alive to the challenges that racialized lawyers were facing, and I don't think it was talked about a lot. I think what was happening in that period was that there were really two tracks.

58There were people like me who were finding their way into Bay Street or government or in-house jobs, the kind of lucrative high-end jobs that people people had an image of. And then there was a whole cadre of people who were the subject of discrimination and bias and inequality who ended up in small and sole practices, right? That they just ended up, not by choice, that's what ended up happening. And so I think, and the discussion around microaggressions and unconscious bias, none of that existed. I think what changed in a couple ways is that my entry into the profession kind of dovetailed with this bulge, this demographic bulge, right? Because my parents are of the generation that came in that big immigration sweep in the '60s and '70s, right?

59Like, the Government of Canada just let immigrants from all countries in under Trudeau's immigration reforms, and it's no coincidence that the children of those immigrants kind of hit their professional stride in the mid-2000s, late 2000s. And as a result, got a little bit of power, right? So I remember joining the South Asian Bar Association as a director. I'll tell this story, but, you know, I had gone to a SABA meeting like 7 or 8 years before when I was a very junior lawyer, and I sort of left halfway through because it was small firm lawyers, lawyers who had trained in India, lawyers with accents, you know, they weren't, they couldn't be, or I wasn't seeking them, those kind of lawyers out as mentors to me.

60I wasn't sure what the business proposition was. But 5 or 6 years later, I went to a SABA meeting again, and all of a sudden there's a whole mix of people, right? Foreign-trained lawyers, lawyers in small practices, lawyers in big practices, friends of mine from law school. And I realized, along with a group of other people, that the diverse bar associations could be a real engine for pushing this discussion about diversity and equality and inclusion in a broader sense, like not just for Bay Street and not just for government and not just for small practices, but in the broadest of senses. And I think it was sort of timing was good in the sense that there was a burgeoning discussion about diversity on the bench, there was a burgeoning discussion about diversity in business and in our communities and in government, and of course that was then translating into a discussion within the practice.

61And of course then came the Challenges Facing Racialized Licensees report, led by people who really I stand on the shoulders of, like Raj Anand. And so it all came together. And of course, now today, a real awareness of the real damaging effects of unconscious bias, of microaggressions, you know. And I have to say, I am really fortunate. I can't think of a time when I have been actively discriminated against. Like, you know, I've never been called a Paki. No one has ever as far as I know, treated me in an offensive way because of the color of my skin. But I can tell you lots of stories of where I have been, you know, the victim of— and victim's the wrong word— I have been subject to unconscious bias or comments that people think are of no moment but actually, you know, in hindsight are quite hurtful.

62And I think— and I'm glad I've become alive to that because, you know, I probably would have shrugged that off 15 years ago. Today I'm more willing to speak out against it. In part because I want to give a voice to other people, right? Like junior lawyers who may not feel the courage to speak out against that. I want to be able to speak out against that on their behalf.

65So I think I've always been challenged by this idea that, you know, if we prize equality or inclusion or diversity, we somehow water down merit or success, you know. So first of all, you know, I don't think in any scenario there aren't lots and lots of people that can do the exact same good job, right? Like, like when you're talking about hiring students, right, the big law firms just finished their big student recruit. You know, we'd love to think that, you know, any one law firm hired the 20 best students, but the fact is, if you hire 20 from any of the top 100, you're probably going to be fine. You're probably going to have a great class of students, a great class of associates, some of them are going to make partner, right?

66Similarly, you know, when we're talking about the bench, You know, if you've got 100 applicants for a job on the Superior Court of Justice, there's not just one that's going to be excellent, head and shoulders above all the rest. You know, you can probably pick almost, you know, 20 of them and they'll all be great and great jurists and maybe end up on the Supreme Court of Canada. So in some ways, I think what has happened though is that we have replaced the discussion, or we have tried to meet the discussion about diversity with this discussion about merit in an effort to say, well, look, we just want the best. But in some ways, the best— so first of all, how you define that, but also the best can— it's much broader than that.

67And one of the things I find challenging about discussion about the best is that it implies in it a certain understanding of what the best is, right? Like, in the sense that, well, he must have gone to the best schools, or she must have had the best articling job, or, you know, whatever the case may be, when really what we are looking for in some respects is people who are empathetic, people who come from a wide variety of backgrounds, people who can relate. So, you know, when you talk about the equality of outcomes, you know, I'm— I guess I'm— I don't have a view yet on that thesis, in part because I'm still interested in how we move the discussion about equality more generally so that we can dismantle some of these ideas that we have in our profession, in our communities, in business and society, that there really is only one way of doing something.

68And don't get me wrong, like, I'm as impressed as the next person by someone who graduates from Harvard, right? But over time, I've come to learn that you know, the person that went to Harvard may have had advantages that other people didn't to get there, right? They may not have had to work in high school because, you know, their parents were professionals or they may have been able to afford that internship that took them to, you know, South Africa, which made their resume look better, right? And so I, I, you know, in some ways I want to push back against all of those theses we have about credentials and about background, because in some ways I think that's how you dismantle and then build up this argument around diversity and equality.

69Like, in other words, if we can prize equally the person who is an immigrant to this country, foreign trained worked in the small law firm in a small South Asian city but, you know, was ambitious and entrepreneurial and, you know, if we prize that as much as the person who went to Harvard and clerked at Supreme Court of Canada, then I think we will finally have achieved sort of the equality that we're looking for.

71You know, I think there's a couple of characteristics that really stand out for me. The first is we are looking, I think, for entrepreneurial lawyers. You know, when I was in law school, I didn't really understand the differences between the law firms. I kind of all thought they operated the same, and it's pretty easy to believe that because, you know, their names are somewhat interchangeable, right? Like There's both a Blake Cassels and a Cassels Brock. You know, for all I know, they were brothers. You know, there was a Goodman and Carr and a Goodman's. Like, I had no idea they were all kind of the same, you know, the same business. But I think over time what I've learned is that there is a little bit of a cultural difference between the law firms.

72And I think, you know, if you're a student or a junior lawyer interested in a career at Bennett Jones, you're the kind of student I think that views your business model as really a small business model, right? That you, you have to be innovative about how you market your practice, you have to be innovative about where your practice is going, you know. And, and we, I think, at Bennett Jones encourage lawyers to come up with ideas about where they think the business is going, where the corporate world is going, and trying to find a way to then service those clients of the future as opposed to the clients of today. And that may be as a result of the fact that as a relative new entrant in the Toronto market, I don't think we can call us that anymore, but you know, for a long time we didn't have the same institutional clients that a Seven Sister who has existed from before Confederation did.

73Maybe different in Alberta given our long relationships there, but obviously different in Toronto. And so when I was a junior lawyer at Bennett Jones, We were told, look, if you've got a great idea for a new practice or a great idea for a new way to sell ourselves to our clients, go do that. There's no stopping you. And it really encouraged people at all levels to do that. So entrepreneurial is really important. I also think really having a sense of profession. And I think it's really easy, and we should think about the law as a business. I think we do ourselves a disservice if we romanticize the law too much. And, you know, I, you know, when we talk about the articling student debate or we talk about, you know, the training of young lawyers, like, I have some views about the fact that, frankly, I think we romanticize the way it used to be a lot as opposed to thinking about the way it should be.

74But parking that for a moment, you know, I think at the end of the day, you have to view your young legal career as a holistic— you are a lawyer day and night. right? You're also a father, a son, you know, an amateur hockey player, a guitarist, like all those things. But you don't stop doing that at 5 o'clock. And so, you know, I think you have to have a real love of the law, and I think in some ways you have to want to contribute to the profession. And so, you know, one of the things that I have loved about Bennett Jones, and I've really learned from my mentors, you know, Jeffrey Leon, Mike Eizenga, have been tremendous mentors to me.

75You know, Bennett Jones is going to be one of the few firms that has had 3 presidents of the Advocates' Society. When Dominique Hussey becomes president in a couple years, before her Jeff Leon, before, after him Michael Eizenga. A real love for the profession and so many directors of the Advocates' Society and a real strong encouragement to me to play a role at the OBA. I mean, Bennett Jones did not have a traditional relationship with the Canadian Bar Association or the Ontario Bar Association. R.B. Bennett was one of the first presidents of the CBA Alberta branch. But, you know, when I became involved with the OBA and decided I wanted to play a leadership role there, you know, there was a real encouragement from my partners and my colleagues in management to do that because I think they understand that the law is kind of who you are as a person, and I've always embraced that view.

76I mean, it can be overwhelming. It means that you think about the law a lot and you view things through legal problems a lot, and it can be a little boring. Like, I read cases sometimes for fun just because the facts are interesting or the legal proposition is interesting. Like, I do fall into that stereotype. But I think if you want to be successful really in the law generally, but definitely at Bennett Jones, I think you have to view your life— you have to view the law as a real important part of your life. It's not just a job, it's not just a career, it's not just a profession. It has to be part of who you are.

78Yeah, very honored.