What is one thing you love and one thing you hate about your area of practice?

[BrotherShamus]

This is open to all practitioners. I am looking to learn more about different areas of practice.

[Hegdis]

Criminal law

 

It’s never boring. No matter what you’re dealing with it’s always a human story. You see unexpected grace along with unimaginable pain; you learn a lot about how people behave. This is not a job where you’re pushing paperwork around for weeks or months without ever seeing another human being. 
 

But it can wear on you. Insurmountable problems you can’t fix - you just have this brief window to do anything and half the time you already know it won’t even begin to address the real problem. You have to learn to compartmentalize and set healthy boundaries. 

[Hitman9172]

Commercial real estate and lending law.

You learn a lot of transferable skills on the business side - you become a trusted advisor for clients, you occasionally receive offers to co-invest with people in your network, you become a key part of that network alongside clients, accountants, brokers, etc. This probably goes for most transactional lawyer roles to some extent.

You have a lot of last-minute work to do because you're usually one of the last links in the chain that's needed to get a deal closed (the clients and brokers start working on  the deal well before you do, and you often get roped in at the end to close things on a rush basis). 

[Lawstudents20202020]

Litigation generally, I love problem solving and finding creative ways to resolve disputes.

Unreasonable counsel or ones that aren't willing to put in the work drive me insane. It really doesn't bother me if it's someone's client being unreasonable, it's their lives, they probably don't understand the nuances of the law or think about the big picture and that's fine, but when it's a lawyer who refuses to acknowledge something fundamental I am irate.

[Aureliuse]

Family law.

What I like: clients.

What I don't like: clients.

Honestly, they are a mixed bag. Some are wonderful people going through their worst chapter in life, others are the causes of those wonderful people going through their worst chapter in life. Then you have their kids caught up in the no-man's-land crossfire. 

And there are those who pay your bills and top up their retainers, and there are those who would take advantage of you and run with a huge A/R.

Burnout is very real in family law. It's not for the faint of heart or the skittish.

[canuckfanatic]

In-house with a financial institution. Sometimes our "customers" make perfectly legal (but entirely stupid and shortsighted) decisions regarding their finances/estate planning, but I can't tell them that because I'm not their lawyer. I also don't even speak to them directly, I just advise front line staff on how to handle it. We usually just tell the customer that we strongly encourage obtaining independent legal advice before committing to their decision.

Example range from trying to hide money in the midst of divorce proceedings to removing assets from an alter ego trust without understanding the repercussions.

That's really my only "con" about the job - that I can't reach out and help people that clearly need the help. Love everything else about the job.

Edited February 9 by canuckfanatic

[happydude]

Really, the only thing I dislike about my job are the hours and the deadlines. Even a 9-5 day eats all of your time, let alone precious evenings and weekends being taken away. I just hate working generally! It's crazy how much time we spend at work when our time on this earth is so limited. Sadly, I am not independently wealthy, and life is expensive, so I'll keep working away and making the best of it. My job is pretty good.

[PzabbytheLawyer]

I had to dive deep into nitty gritty science today to problem solve a contractual issue before it became a real issue. That was a lot of fun, and it's the favourite part of my job.

 

Emails are the least favourite part of my job.

[CleanHands]

Criminal

LOVE:

• Interesting subject matter. Get paid to read true crime, yay!
• Meaningful subject matter. Unlike most lawyers you won't need to go home at the end of the day wondering if you should kill yourself because you just busted your ass defending Dow Chemical for knowing selling defective resin that would cause pipelines to fail and release gas.

HATE:

• Shitty opposing counsel. Dealing with unreasonable and unethical Crowns if you are defence, or dealing with extremely, unfathomably stupid and incompetent defence lawyers if you are a Crown. These types are product of the former group having a very large amount of power and minimal oversight or accountability, and the latter group having a nearly non-existent barrier to entry. I am obviously not saying that everyone in the practice area sucks, but when you have 10 great opposing counsel to deal with and 1 that is a nightmare the nightmare still creates more work and occupies more headspace than the 10 good ones combined.
• Nitpicky procedural bullshit combined with tight deadlines. Whenever you need to file some new sort of application or go to a new court for the first time or whatever, the court clerks WILL find whatever justification they can to reject your filing that a judge just told you they really want you to get filed immediately. And they won't tell you how to fix it so it won't get rejected next time.

Edited February 15 by CleanHands

[JohnnyCochrane68]

Working with experts is interesting. I had a file where we had like fifteen experts who spent thousands of pages talking about every angle of this one particular thing. I have also worked with genuine world class experts and it's cool to see how they think, write and speak, and to see who can stick to their guns under cross-examination and who is a fake.

I hate the performance aspect of litigation - I really want to move to a position where I never have to do examinations or make submissions again.

[Jaggers]

I enjoyed that too. I once had to bring an expert to an arbitration to testify that whatever was in the little jar turned in by the employee, it wasn't human urine. Nobody could ever explain how the employee pulled that off in an observed test, but there was not nearly enough of whatever dissolved substances (creatinine chiefly) are supposed to be in there.

The union tried to tell the expert that he just drank a lot of water, but the expert testified that he would have died from overhydration long before his urine looked like whatever was in the jar.

[vancouverlawyer777]

Plaintiff Personal Injury Law

Love

- It's been a dream law job. Really. You get to do what you always wanted to do, advocate for very vulnerable people against powerful (sometimes monopoly) insurance companies. You not only advocate for them in court and negotiate for them on legal issues but advocate for their health care coverage. I've literally kept lives together after accidents.  Clients afterwards are incredibly thankful. It's the best of legal aid type clinic work combined with very decent pay. 

- You work with all sorts of health care professionals and some of the leading medical experts in the preparation of expert opinion evidence.  You develop a thorough understanding of medicine.

 - Fees are on a contingency fee basis so you don't have to turn away clients because they do not have the money to pay you. You can take a case to trial, mediate, settle and not worry about running up the client's legal bill regardless of whether your client is on social assistance or the CEO of a major corporation. You also do not have to chase down clients for accounts receivables.

- The pay was actually excellent during my decades long career - both as an employed associate and as a partner in a firm. Disbursements did need to be carried for years though but eventually they get paid in most cases.

- You could schedule discoveries and trials years in advance and prepare well for them and plan your life well in advance around court dates.

Hate

- At least in BC, the Provincial Government is intent on driving you out of business for a large portion of it (motor vehicle injury accident claims).

- The same said government publicly blames you for the mistakes in their own government insurance program.

- The public who are not your clients and some other lawyers in the bar think of you as an "ambulance chaser", out for your own interests, completely ignoring the valuable work you do or the very positive effect we have on client lives.   This stereotype is fueled by statements by politicians  in the course of trying to shut you down.

- In BC, the dream work is coming to an end (most unfairly for anyone injured in an auto accident) at least for motor vehicle accident injury cases.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 19 by vancouverlawyer777

[PetersPan]

Criminal - crown side.

Echoing the above stated. In addition:

Like - no clients to take instructions from. I have discretion, I get to exercise the same.

Dislike - “interesting” judges.

Dislike - almost all things involving Head Office.

[PetersPan]

Have to add after thinking about it - “concurrent fines”.

Yes, I’ve had a judge order that two separate fines be paid concurrently.

As in, you can pay two $100 fines totalling $200 by having a payment of $100 be applied to both fines.

Explain that one to me. I’d love to buy infinite groceries by paying for them concurrently.

[happydude]

9 hours ago, PetersPan said:

Have to add after thinking about it - “concurrent fines”.

Yes, I’ve had a judge order that two separate fines be paid concurrently.

As in, you can pay two $100 fines totalling $200 by having a payment of $100 be applied to both fines.

Explain that one to me. I’d love to buy infinite groceries by paying for them concurrently.

That makes absolutely zero logical sense. If you have two separate fines of $200, the total owing is $400. Period. I suspect they just introduced it to help out convicted persons, who in many cases likely don't have much (if any) cash to spare.

Edited March 17 by happydude

[Kurapika]

10 hours ago, PetersPan said:

Criminal - crown side.

Echoing the above stated. In addition:

Like - no clients to take instructions from. I have discretion, I get to exercise the same.

Dislike - “interesting” judges.

Dislike - almost all things involving Head Office.

Could you further elaborate what things you dislike about the head office?

[PzabbytheLawyer]

On 3/17/2024 at 12:44 AM, PetersPan said:

Have to add after thinking about it - “concurrent fines”.

Yes, I’ve had a judge order that two separate fines be paid concurrently.

As in, you can pay two $100 fines totalling $200 by having a payment of $100 be applied to both fines.

Explain that one to me. I’d love to buy infinite groceries by paying for them concurrently.

Were the offences connected factually? I am very far away from criminal law, but concurrent sentences are made (I think) when one set of facts gave rise to two different offences?

It's more nuanced than that. But I do remember that being a thing.

[Psychometronic]

Litigation: 

Like:

- Fantastic co-workers 
- 0.1/0.2 emails that get me through the day 
- researching interesting new areas of law
- when clients start to trust my judgment (I'm junior)

Hate:

- report-writing
- unreasonable/difficult people
- feeling like work is always a presence in my waking thoughts 
- not feeling fully rested after a weekend
- billable targets 

 

Edited March 22 by Psychometronic

[BHC1]

48 minutes ago, PzabbytheLawyer said:

Were the offences connected factually? I am very far away from criminal law, but concurrent sentences are made (I think) when one set of facts gave rise to two different offences?

It's more nuanced than that. But I do remember that being a thing.

You got the right idea conceptually, but for low level stuff it’s all handled pretty arbitrarily - concurrent fines being a pretty common example.

[PzabbytheLawyer]

5 hours ago, BHC1 said:

You got the right idea conceptually, but for low level stuff it’s all handled pretty arbitrarily - concurrent fines being a pretty common example.

Well. If it's handled arbitrarily, but the judge is applying principles, it makes sense to me 🙂

(Yes, I'm pro defence).

[CleanHands]

Of all the fucked up things in our criminal justice system, concurrent fines seem like such a weird thing to zero in on.

[BondGuy]

Commercial stuff with a too specific subfocus. 

Like - sophisticated clients and complicated and interesting subject matter. The networking on the business side is a huge plus. 

Dislike - honestly. Not much.