It Was 30 Years Ago Today

This month’s column is aimed at Gen-Xers like me and the Boomers who preceded us in the legal profession. Readers in your 20s, 30s, and 40s – I’ll catch you next time out.

Preparing a talk the other day, I realized with a mild shock that last month, I celebrated the 30th anniversary of my call to the bar. Although maybe “celebrated” isn’t quite the right word – “commemorated”? “Glossed over with mild discomfort?” “How the hell did that happen?” 1995 was also the last year in which I engaged in anything like the practice of law, so I suppose I can place a 30-year capstone on that brief chapter in my life, too.

Casting my mind back today, I’m struck by how so many aspects of the legal sector were the same then as they are today — as well as by the startling nature of the exceptions.

There were about 65,000 lawyers in Canada in 1995. McCarthy Tétrault was the largest law firm in the country, although lawyer headcount likely topped out in the 350 range. Their competitors included a number of firms across the country whose names are now either distant memories or preserved in the amber of the national-firm merger trend of the late 1990s:

Toronto: Borden & Elliot, Fraser & Beatty, Fasken Campbell Godfrey, Lang Michener, Goodman & Carr

Montreal: Heenan Blaikie, Ogilvy Renault, Martineau Walker, McMaster Gervais

Calgary: MacLeod Dixon, Milner Casgrain, Howard Mackie

Vancouver: Russell & DuMoulin, Bull Houser Tupper, Davis & Co.

If you worked in any of those firms, you conducted your business by mail, phone, telex, and fax. I remember when email first began rolling out at Blake Cassels when I articled there in 1993-94, although it was still reserved for intra-firm communication. There were no websites. The first Blackberrys from Research In Motion were four years away.

If you wanted information about a statute or a court decision, you walked down to either your own firm’s library or the one at the nearest courthouse. You’d be searching bound print volumes of case reports and published statutes and regulations, along with looseleaf updates. Maybe you were among the bleeding edge using CD-ROMs for legal research, or if you were really well off, you had access to QuickLaw.

Or maybe you were leafing through the latest copy of The Lawyers Weekly and reading the five pages of case headnotes at the back. If you saw a case that interested you, you would phone Butterworths Canada and ask them to fax or (if it was urgent) overnight courier you a copy of the decision. That was back when we still had faxes, not to mention The Lawyers Weekly.

You were also very likely male, and almost certainly white. Diversity is hardly a glowing feature of the legal profession in 2025, but 30 years ago in Canada, barely 30% of lawyers were women, and visible minorities were vanishingly rare in most law firms. It wasn’t going to get better in a big hurry, either – looking at the photos of my law school graduating class of 1993, 116 of the 143 graduates were white.

And as for LGBTQ lawyers, well, we were still three years away from Vriend v. Alberta reading in “sexual orientation” as a protected category under s. 15 of the Charter. The world back then was a lot different, and a lot less tolerant, than it is today.

But plus ça change, right? Lawyers are still mostly billing their clients by the hour today, and assessing their juniors by how many such hours they crank out. We still work too hard for our own well-being, courts are still backlogged with long-delayed cases, and most people still struggle to hire a lawyer — although you would have shocked any 1995 practitioner with the statistics on self-representation in Canadian courts today.

The future, as always, remains a work in progress, and we’re still called into the job every day. How about you, fellow veterans? What do you remember about the legal profession in 1995, good, bad, or indifferent? Let’s hear your stories below.