How to Succeed at Articling
(or “How to Not Collapse Before You’re Called to the Bar”)
Author: Anna Cooper
The CDO in coordination with HWSAC organized a panel called “The Articling Process: What Can I Ask For?” Deborah Glatter, Director of Professional Development and Student Programs at Cassels Brock, and Doron Gold, a full-time Staff Clinician at Homewood Human Solutions (the provider of the Ontario legal profession’s new Member Assistance Program), came and answered our toughest questions with a surprising level of candor. What follows is a summary of the critical advice they had to share with us, replete with substantial additions from yours truly.
INSTALLMENT I
Here is the tough truth: articling can be hell.
Articling students have a range of difficulties to contend with. Some struggle with neglectful firms who treat them like cheap labour and generally ignore them for 6 months. Others have principles who are downright abusive. You may feel pitted against your fellow articling students, and not trust them enough to ask for support. Two months in you might realize you do not want to be a lawyer at all, which can be a crushing realization. Or maybe you just find working 80-hour-weeks doing work you don’t fundamentally believe in soul destroying… who knows.
Add to this that legal employers can have a fairly blunt approach to assessing their articling students. Deborah Glatter, Director of Professional Development and Student Programs at Cassels Brock, said that the students who get hired back are the ones who hit the ball out of the park all year long. She said that if an articling student’s performance is “100%, 90%, 100%, 100%, 90%, 100%, you are not going to get hired back.” There is healthy room for pause to question how true this is in firms with 100% hire back rates, but still. Deborah also described the work/stress load of articling like the week before exams… on repeat… for 10 months straight…
Meanwhile, life can happen: siblings get married, parents fall ill, preexisting conditions flare up. And the fact is asking for what you need can make you vulnerable. It can come across as admitting weakness, or displaying inadequate commitment to the firm. It can put your career at risk.
So what should we do? One approach is that we all cross our fingers and hope we become masterful articling automatons and then magically turn back in to flesh and blood humans when it I suits our “career paths”… Alternately, we find out what our options are now and enter articling with a little more perspective and a little less blind fear.
The CDO in coordination with HWSAC organized a panel called “The Articling Process: What Can I Ask For?” Deborah Glatter, along with Doron Gold, a full-time Staff Clinician at Homewood Human Solutions (the provider of the Ontario legal profession’s new Member Assistance Program), came and answered our toughest questions with a surprising level of candor. In the coming days, I will be sharing a summary of the critical advice they had to share with us, replete with substantial additions from yours truly.
Meeting of the Minds 