Society: Articling Horror Stories
Originally published in Precedent. Read the full text here.
it had been two months since Erica graduated from Osgoode Hall, and she still hadn’t found an articling position. It was July of 2017.
On one hand, she wasn’t too disappointed: she expected her job search to be difficult. She’d wanted to work at a firm that specialized in both environmental and Aboriginal law, but she knew that such firms have limited resources to hire students. Erica had received two job offers, but the positions were unpaid. “I had to turn them down,” she says. “I couldn’t afford to work for free.”
Then Erica met a sole practitioner who had a business and real-estate practice in the GTA. (Erica’s real name, and the names of other former articling students, have been withheld. We have marked their names with an asterisk.) His office was a long commute from her home, where she lived with her parents. But she saw the job as a potential learning opportunity, and the $30,000 salary was looking pretty sweet.
The lawyer seemed engaged and thoughtful. When Erica told him that her father was a general contractor, he said that her exposure to that industry would make her an asset to his real-estate practice. And when she mentioned her Mi’kmaw heritage, he expressed an interest in learning more about Indigenous peoples in Canada. It felt like a great fit, so she took the job.
That turned out to be a terrible mistake. Once she started work, her new boss treated her as if she wasn’t there. They barely spoke, and when he gave her tasks, they were of the most menial kind. He’d tell her to file papers or answer the phones.
Erica confronted her boss. It wasn’t that she objected to handling occasional secretarial tasks; it was that she wanted experience in the practice of law. Her principal was surprised by this argument. He pushed his glasses to the tip of his nose and looked at her above the frames. “You need to take the firm as it is,” he said.
Their relationship never improved. Erica asked, repeatedly, that he assign her meaningful work. He obliged, grudgingly, but his attempts were half-hearted at best. He’d ask her to write a closing report on a real-estate transaction she knew nothing about, or he’d tell her to draft a will for a client but then refuse to let her sit in on the consult meeting. If she made mistakes, he’d yell, swear or call her incompetent.
His temper could be terrifying. A month into the job, he handed her a reference number and told her to retrieve the corresponding file from the storage room.
When she produced the wrong document, he went into a rage. “He stormed to my desk and started flaring pages all over the place looking for the piece of paper he’d given me,” recalls Erica. Eventually, he found it, revealing that the mistake had been his all along: he’d written down the incorrect number. Still, he insisted that she was at fault for failing to catch his error.
Her boss’s law clerk didn’t behave much better. During one interaction over a mistake on a file, Erica spoke up to defend herself. The clerk straightened her back and lowered her voice. “I suppose you want to be a know-it-all little bitch,” she said.
Around this point, Erica began phoning the Law Society of Ontario on a weekly basis. They assigned her a caseworker, who discouraged her from lodging a formal complaint that could further jeopardize her already strained relationship with her boss. Erica wondered if her best course of action was to put up with the mistreatment. The behaviour seemed wildly inappropriate, but she had no benchmark to measure it against. And anyway, she thought, wasn’t articling supposed to be tough?
At other times, she contemplated quitting. But she feared the consequences. Would she find a better position? And if she got an interview, she’d have to explain why she was walking out on her current job, while, at the same time, making a case that she’s a trustworthy employee, the kind who sticks around.
This dilemma reveals the central flaw in the entire articling system. When students are in the middle of an awful articling position, they aren’t even lawyers yet. So they can’t simply quit and find another job (which is hard enough on its own). The power that articling principals have over their students allows them to behave terribly with impunity. That harsh reality raises an obvious question: Is it time for the articling system to die?
This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.