Nowadays, while big national firms dominate the legal landscape, it’s easy to forget how new they are.
In fact, it was barely 20 years ago that the Supreme Court of Canada struck down law society rules that prohibited most interprovincial law firms in this country.
Among the big nationals today are Bennett Jones LLP and McCarthy Tétrault LLP, both well represented on the Toronto legal scene. So it’s worth noting the recent passing of a lawyer who never practised in Ontario but who helped bring both of those firms into being.
Thirty years ago, Robert Black was a name partner in Jones Black, a leading Calgary law firm. A key firm client was Calgary Power, for which Black was both director and general counsel.
But another Jones Black client was an upstart firm called ATCO, which had launched a hostile takeover of Calgary Power.
Jones Black believed the firm could put up firewalls, recruit independent counsel, and continue to serve both sides.
But Black thought it was impossible to paper over the conflict. In 1980, he left Jones Black to form Black & Co., where he assisted Calgary Power’s successful defence against the takeover. Now called TransAlta Corp., the company continues to thrive.
Having lost Black, Jones Black needed a new name. To escape an endlessly changing roster of senior partners’ names, it looked to the founder of the firm: R.B. Bennett, the millionaire Calgary lawyer who was prime minister of Canada from 1930-35.
Bennett had been dead since 1947, but his name was perfect for a permanent law firm brand. As a result, Black’s tumultuous exit became the stimulus that produced the new moniker, Bennett Jones.
For about 10 years now, Bennett Jones has been leveraging its leading place in oil-and-gas law to lay the foundations for a growing national law practice.
Black, meanwhile, had also been in on the birth of another national law firm. Out on his own, he decided not to take his blue-chip roster of clients to some other Calgary firm.
Law firms were too small and local for the scale of business they were doing, he concluded, and too often conflicted. So he linked up his firm, Black & Co., with McCarthy & McCarthy in Toronto.
In 1980, McCarthys was seeking a way to get in on the Alberta boom. The merger with Black & Co. did that and helped launch McCarthys on its path towards national expansion.
But Black’s deal with McCarthys provoked the ire of the Law Society of Alberta, so it passed rules forbidding interprovincial law firms.
It was Black’s lawsuit, Black v. Law Society of Alberta, that cleared the way for Canada-wide law firms. Both of Black’s firms, Bennett Jones and McCarthys, would be beneficiaries.
Although he helped bring the big-firm model of practice to this country, Black always had a fondness for an older style of legal practice. In his personal care for his clients, he struck some as being more like a traditional English solicitor than a megafirm honcho.
As early as the 1950s, while working with big Wall Street law firms on financing for Calgary Power, Black professed himself “overwhelmed by these immense law firms.
And I realized what a different life I was leading as a general practitioner. . . . They would work endless hours, would not even get home at night, and I found that very foreign to me. Because of course no one in our town would work all night.”
Robert Black, both a founder of megafirm law in Canada and a veteran of times when a top corporate counsel never worked all night, died at home in Calgary in August at the age of 88.
Christopher Moore’s newest book is The British Columbia Court of Appeal: The First Hundred Years. His web site is www.christophermoore.ca.
