Canadian Lawyer 4Students

Spring 2010

Life skills and career tips for Canada's lawyers in training

Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/50902

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 24 of 31

COMPILED BY MAT T POWELL pros+cons The of practising in... construction law Ottawa Whitehorse trusts and estates law Practising construction law ELLIOT SMITH, Osler Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, Toronto + PROS: • When people think of construction law, they usually think of home construction or renovations, which is only one part of construction law. If you work at a larger fi rm, you can work on much bigger projects. In fact, you could be involved with some of the biggest and most complex construction projects in the country, such as airports, skyscrapers, and nuclear power plants. • Th ere are many unknowns in any construction project. When issues arise on a project, everyone involved looks to the contract to determine who is responsible. As a construction lawyer, it is very satisfying when you've anticipated an issue ahead of time and addressed it in the contract (therefore keeping your client from getting involved in a potentially lengthy dispute). • As a result of the complexity of construction projects, the contracts are oſt en extremely intricate documents. A change in one place can result in unintended conse- quences elsewhere, making it imperative that you keep the entire document in mind every time you make a revi- sion (no matter how small the change may seem). Work- ing with these documents provides a great challenge. • Because of increased infrastructure spending during economic downturns, construction is one area of law that remains busy even when the economy slows down. - CONS: • One drawback to construction law is that a single fi le can be ongoing for months and even years. While seeing a fi le through to completion is rewarding, you don't get to work intensely on a project and then move on to some- thing new in a few weeks, which some people prefer. Th is also means that at any given time, you can expect to have multiple active fi les on the go. • Sometimes aſt er you've done a fair amount of legal work on a project, it will get cancelled. It can be frustrating to spend months negotiating a deal and draſt ing the docu- ments for it, only to have the project fall apart for rea- sons you had no control over. • At larger fi rms, construction law is increasingly being divided into the up-front solicitor work (the prepara- tion of contracts) and the post-construction barrister work (dispute resolution). When this is the case, you have to choose early in your career which you want to do, because it gets increasingly diffi cult to make a switch as you become more specialized. C ANADIAN Lawyer 4STUDENTS SPRING 2010 25

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of Canadian Lawyer 4Students - Spring 2010