The Business of Law, The Art of Saying No and Why Junior Lawyers Burn Out with Darren Smith

Welcome to Studying Law Around the World. I'm Claudio Klaus. In each episode, I talk with lawyers, law students, and professors from different parts of the world to talk about legal education, careers, and what the profession looks like in real life. We talk about the hard parts, the surprises, and the decisions that shaped their paths. Whether you're planning to study abroad, thinking about working in another legal system, or just curious about how law works around the world, this podcast is for you. Today I have the privilege of interviewing Darren Smith. He was called to the bar in 2004, worked in private practice for 15 years focusing on civil and commercial litigation before joining Imon Publishing. Theron has acted as an article in principle and mentor to many juniors lawyers and has served as a director on the board of several not-for-profit corporations. For the past six years, Darren has been helping, developing and running imand Exam prep. Thank you so much for making the time to to be here in the podcast today, Darren. Thank you very much for inviting. Me absolutely. It's your to start episode. Even though I did a, a very short introduction, I'd love to hear a little bit about your story and, and maybe even how did you decide to go to law school? How did you get into, you know, litigation? Was that what you wanted to do all throughout your law school experience? Tell us a little more about yourself. OK, Well into law through a very untraditional way, I found myself at one point in time after having gone through and got myself a design and illustration background. I enjoyed science and so I wanted to become a medical illustrator. In fact, the school did a science degree at the University of Toronto in my program involved me in a lot of forensics. So we were the first accredited forensic program in Canada. And so I got really interested in criminal law. And at that time the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was happening. And Madam Justice, lose our Bureau, prior to being appointed Supreme Court, was ahead of the ICT Y. And I dreamt about going to law school, getting a law degree, taking my forensics background and working as one of the lawyers at the ICT Y. And so eventually through that, I found myself in law school and on my journey to what I'm doing now. So everything was very organic and nothing was planned and I just kind of found my way through. Amazing. Can you can you walk us through a little more about how specifically you got into the area that you worked on for for most of the time on civil and commercial litigation? Was it, you know, love at first sight? Did you really grow to like the area the more you stay that or were, you know, ultra law school really wanting to do it? Again, another funny story where I just let things happen organically. I got into law school, I again, wanting to do criminal law from the perspective that I said I, I knew that I wanted to be in the courtroom and I did first year and I really did not enjoy criminal law. So I spent time kind of exploring in my second and third year in a number of different areas. Didn't particularly like business law. It wasn't necessarily my thing. Found that I did like litigation though, So torts and all that fun stuff. I thought I'd yeah, do that. And then I found myself at a boutique litigation firm doing my articling, and they did a lot of commercial litigation, lot of real estate work for developers and worked for a lot of corporations. And that's where I kind of discovered how incredibly interesting commercial litigation can be as opposed to some of the other more traditional litigation areas like personal injury or just traditional torts. I learned that I had to think on a different level. Every case was very different. The facts were different every time. The law was slightly different and it really engaged my brain. And because of that, I found that I very quickly which just started soaking up everything I could about business law, contracts, everything, litigation and I, I ended up making a reasonable career. Hey, I'm Tony Albert here with another LinkedIn tip from Contender, the LinkedIn ghostwriting agency for lawyers are questioned today. What are the easiest things I can do to improve my LinkedIn profile? So there are a few things you can do very quickly to make it a real difference. First one, your headshot. If your headshot is a few years out of date or just not high quality, the camera on your phone is most likely good enough to get you a really sharp picture. That is also current update that that's nice and easy. The banner, if you have that Gray background or just like a sort of generic design or just an image and you can update that rule quickly where even something with the logo of your company, maybe a different photo of you and just a quick align a sentence about what you do or who you help and how. Bonus for branding, colours can make a big difference. The third you're about section, it's a write it from the first person. Start with a statement about what drives you, what motivates you, and instead of making it based on your resume, see if you can't tell a little story about how you make people's lives better and how you might be able to help them and how to contact you. Do those three things, you're out of the game. I'm mostly curious. You ask a little more about your transition. You know, I found it very interesting that you started with design and then you end up at a publishing company. So it sounds like your whole career had some interesting threads looking now, you know, kind of backwards at this moment in history. But I wanted to ask you, you know, what motivated you then to transition from private practice after 15 years litigating into illegal public publishing in legal education? Well, I, I found that, you know, as I was continuing on with practice, I was in a situation where a couple of times I was joining friends, rebuilding litigation practices and, and departments, a lot of work, a lot of stress. It's started to wear on the a bit in terms of my health. I wasn't enjoying it like I used to, but the one thing that I always did enjoy was the the teaching aspects of the articling and mentoring. When it got to the point where for my own self, I wasn't enjoying it going into going into the firm every day was more of a chore than something I was excited about doing. I had to, or at least I told myself I had to really kind of rethink things. And so I did a little bit of soul searching, took some time to do that and look to see what it was that I really, truly loved. And I found myself kind of going back to my more artistic side. One of the things that I did in undergrad is part of my science degree was a lot of professional writing. And so I was a big proponent when I practiced and written advocacy. I think that's a skill that is underutilized and that everybody should learn to master grow. Sort of thinking about how much I loved writing and the law and working with young lawyers. I luckily found myself connected to some people at Emond Publishing and I got an invitation to make legal education a new career for myself and I took the plunge at decided it was worth the risk and I haven't looked back since. I love every single day of OF. This job amazing. Well, thank you so much for for sharing that. You did mention that one of your passions was the teaching, the mentoring aspect of it. And, and I saw in your bio and, and mentioned it when I was first introducing you that you've mentored many junior lawyers. I was thankful to hear a little bit of your advice as well. But why didn't you ask you? You know, looking at all your experience and continuing chatting with these students today, what do you think that new lawyers struggle with the most nowadays? Not anything from a substantive perspective, but my experience in dealing with a lot of candidates and speaking to people who are preparing to write licensing exams, I get a mix of a number of things. So there's often, I think, a bit of overconfidence where people think that they don't need to work as hard as they really do. And it's not just with respect to licensing, it's also when it comes to articling and practice overall. I don't think people are fully prepared for the amount of work that really needs to go into it. And that's also something that I experienced with articling students a lot of times. And I'm not saying this is the case for everyone, but it's a common thing that I've run into. And even now when I speak with students and young lawyers are looking for answers to be handed to them. They don't want to work, they don't want to do the digging, they don't want to figure things out on their own. But there's so much value in doing that. When I worked with articling students, my I used the Socratic method or Socratic approach because my area was in litigation. We lived by the rules of Civil Procedure. So when an article student would come to me saying, I don't know what to do, tell me. The first thing I would say is get your rules. What are we doing? I'd ask the questions, what are, what are we in the process of doing? They respond, I'd say, So what do the rules say? Like make them read the rule and I'd work through things with them. And so if you put in the work and and make the effort to find the answers, even if it's through being prodded as I would, you learn things, you retain things, you remember them going forward, and that makes you better and stronger. So again, it's one having some humility and understand that you don't know everything coming out of law school, that you have to put in the time and effort and that by doing it, it's going to make you that much better, that much stronger and that much more respected. Amazing. And I'm assuming that applies very much to the licensing exams. It applies to, to all of that like educational aspect of it, right. So you just mentioned about taking the time putting in the work. It sounds very much like what I hear when you know, you're doing StarCraft Shepley, right, Do do a lot of hours of, of seating and listening and studying. So I wanted to ask you, you know, in, in your experience now six years working with legal education, licensing exams and all of that, what are some of the skills or habits that have made the difference for candidates as you've kind of seemed and growing and, and going through these processes? So there are a number of different things and I think both substantive and in terms of other technical things that that are skills that help in terms of success. So understanding and looking for different ways to learn. If you struggle with content, think about other ways. What if a try to take the information that's contained in the LSO study materials off the page? Think about it in my head, trying to work through it. And as I'm doing that, maybe what I'm doing is I'm drawing charts, I'm preparing a flow chart, I'm putting together a mind map, I'm laying things out in a visual format. So opening up your your mind to different approaches of displaying information and understanding the information is really important and I think makes a huge difference because similar to the Socratic method that I would use with articling students, as you walk through it and you put it down on paper, you're forcing yourself to think through it, you retain it better, you understand it better. Similarly, when I was dealing with clients who are new to the litigation process and they didn't understand anything, I would draw out a timeline and I would indicate roughly when things would happen and what steps were going to happen, what was involved. And so as I would draw it visually and break it down, clients would understand it even if they had never contemplated anything from a legal perspective in their life. And if you do that with yourself, you can understand and work through the most complicated of the substantial materials. The other things too are things like discipline. Having discipline is very important and that can be displayed in something as simple as creating a study schedule and sticking to it. So taking the calendar, if it's on your computer, if it's in, you know, in a book or anything like that, figuring out what's my plan of attack, knowing when the exam is working backwards to wherever you are in time and saying, I'm going to cover this material in this way on these days, including any resources that you doing and sticking to it. Hold yourself accountable for doing all of that. It it creates a steady, organized plan. It helps you ensure that you're covering everything so there are no gaps, you're not missing something accidentally and and it ensures that you as best prepared as you can within the timeline you've got other things like practice exam. It's unbelievable how effective and important practice exams are, are for it not for the purposes of testing your memory because nobody is going to remember all that material for the exam. But what it does is it allows you to practice other techniques that are super important for time management is a massively important tool and technique for you to be able to employ. It's amazing how easily you can lose control of the time and it just snowballs after that. Other things like answering the questions using certain techniques, so eliminating the obvious, if you're able to eliminate answers that obviously wrong using clues from the questions, then it helps you spend your time more effectively on those potential answers. And that again requires discipline and practice through doing things like practice exams. So yeah, it it's again the a substantive approach and a technical approach as well that requires discipline and hard work. Opinions, you know, on the row of exempt preparation, specifically in, in legal education. And if you see this role changing a little bit, both for the examination and the preparation. When you look at, you know, the experience you've had for the last six years, has this been changing a little bit in Canada? Has this, you know, kind of stayed the same throughout this this time that you've been kind of following these very closely? I don't know if you were licensed back in the time where you had bar ads or what was the the licensing method back or when you did it, but I'd love to hear your comments on on all of this. He was fortunate enough that I did go through the bar ads process and it was, I actually thought it was pretty good. I like the approach and spending time in the classroom learning about that particular subject, being taught by an expert in addition to working through the materials and then writing exams on it. And obviously the examination of the licensing process has changed since then, but I think that what exam preparation does now is important because I think the one thing that people don't understand about this licensing process, and it's unique in this because not a lot of people discuss this, but I look at it from the perspective of the mandate of the Law Society. And again, there's appreciate that you want exam prep is very Ontario focused. Ontario is the only province in Canada or territory that has this particular type of licensing exam where it's strictly multiple choice based upon different fact based questions or scenario based questions. And I think that despite the opinions about standardized tests and how they are not equitable and all that, it's important because if you consider the mandate of the Law Society, its mandate is to protect the public. It's not to protect the lawyers. And that has to be understood in the sense that what the licensing process does is it allows candidates to demonstrate a minimum understanding or minimum level of competencies. And the goal behind this is to ensure that brand new licensees on the very first day of practice after being called, when the training wheels are off, you're no longer an articling student need. This is for real. You can sit down with clients, whether you're working for a firm or you're on your own, so you can be handed a file and you can actually look at it, understand what's important, what's not, what the law really is, how it really applies, and provide proper legal advice. And that's the thing that that really kind of gets missed in all the discussions. It's about being able to provide proper legal advice. And so a lot of times as a new lawyer, you might be sitting with clients discussing what they think is important and all the facts in their matter that they think is important and what their rates of remedies are. But in fact, you need to be able to sift through all that stuff and say, you know, really it's using its acts. It's really wide. And you know, yeah, you maybe you've been wronged in this way and you've got a case here, but you're real real, you know, remedy or the real action lies from this piece of legislation. And so that's what the law societies examination, the licensing examination tries to get the lawyers to the point of it's about application of the law. It's about critical thinking processes. That's why the exam isn't straight recall. Anybody can go look through the materials or memorize many facts and figures as possible, but what's really required for success in the examined and the way it's set up in Ontario is it requires you to take that knowledge and apply it to specific facts or scenario in a way that applies that knowledge and information that you're getting from the materials, from law school and from any other things that you're using to study and demonstrate the Law Society that yeah, I understand it, I can apply it and I can provide proper legal advice on day. One amazing. Thank you so much for for sharing that there. And I'm curious to hear a little more about, you know, your, your decision making throughout your career. You mentioned you, you've been at different firms and and you did this work for quite a while, mentored a lot of people. So if I may ask, you know, what are some of the decisions or experiences that you've gone through that really had the biggest impact on your professional growth looking back as you kind of look at this career, you know, over 20 years out in in the market? That is, it's a challenging question because there are a lot of experiences that I've been through, some amazing and and some not very good. But I think probably one of the biggest lessons that I learned, and I had to learn this very quickly, and I think all young lawyers are going to have to learn this as well. Is that a loss of business? We or most of us spend our time in law school thinking that we are going to change the world, that we're going to fight the good fight. And in many cases we do get to do that. But most of us be realistic, end up working for firms or for ourselves and quickly need to understand that what we as lawyers do is provide a service. And that service is part of a business. And so we need to understand that very quickly. And a lot of things that will happen in your time practicing law will be shaped around the fact that it's a business. Sometimes you will butt heads with people and a lot of the reason for that is because of the nature of it being a business. Some people you know, will have issues. Maybe you're having a better year than them. Maybe you're getting more clients or maybe they wish they had got that client instead of you. Maybe they wish that they were brought on that file because they know it's going to be big and you're going to be able to bill and, and meet your quotas, all those kinds of things. And so people may not change their attitudes about you. And it's really interesting. I, I can't speak for all of Ontario, but my experience has been in Toronto. Toronto is very much driven by the business. And so in addition to having to learn about the law and all the other things that you do, especially as a litigator, having to learn how to not only just the law and how to do written advocacy effectively, but also oral advocacy and all the court etiquettes and all of that stuff. But you're also having to learn all the all the etiquettes of firm life. You're having to do the client development. You're having to worry about what the guy in the next office might be saying to try and get work instead of you, all those little things. And this isn't being said to to throw shade on practice on the practice of law. But if you're asking what is it that I had to learn the most and what is it that drove a lot of my decisions about where I went and what I did and all of that. I think a lot of it again, was, you know, the Nexus was the business of of the law where people, you know, there were situations where partners didn't want to spend the money to provide resources because it cost money. And you're working a lot harder, a lot later, you know, extra days, all those kinds of things just to do the things that, you know, some help would make it easier for you. And then that adds up, or at least it did with me. And it gets to a point where now that starts to affect your health and your ability to do good quality work or you're retired. And so you're not thinking the way you should be. Fantastic. Well, I really appreciate you sharing that this is one of the, as the main points that you can't really, it's something that school doesn't teach and that it really is, you know, shaped by life, shaped by experience and, and shaped by the different environments you've been on, right? It's, it's easy to in a way, be really naive being in, in different environments, right? It, it, it was much of my experience. I've actually had this, one of my supervisors in a, in a job that I had about like 5-5, six years ago that specifically told me that he thought it was a little being a little bit too naive dealing with my colleagues and all of that. And, and it's interesting, right, because when you're trying to leave by a set of values and all of that, then at at what point, you know, it makes sense to you, you know, maybe get more business and, and make things a little bit different, but not living true to those values as well. So I can see how all of it can play it very different role and, and how each experience is just so unique and so personal to, to one person, right? I can see how two articles students can go to the same firm and have completely different experiences. So it's it's always fun to see like how much do you really control and then how much it's not really up to you, but. So absolutely. And I think you said something very important, and that is that these are the kinds of things that law school doesn't teach us, and it doesn't prepare us for the law. Law school prepares us for the theory. They teach us the substantive part of law. They don't necessarily get us ready for the realities of practice. And that's probably the biggest culture shock coming out of school, getting licensed and going into the profession. Article will start to give you that sense and you'll see different experiences and each person will have a different a different experience based upon who they work with, what they work on, and that individual as well. And so like, I don't know if it's like yourself, but certainly with me in of alignment with the comment that you said somebody made to you, I was naive about it. And I think a large portion of people are just as naive. We just don't talk about that. We don't open up about it. We won't say things like that because it's not part of the culture. Fantastic church. To wrap up today's episode, I wanted to hear what kind of advice would you give to your younger self, maybe if you were, you know, starting a legal career again today? Probably the same advice I give to everyone, and I do this because I say this because I want people to benefit from the lessons that I learned. So first thing I would say to myself is be a sponge. Soak up as much as you can. The word is much as you can. And it's not just from being involved in a file or learning, doing a particular bit of research or anything like that, but it's also related to the culture within the firm within within the industry, right? Like RAW is there are a lot of lawyers, but it's a very small community. And so there's a lot to learn, not just about the practice, but about the culture, the etiquettes, all those things, how you work with others, understanding how important your reputation is. And that starts right from day one. The, the other thing, and I, I've said this to a few people that, you know, I try to and care to give good advice to is learn how to say no. And that's something that I didn't necessarily do from the, from the beginning. And it's hard when you're an articling student or a young lawyer, you know, you call or within your first couple of years, because the idea or the thinking is we never want to say no because we never know when we're going to get asked again. And we need the work and we're always looking to be accepted and we want to get hired back and all those other reasons. But you can say no for the reason that or should say no for the reason that. If you don't, it quickly becomes overwhelming the quality of your work as you're trying to juggle so many things and keep so many balls in the air slips that makes you look bad. You don't necessarily end up hitting your deadlines. And when you do hand things in, it's maybe incomplete or you've missed things because your attention is spread too thin. What works is trying to manage that and you can manage expectations. So in a way of saying no, the way to for a young lawyer or an article student to approach this is they say yes, I'd love to do that for you. Thank you for asking me about it. I'm happy to do it, but I'm working on something right now for this lawyer and that lawyer and I've got another project and these are one they'll do. I can do this for you, but I can't do it until whatever time and then let that goes is it manages the expectations and it gives the lawyer who is providing you work or the opportunity to decide for themselves whether or not they still want you to do it. If it's not time sensitive. And you'd be amazed even without seeing it to you, but you'd be amazed at how much that is respected because it shows maturity and it shows incredible professionalism. And it also saves you. You're not as overwhelmed, you're not as stressed, and you're doing better quality work and you're able to meet your obligations, which is so important, particularly when you're just starting. Out I really appreciate you making the time to be in the podcast today there and thank you so much for listening to today's episode as well. Thank you so so much.