Life as a Summer Student (Part 1)
Stories about working with us as a law student
Next week marks my 10 year anniversary as a lawyer, which is sort of hard to believe.
It also means that it’s been 13 years since my first time as a summer student at a law firm.
For our upcoming series of posts (including this one), we’ll be featuring the perspectives of some of our firm’s summer students who are working with us this summer.
Consider it a throwback to times of yesteryear, before you became jaded and realized how f*cked up the legal profession is. Or the days when you eagerly said ‘I’d be happy to help’ when an associate asked you to work on a file (and you actually meant it).
In any event, I hope you enjoy Part 1 of this Series, which is written by Marin Shahaj, who recently completed 1L at Western Law. On the side, he’s the owner of West Atlantic Moving, which is allegedly ‘Toronto’s favourite local moving company’. At least law school taught him what puffery is.
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Documenting everything
by Marin Shahaj
As a student I mainly want two things from a firm: to figure out what area I’d like to practice and to have opportunities to learn.
Renno provided both on day one before I spoke to any of our associates or senior lawyers. This is because everything is documented for all of our staff to see.
Other firms might have a rotational system where students are immersed in various groups, or they might require students to reach out to specific lawyers to gain experience in a set practice area.
While we do give our students the choice to pick their practice groups and seamlessly transition between them, this wasn’t necessary for me to achieve the two desires I listed above.
Instead, everything about any practice group is in our databases.
I really wanted to work in the SMB group to try my hand at M&A’s this summer.
Good thing my senior literally documents everything (within reason), providing a step by tutorial on how these deals are done—from the first onboarding email to a client all the way to months after closing. Even if I had directly done M&A work side by side with my senior I wouldn’t have possibly learned this much. Moreover, he wouldn’t have had time to explain this process so in-depth to me, and I likely wouldn’t have understood it as well.
Renno does this for each of our groups, and we strive to provide such knowledge for all work that is done. Just yesterday, I created a ‘playbook’ on how to change an Alberta corporation’s information through their registry. It took me an hour to figure everything out and write it down. Now that it’s documented, it will take everyone else 15 minutes (another benefit of documentation: saving time). I’ve done this several times for other groups/tasks as well, and so do all our staff—from students to partners.
Whether it’s instructions on how to facilitate a complex, year-long M&A deal or a simple change of corporate address, we document it.
Many times, I’ve been unsure how to do something, and I simply search for it in our general system (just like I would on Google), and I get the answer. I can immerse myself in as many groups as I want and shadow as many lawyers as I want without even making direct contact with anyone. It’s all there for me, with rigorous instructions and documented applications of these instructions.