The Alignment Doctrine, Tribal Mentorship, and Finding Your Legal Giftings with Norm Bowley

Welcome to Studying Law Around the World. I'm Claudio Claus. 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. I 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'm joined by Norm Bolli. He's a lawyer, educator, author, speaker, and a coach whose professional journey spans more than five decades. Norm began his career as a teacher before entering law, building a practice that took him from business and state law to appearances before the Supreme Court of Canada. Today, through his work at Zalabu Leadership and Communication, he helps professionals understand their unique strengths and connect with clients they are best suited to serve. Norm, thank you so much for joining me today. Great to be here. I'm enjoying this already, and I'm looking forward, I think we're going to have some fun. I love that. I'd love for you to introduce yourself and share a few key moments that shaped this path from teaching to law, and then into coaching and writing. I began teaching at age 17. Back in the day, of course, I was at the leading edge of the baby boomers, right? And they were desperate for teachers. They had vacant classrooms all over the province. So basically said, listen, if you got your grade 13, come on down to Ottawa, we'll give you a one-year crash course, free books, free tuition. Just have to find some couches to crash on, and we'll turn you loose. And so age 17, I was turned loose on an unsuspecting class of 35 kids, base Petawawa. First year was sheer hell. And then I figured out which way was up and had nine years of a lot of fun. I'm pretty sure I was a good teacher. My students, even from guys come up to me with gray beards and they say, Mr. Bowley, I was in your grade seven class. And I look at this old dude with wrinkles and everything and say, really? But anyway, and with them, we reminisce about the old times. So I had a great time teaching, but then I got, I got the itch, I guess. And my dear wife supported me in it. And so we cashed in, cashed in the pension, cashed in what investments we had, put a mortgage on the house and off to law school. And to my shock, I actually survived the Christmas exams. I was terrified in first term. I was surrounded by all these brilliant people. And, and I didn't think there's any way on earth I can keep up with them, but Christmas exams came and went and I actually survived and got some decent marks. I think I graduated with third in the class and won a couple of prizes. So one of the things that I teach is that you need to be modest in life, but not too modest. You gotta be fairly bright to get into law school and you have to be even brighter to get out of law school. So you're equipped or blessed, if you like, with a decent intellect and you've survived a lot, it's a tough go to get into and out of law school and the bar ads. So all of a sudden you're dumped into a profession where a lot of us don't survive and many of us don't thrive. And I think I spent 37 years asking that question. Why is it that all of these bright, capable, funny, witty, industrious, resourceful individuals are grinding along and many of them hate what they do. They're waiting for the weekends, they're waiting for the holidays, they're waiting to retire. What's wrong with this picture? That really is where my whole investigation about the alignment doctrine and the sense of giftings and what is, why is it that some of us thrive and some of us have a wonderful time and others just scrape by and that question stuck with me all the way through my practice and I wish I'd figured it out sooner. I was a guy that read all the books on law firm management. I didn't resent continuing education. I ate it up. I wanted to get all the subject matter expertise I could, but nobody ever sat me down and said, listen, Norm, there's stuff that you're really good at and there's stuff that you're awful at. So quit doing the awful stuff. And nobody ever sat me down and said that. And it's so obvious in retrospect, isn't it? You teach about the disalignment and the importance of noticing that. I'm here wondering, is there a difference between work that you're bad at doing and work that maybe you're just, you just don't enjoy doing, but you have to do? All of this work that might not be enjoyable, but maybe it's necessary. Is there a difference there? Really good question. Let me bring it very close to home. Let's go with cross examination and discoveries. So I never got good at cross. I got what I had to get. I knew what had to come out of it. And I would wrestle with a witness. We'd spend sweaty hours on the floor. I'd draw blood. It was, it was ugly. It was like murdering a pig. It was just terrible. But I got what I had to get. It also took me hours and hours and hours burning the midnight oil, prepping my questions, trying to figure out where the witness was going to go or what they might say and holy cow, it was hard work. And you can't bill for that, right? If you put, if you put 25 hours into prepping for a two hour exam, you can't bill for that. So it took me years and years and years to discover that I was never going to be a hotshot examiner. It just, it's not me. I had a classmate, a friend who I think he dragged through with C's, the C minuses and stuff. What he's all, he played, he was on the varsity football team. He was on the varsity basketball team. He was on the varsity hockey team. He coached, he taught ski lessons during the winter. He was hardly ever in class. He'd show up a week before exams. Now this guy is tall and handsome and everything, right? So he'd float in, he'd cozy up with the smartest girls in class. He'd get their notes. He'd go home and cram and he dragged through with C's. What his certificate looks exactly like mine. He came out of law school, set himself up in a little litigation boutique. And because he's an athlete, he knows where every play is going on. He knows who's going to move in on the puck and why. He just has this sense of the courtroom and of people and of the motion. And he was a killer examiner, right? He was born for that. I tried to examine people and I'm trying to logic my way through. And I'm trying to plod from A to B to C to D. And of course, a crafty witness is going from Z to M, Q to P. They're all over the place. And I'm standing there like a deer in the headlights saying, and it took me years and years and years and years to say, Norm, you've got to stop even trying. Get somebody else to do your exams for you. Right. And if I'd understood that in my first year, my 10th year, even 15th year. I'd be miles ahead, but I had this idea that, Hey, I've got a certificate on the wall, I should be able to do all this stuff. Well, that's nonsense. We're not all good at everything. On the other hand, I don't think I ever had pleadings that got knocked down or that weren't successfully structured. In other words, my pleadings were very strategic. They were very, excuse me, flexible. And they sort of anticipated where the whole thing would go. So my pleadings were excellent. My appeal briefs were excellent because I'm a writer. It's what I do. I won the regional prize when I was in grade eight. I won the, I won the Justice Leaf Award for family law in law school. So I write. I, it's just natural to me. So my pleadings were going to be excellent, but don't ask me to examine on them because it's just not going to work. Why did it, it shouldn't have taken me the better part of 25 or 30 years to figure out something as simple as that. But that's human nature. We are really good at advising others and we don't necessarily advise ourselves very well. Which is why I get into mentoring and how to find your gifting. You've got to recruit other people because we don't know ourselves as well as we should. I believe that many professionals might struggling between choosing what they perceive as stability and then what they might perceive as their purpose. So how do you think people can better recognize that when they are in the type of work that, that maybe it's right for them, more professionally aligned or according to their giftings as well? Really good and important. I think it's a really important question. And what there's nothing wrong with stability. When I was a kid, I had, I had friends whose dads worked at the Ford plant and they spent their entire life bolting their left rear wheel on Ford F-150s. They worked from Monday to Friday. They got off, they went fishing for the weekend, got their summer holidays. They're retired. They sat in the dock and caught catfish for 10, 15 years and then they died and they didn't have a bad life. Like stability is not a bad thing if you're okay with it. But I think most people that go to law school and get out of law school and start a career, we've got this crazy idea in our mind that somehow we're up to more than putting the wheel on a Ford F-150 that somehow or another, we're going to make a difference that we're going to get noticed that somebody's going to say, wow, that's a neat, that was really, that's cool what you just did. And we live for that. We're like athletes. We're like musicians, right? We like to do somethings a little different and be recognized for it. We also like to get paid well for it. And here's the funny thing, Claudia, that if you look at the greats in the practice of law, they love what they do. They also make a pile of money. So connect the dots. It's funny. That's why many of my generation ended up as generalists. And what they're guys that spent 35, 40 years practicing law solo above the Burger King, and they performed a useful and necessary service in society. But most of them never really lived up to the dreams that they had. They never realized the potential that they knew they had when they went to law school. When you go to law school, you intend to be more than a clerk that pushes papers. But many of us spent an entire decade essentially pushing papers. And to get back to your question about stability, let me take another sort of tangent here. There are really two ways of running a business or a profession. One is what we call commodity, and that's the McDonald's model, right? You sell lots of hamburgers and lots of coffee and lots of orange juice, make a margin on every one, but you sell millions of them. And so you can make good money running a McDonald's. Nothing wrong with it. And there are law practices that are like that. I mean, to look at some of them, residential real estate is one. Personal injury is not far from that model either, right? It's volume work. The other way of practicing is bespoke work or tailoring work. And that's the violin maker, or that's a high-end suit maker, or that's the rock star performer, the hockey player, whatever, you're doing stuff that's absolutely unique and you can make a lot of money at that, but I've also owned violin makers, made wonderful instruments that could barely feed the kids. So it's not a guarantee that you're going to make money as a, as a bespoke professional, but the likelihood is if you are a bespoke professional, really good at your trade, and you get to the other thing that we'll talk about is reputation and how to promote yourself, if you like, if you're good at it, that's where the joy is. And that's where the money is. And that's where every lawyer could be and should be. If you're, if you're in deep trouble, if the cops show up at my door and I suddenly realized I'm in deep trouble, I'm not going to phone, I'm not going to check, go online to see who's the cheapest guy, the criminal defense guy. I know the two or three guys that I'm going to call and I don't care how much they charge. I understand that in some of your writing and from what I've read, you emphasize the importance of mentoring and guidance, and you even mentioned about some of the mentoring and guidance you wish you had received earlier yourself. So I want to ask you, what does good mentorship look like in practice for young lawyers? What an important question. Let me tell you just a tribute, if you like, to some of the mentoring I got. Despite the fact that pickings were really slim, there were eight or 10 old bulls around the city of Ottawa where I practiced and they were just a grand old men and they, I mean, it was a very male based practice in 81, early eighties, but they, you could call up Larry Royne or Brian Trinagar or whoever and say, listen, I've got myself a really ugly file here. I don't know which way is up. I think I'm getting bamboozled on it. Can I get a, can you give me some time? And Larry used to say, you know what? Pick up a bag full of McDonald's at five 36 o'clock, show up in my office and let's go. And so you would, you'd show up with a bag of McDonald's and some bad coffee. And the next thing would be midnight and you'd walk over there confident and having a sense that, okay, now I know where this is going to know what it's all about. I know the strategy. And that was wonderful mentoring. And it happened a lot. You had to ask for it. It happened a lot. What you didn't get, I think ideal mentoring is when you've got those guys down the hall in your office. One of my law school profs came to me, was in a bit of a, got into an investment and I helped get him out of it. But so I was at his office and he was at that time, he was practicing the Dowlings and Gordon Henderson was probably 85, 88 at that point. So I'm sitting with my client and also colleague in his office and we're banging through his file. There's a little tap on the door and this lovely old white head came around the corner and said, boys, can I, can I join you? And he came in and Gordon Henderson sat at the end of the desk, like a observer and listened to us. And then he said, great, you guys, you're right on, you nailed it. Well, this is well under control. And if you remember Columbo, the old movie, Columbo, the detective, anyway, he stopped at the door just as he was about to leave and he turned around. He said, and by the way, do you think the case of such and such and so-and-so might be relevant? And then he walked away and my client and I looked at each other and said, like it was, it was like a silver bullet case, right? But that's what real mentoring is all about. Grand old men that sort of hang around and don't push, don't lecture, listen, and encourage. And then they drop that little nugget, wander off to the next room. Isn't that beautiful? Absolutely. I think it's the profession that we strive to be. So that's my idea of mentoring is most law firms are a business model, like every other business, like General Motors, like Amazon, like any other business, basically they exist for the welfare of the shareholders and senior management. So they're there for, and the rest of us are grunts that basically are there chained to the, chained to the oars and making it work for them. That's the way it works. And as long as you crack the nut every month and make your billables, you won't get thrown out, but they don't really care about you. They're, you're just there as a unit of labor. If AI can replace all or part of what you do, then that's just too bad for you. If they can figure out a way to get more students and less juniors, they'll do that. It's really about the bottom line for senior management and the owners. And now that law firms are incorporating, I think we're just going to see more and more of that. And that's a model of many, maybe even most law firms. So that until you become quite senior, you really don't matter as a person and you're replaceable. But I don't know if it's a third or a quarter or maybe only 20 of law firms, but there are the models out there, what I would call the tribal models that understand that they are a community, that they are, if you like a tribe, that they are almost an organism. And so the senior ones have status because they've earned it. They earn, they have earned respect, but they also give back in a big way. Seneca, the Stoic philosopher Seneca said, we don't get to choose our parents, but we can choose whose children we wish to be. And I think mentoring in a sense is all about that, that I wish I'd understood that principle. I would have looked for the elders whose child I wanted to be, if you like. So I think the really professional law firms, the good ones, the magic ones, are the places where the seniors in the firm see themselves as almost parental in their roles. Not in a, not in a condescending sense or in a despotic sense, but they understand their responsibility to nurture and to mentor and to give opportunity and a challenge and sometimes to kick ass and sometimes to throw them out of the tribe. But mostly to, in their juniors, someone who's going to be better than they ever were, and it goes from generation to generation. And we know the firms that are like that. They're, they also happen to be the firms where you see most of the academic papers coming from, where you see most of the people sitting on the, on the CLE panels, it's no accident. That makes sense. Is there a piece of advice that you'd give to young lawyers, law students who are really trying to build a meaningful career and maybe at the same time, figuring out their own strengths, the direction they want to go and take their That's such an important question. There's also one I wish I'd been asked about 40 years ago. I think that the key is to really know who you are and what your giftings are. And there's what, what's the stuff that you do better than anyone else. And partly that yourself, but internally, but most of us don't. Most of us, those biases that, what is it? 60 or 80% of all drivers think you're among the best drivers. It's statistically impossible, of course, right? 80% of all people think that they sing better than others. Again, statistically impossible. We just don't know ourselves really well, but you've got a pretty good idea of stuff that you are good at. So I guess one of the first things I would say is this, ditch the stuff that you're mediocre at. And my personal example is I, I got a guitar when I was 14 years of age. When I was in my mid thirties, I was sitting down one day, practicing the same old stuff again, and I realized that I really wasn't any better in 20 years. And I was, when I was 14, I just, I have no sense of rhythm and I have no sense of melody. So what was I doing? Practicing something that I was never going to be even mediocre at. So I took the damn thing, put it in its case, shoved it under my bed. And it's probably still there. And I use that as an example. I think as lawyers, we need to say what there's stuff that I do that at best I'm mediocre. So you quit doing it. So one of the best ways to find your giftings is to stop fritzing around with stuff that you're no good at, or you're only average at. Like if you're just the same as all the other kids, quit doing it. And what's left on your plate is your first clue as to what you're really excellent at. The second thing that I try to teach is that our peers and our spouses and our parents and our kids actually will be frank with us about our giftings. They'll also be frank about your non-giftings, but that's good too. But despite the fact that I, throughout my life, I've won prizes for writing. I've published a lot of stuff. It just never occurred to me that I'm a better writer than most people. I figure everybody does this, right? I have friends who are musicians and I'll say to them, wow, that, how do you do that stuff? And they sort of look at you blankly and say, well, anybody can do this, no. So we need to ask, I think those of us around, or those who know us well, because they probably are going to be more honest and they'll see stuff that we don't write. We think, we think that we're very ordinary. Well, no, we're not in a lot of our giftings. We're not ordinary. And we need other people to point that out to us. What about the Briggs Meyers and all that sort of thing? Frankly, I think all that stuff's a waste of time. Waste of time, waste of money. They're power games. There is one set of aptitude testing, which is fairly useful. It's a one that was done by the Reuters organization, but even the problem there is that it's so granular and so heavy, you almost need a Sherpa to guide you through it. And so I keep it simpler and say, okay, start with yourself and clear the deck of all the crap that you're mediocre or worse, and that will, at least you're spending your time in the better half of your life and keep on doing that. Keep on shedding the stuff that is less interesting because you're, you, you're going to know your gifting. So when you're into something and time stands still and you suddenly realized, holy crap, it's 8 30 at night. I'm starved. I didn't realize where the time went, right? You're in your giftings in those zones. When you take stuff home in the weekend and tell your wife and kids not to bother you because you're in the middle of this, because you're having so much fun, you're in your giftings. And when you come out of the courtroom or when you're finished with a reorg or something like that, and your client says to you, but I've never, I've never felt as cared for before as right now. And what a rush that is. So I think we sort of gravitate toward our giftings if we're, if we're alert and we're sort of keep a radar up for it and we let other people around us tell us and you quit doing the dumb stuff and you'll gradually funnel down more and more and more until you realize, holy crap, there's nothing in the world I'd rather be doing. And that's not a bad place to be. You just said something very interesting about going and talking with those around you, grabbing that additional awareness, that community awareness about who you are and then also noticing what kind of work you enjoy and all of that. But let's imagine I just started at a new law firm for quite a while. I won't have much of a choice of what kind of work I do, liking it or not. Is there, is there maybe an actionable tip that you have for someone who is trying to trying to figure that out and try to niche down as time goes by? Good question. You're not going to see change overnight. You're not going, you're not going to suddenly wake up one morning. It's not like Hollywood, right? But I think what happens, and I've seen this with colleagues that I remember one particular colleague used to get, get into the office every morning at six o'clock and he would drill down into the finer points of his particular area of law. He was a construction litigation specialist and he spent from about six o'clock to eight o'clock every morning, basically learning to trade and developing his expertise, making summaries, making grids, making charts, making flow charts, it probably took three or four years before he was as good as anybody in Ottawa and he was known as it. He was, it wasn't long before he was going toe-to-toe with the old bulls and winning. Well, guess what? That's, but he paid his dues in terms of sacrificing a chunk of every day, every day and disciplining himself. Just very quickly thought of the, what I call giftings are the, it's this, it's your innate or your inborn capacities, which have been shaped by your training and honed by your experience. So how do you get there? You figure out what you're kind of good at and you train and you train and you train and you train and you seek the experience and that all builds your gifting. I really appreciate you making the time to come on the show today, Norm, and share these incredible pieces of advice and wisdom with us. I've had so much fun and I love your questions and I love how you do this. So keep up the good work, my friend. Thank you. And thank you all for tuning in and listening to today's episode. We'll see you on the next one.