Life skills and career tips for Canada's lawyers in training
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/552038
10 F A L L 2 0 1 5 C A N A D I A N L a w y e r 4 S T U D E N T S "People who fi gure out how to provide services at low costs, the people who pro- duce the Ubers of law, they are the ones who are going to make money, and do great, and everyone else is going to be in trouble," Sykes says as she notes how Uber's ride-booking service has changed the taxi industry. " e ultimate goal of the course is to equip them with some tools and spark them to think about some ideas that will enable them to adapt. I can't tell them how ' ' to do it; I don't know it myself. If I knew how to start the Uber of law, I would go and do that, and I would be a lot richer. But I hope some of them will fi gure it out, and, at a minimum, I hope every single one of them won't be blindsided by changes that nobody mentioned to them might happen." Sykes, who studied law at Harvard Uni- versity, the University of Toronto, and Dalhousie University, spent more than six years at the big law fi rm of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP before moving to the academic world. It's a career track that sets her apart from some of her professors, including one who told her, almost proud- ly, that he had never set foot inside a big law fi rm. But she also admits that her law degree, rigorous as it was, did not equip her particularly well for the real world. " e model for teaching law is basi- cally from the late 19th century — it hasn't changed a lot since then, and there are good reasons for that because, as a lawyer, there are just some essential skills that you need. You need to understand cases, you need to understand how to extrapolate rules from them and how to apply them to facts, and you do need that and that method works for it. But that's defi nitely a very small frac- tion of what you need, especially in a very I went to a fantastic law school that I loved that did pretty much nothing to prepare me for practice, other than perhaps I got used to having high standards of working hard. And I had absolutely no idea about any of the things that you do in real life. KATIE SYKES, Thompson Rivers University