Canadian Lawyer 4Students

BY CLAUDIO D'ANDREA Dan Griffin has taken a step back from the music industry to get a legal education. * ock r school before B alance. Discipline. Leadership. Advocacy. Empathy. Focus. These are the values and skills Dan Griffin has been learning at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law. They also form a big part of his former life as a rock star in the making. Thoughtful, pleasant, and softspoken, Griffin was a member of the award-winning indie band Arkells. He is also very lawyerly in the care he takes framing his answers to questions, like why he decided in October 2011 to step back from Arkells and pursue his legal studies just as the band seemed poised 22 Spring 2013 CANADIAN to break through to the big time. The Arkells announced Griffin was temporarily leaving the group but would rejoin them on stage when he could. He was replaced by Anthony Carone. The band had recently released its second album Michigan Left and was still humming from the success of a 2010 Juno Award for New Group following its 2008 debut Jackson Square, and would also win a second Juno in 2012 for Group of the Year. The band had played some big gigs too, including headlining a Burlington, Ont., show before 12,000 people in June 2010 and being asked by Them Crooked L a w y e r 4 students Vultures to open the group's Air Canada Centre show in Toronto a month earlier. Arkells would go on to perform for CBC TV's George Stroumboulopoulos and Jian Ghomeshi in the fall of 2011 and, earlier this year, toured with The Tragically Hip — without Griffin. Never mind school of rock. This is school before rock. To Griffin, his decision came down to taking the skills he learned in one area and transferring them to another. With Arkells, it was the complexity of the business side of music — dealing with managers, agents, record labels, and studios — that made him recognize the value of a KaLEIGH TaIT dan Griffin takes a break from award-winning band Arkells to pursue his law degree.

• Cover