34 A P R I L 2 0 1 6 w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m
Calgary
Calgary
Resilience of
oil town lawyers
put to test
By Geoff Ellwand
"It's hold on to your hat,"
says Joe Lougheed. "Don't get bucked off
and look to the future." That is his straight-
from-the-hip assessment about business,
and specifically the law business, in Calgary
these days. Lougheed is a partner with Den-
tons LLP and a member of one of the oldest
and most storied families in Alberta.
The Lougheed family knows only too
well Alberta's glorious booms as well as
its painful, discouraging, and devastating
busts. There has been a member of the
family in the law in Calgary in every gen-
eration since 1882. Lougheed knows this
city and the province like few others. He
says law firms are not immune to Alberta's
current economic realities, but he charac-
terizes the mood in the city's law offices as
"guarded yet optimistic for the long term."
In Lougheed's view, the oil and gas industry
is undergoing global changes and Calgary
is part of that. "We are in this together with
our clients and we will come out of this
cycle with them, too."
Take a walk around Calgary's downtown
and you can't miss the evidence of the col-
lapse in the price of oil. There are a lot of
"For Lease" signs on empty offices. With a
commercial vacancy rate in the 18-per-cent
range, the lunchtime crowds are smaller, the
