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By Murray Gottheil | April 16, 2025
Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.~ Stephen Covey
A Canadian grocery chain has just announced that it will launch a new brand to sell low-priced groceries in Canada. Their announcement is being greeted with great skepticism. The reason? Canadians do not trust them. It could be because we just do not buy it when their CEO says that their increased profits have nothing to do with their increased prices.
Trust is just as important in the legal profession, and the fact is that it is in short supply there as well. Don’t believe me? Google “respected occupations in Canada”. It turns out that grocery store owners rank significantly higher than lawyers, and that should tell you just about everything that you need to know.
Why is there a trust deficiency when it comes to the legal profession? Is it a case of 99% of lawyers giving the other 1% a bad name? Probably not. I would guess that the vast majority of lawyers are quite trustworthy. But I challenge you to find a lawyer who can honestly say that they have not run across a significant number of lawyers whom they do not trust. I also challenge you to find a law firm with 10 or more partners where all the partners trust each other implicitly.
Sure, I trusted all of my partners not to steal from our trust account, and almost all of them to try their absolute best to stay on the right side of the ethical line. But did I trust every one of them never to put their interests ahead of the firm’s best interests? Nope, I did not.
Good lawyers are often ambitious and competitive. The first managing partner of our firm made a big point of saying that he wanted our firm to be competitive externally, but not internally. In some ways, he kept that promise, and subsequent partners tried to honour his legacy. In other ways, human nature triumphed, and we did what ambitious and competitive people do, putting our interests first, at least some of the time.
We did fairly well, but I can only imagine just how phenomenally successful we might have been had we all been consistently and impeccably trustworthy.
If I could go back and do it again, my most important question to consider before having someone join our partnership would not have been, “How good a lawyer are you?” or “How much do you bill?” or “How big is your book?”
It would have been, “Can I trust you?” Had I asked that, I might still be practicing law.
Murray is a happily retired lawyer who lives in the country, drives a pick-up truck, writes, teaches and mentors. You can reach him at [email protected] or see what he is up to at lawanddisorderinc.com.
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