UBC Law: History

Chapter 1: Indentured Labour

Day-to-Day Work

Most efficiently managed organizations assign time-consuming, repetitive, and intellectually undemanding work to their lowest ranking, poorest paid employees. In that capacity, rather than fully clothed as "professionals-in-training", such tasks were often delegated to articling students. This sort of work constituted a significant part of the articling experience; for example, Daniel Gordon’s days copying documents in longhand or Leonie Lalonde’s bone-rattling jitney journey. Copying and delivering were not out of the ordinary in the work of early articling students.

Robert Wootton, who articled to his father from 1918 through 1923, used a "press letter book" to keep copies of correspondence for the firm:

Mr. Wootton: . . . We had no dry files for our letters. We used a press letter book. That book was a book with numbered pages and the paper was tissue paper of a particular kind and you used a damp rag and cards and you placed a card down, you placed a damp rag upon it and pressed it flat. You then drew upon that rag, flattened a sheet of tissue paper of the book and then upon that you put the letter face downwards, then another card and that could be done for about four or five letters at a time. You took the book then and put it under a press and whirled this press about until you felt you had pressed it hard enough and then left it for a short time and pressed the book and took out, with great care, because the paper could tear easily, took out the cards and rag, etc. and continued the process for so many letters as there might be.

In addition to maintaining the "press letter book", Wootton also kept busy with "running errands and filing documents at the Registry". "[A]bove all", however, he was responsible for keeping track of the billable legal work done by the partners. The task required meticulous attention to detail and was time-consuming. As Wootton described, "It was my duty as to the docket to take the entry from the partners’ daybooks into which it was their duty to write a memorandum of each client interviewed for each chargeable item for work done, to be entered. That entry was then transferred into a huge volume under the heading and separate pages of course of the name of the client. There had to be entered also a reference to the letters sent out and the letters received." The tedium of this chore seemed not to have bothered Wootton, who embraced it as an educational experience. He reported many years later that "[t]he docket . . . was a treasure box because the young student saw and read about exactly what was going on". Wootton called it his "training with the docket".

Leonie (Lalonde) Anderson reported that she "learned a lot from handling legal documents" during articles that were spent doing "office work" for "eight hours a day, six days a week". Like other students, she also spent a good deal of time on "leg-work" and routine procedures:

Mrs. Waters: Can you recall some specific duties that you had? You mentioned doing a great deal of walking as part of your job, why was that?
Mrs. Anderson: Well, after banking hours we would get from the bank all the protested bank articles and I had to represent these things to those who had signed these different papers. They called it protesting, and I protested after three o’clock every banking afternoon, and then took all those protested papers to the bank and I did that every afternoon, and the fees were marked on these protests and really they did very well with me after banking hours. But my own payment never increased, so I did a lot of walking.

Her work in the office did expose her to "all the different stages of papers prior to trial".

Although she did not feel particularly attracted to court work, Lalonde participated in all the work that articling students preparing for careers in litigation would have engaged in. Students, she reported, "only appeared in Chambers. We had no occasion to appear in court. That was a practice for court work. It was part of each action and we did that very readily, but the solicitor’s work was interesting." Donald Fillmore recalled that, apart from discussing things with his principal, "all I did was to collect some debts and that sort of thing, or try to collect debts. . . . there wasn’t very much going on in the legal business". He also reported ample opportunity to "go to the Courthouse and listen in on cases". The economic cycle, apparently, had a drastic impact on the character and pace of articles.

Robert A. B. Wootton, circa 1920. The docket books that formed an important part of Wootton’s legal training are on his desk.

Charles Hamilton divided his articles between service to Mr. Wragge in his father’s Nelson law office and a final six months of articles (in 1924) to the renowned E. C. Mayers in Vancouver. While in Nelson he had done "anything that came to hand, except of course, work that we weren’t qualified to do. . . . I don’t know that anybody asked me for my opinion particularly during that time, but it was work that was practical experience and doing anything that either my father or Mr. Wragge felt that they could trust me with under their supervision". E. C. Mayers apparently had no such exalted vision of the appropriate role for an articling student, even one near the end of his qualifying period. While in service to Mayers, Hamilton "used to collect the books that he wanted from the library, and run messages for him". His own frank assessment was that he was not "very much use" to Mayers "except as a hewer of wood and drawer of books".

To similar effect, former Chief Justice Nathan Nemetz described his articles in Vancouver in the 1930s as a busy but largely uninspiring period: "all in all, it was hard work because most of the day, from 9:00 a.m. until 3:45 p.m. you were just rushing around doing menial chores . . . and you were supposed to be studying of course, but the study periods were short and small". Most of the chores assigned to articling students were, he said with studied understatement, "not highly edifying":

The only good thing about it was that if the boss wanted to take you to court, and that depended. Claude McAlpine would take you to court with him in cases where he figured he needed someone to handle the books . . . and things of that nature, but when it came to advising or starting to ask what he was doing that was none of the student’s concern. But I went with him a number of times, I got to like him very much. . . . That was an interesting period of time . . . .

The articling experience thus varied tremendously from place to place, from firm to firm, from lawyer to lawyer, and from one personality to the next. Charles Hamilton’s account of his two quite distinct articling experiences particularly indicates this diversity, as does the wide variation in other individual recollections of legal apprenticeship. In a time when articles ran over three to five years, students could take advantage of the differences among principals, as Hamilton had, by arranging to work under two or more in sequence. Anyone who was bored with what they were doing or who felt a need to seek out a more rounded exposure to legal practice than was possible with their principal could arrange to have their articles assigned. Angelo Branca, like many others, worked under more than one articling principal. Beginning with Arthur Sutton, solicitor for North Vancouver in the 1920s, Branca soon became bored ("Hell, all I did was by-laws, you know") and transferred his articles to Arthur Fleishman. There, apparently, he did a little bit of everything: "Arthur was a very litigious man, he’d put everybody into litigation, so that’s where I got my blessing in the law courts. I’d go up to . . . do all the chamber work that had to be done. And process the claims and so on. I learned an awful lot in the four years that I was there . . . ."

The picture that emerges from firsthand accounts of articling in the early years of the twentieth century is not altogether edifying: low pay, long hours, copying, record-keeping, walking, delivering, filing, and repetitive office routine interspersed only with the occasional opportunity to appear in chambers or to sit in on court proceedings. The working world of articling students in the first decades of this century was probably nowhere near as intellectually challenging or as demanding of sophisticated skills as that of any legal secretary today. Indeed, many accounts of the articling experience match, with surprising accuracy, the training in "mere manual dexterity" denounced by England’s 1846 Select Committee on Legal Education. There was little positive mentoring by the lawyers under whom articling students worked. Opportunities to obtain a formal legal education of any sort in British Columbia were not available until 1914.

Chapter 1 continued