L21C Book Club: The Citadel

In my non-work time, I’ve been re-reading a novel that I first read many years ago: The Citadel by A.J. Cronin. The Citadel was published in 1937. It was made into a film in the 1930s, and adapted for television several times, most recently in the 1980s.  The Citadel was once a very famous book, but it seems to have faded out of consciousness these days.  I hadn’t thought about it for ages, then I saw it mentioned somewhere by chance and thought “I’d like to read that again.”

I’m glad I did.  It’s a good read.  But more importantly – and the reason for doing a blog post about this book – it turns out that this is a fascinating to read from my point of view now, as a someone who’s part of a profession undergoing great change and examination of its own purpose, ethics, and place in society.

A.J. Cronin was a doctor.  His novel is about a doctor, his fictional alter ego Dr. Andrew Manson.  At the beginning of the novel, Dr. Manson, an idealistic and principled young medical school graduate, arrives in a remote Welsh mining town for his first job.

Andrew Manson works to heal the struggling, proud coal miners and their families.  He gets challenging diagnostic cases and he is brilliant at solving them.  He encounters public health problems – typhoid from a leaking sewer, lung disease from anthracite dust – and he works hard to understand the root causes and solve them, even to the point of taking radical action.  In a memorable scene, he and a friend clandestinely blow up a leaking sewer to force the authorities to fix it.  He is hampered by bureaucratic indifference, and by the ignorance and outdated approaches of some of his fellow doctors.  He doesn’t make much money.  He’s also a bit of a hothead and a prig.  Cronin was too good a writer to make his protagonist an insufferable saint.

Later in the novel, Andrew is seduced by opportunities to make more money and live like his more prosperous doctor friends, who find rich patients and charge them silly money for largely useless treatments.  He becomes, in conventional terms, successful. Cronin portrays this change as a loss of his soul.  And what happens next … you’ll have to read it to find out.

There were many points in the novel that had a new kind of resonance for me, reading it again after years in the legal profession and teaching law.

For example:

  • When Andrew first goes out to practice and work on real cases, the things he learned in the lecture hall at medical school seem like they are from another world.
  • His professional choices are dominated by the tension between personal success and prosperity, on the one hand, and the ideals of his profession and his idealistic desire to serve the public good, on the other. Cronin depicted Andrew’s attraction to material success as a kind of ethical failure, but he didn’t mean it as an indictment of his protagonist as an individual.  He saw the medical system of his time as inevitably (systemically) producing such moral failure.  He said of The Citadel: “I have written … all I feel about the medical profession, its injustices, its hide-bound unscientific stubbornness, its humbug … This is not an attack against individuals, but against a system.”
  • Andrew has virtually no power and no route to dealing with what causes patients to be ill – malnourishment, bad sanitation, dangerous working conditions. All he and other doctors can do is patch things up when people become ill.  They are ambulances at the bottom of the cliff, not a fence at the top of the cliff.

The Citadel was written before there was a National Health Service in the UK.  All doctors were, essentially, small businessmen (they were indeed mostly men).  Every decision about taking a patient necessarily involved a calculation about profit and financial viability, and could not be based solely on the patient’s need or the complexity of the case.

One thing that is fascinating to me about The Citadel, a twentieth-century book, is that these dilemmas are so similar to the ones faced by medical characters in nineteenth-century literature. There are great fictional doctors of previous generations caught in the same conflict between idealism and material success, like George Eliot’s Dr. Lydgate (one of my favourite fictional characters of all time).  I don’t think the central dilemmas for doctors, or their fictional representations, are typically like that now.  But … they still kind of are for lawyers.

The National Health Service was created after the Second World War, in 1948.  The Citadel’s powerful indictment of the ethics of profit-driven medicine is thought to have helped lay the foundation for the creation of the NHS.

This is a fascinating tale for lawyers going through self-examination about their role as professionals, and reflecting on the systemic strengths and weaknesses of our profession.  I recommend it to any L21C partners who have a bit of time for novel-reading after exams are over.  The gender and racial attitudes are … no better than you’d expect from a book published in the 1930s.  But if you can overlook a handful of cringe-making moments of that sort, it’s a book full of humanity and insight, especially for twenty-first century professionals in the process of shaping their professional identities.  It has a lot to say to us.

JD, Ryerson?

Ryerson University in Toronto is developing a proposal to create a new JD program “that focuses on innovation in legal education for the benefit of graduates, their communities, and the broader society.”  That quotation comes from Ryerson’s Letter of Intent, available here.  It makes fascinating reading.  Compared to the traditional law curriculum, it is a profound re-think of what training lawyers is all about, with emphasis on producing “graduates who possess the initiative to respond to unmet legal needs, who exhibit a commitment to social engagement and community leadership, who are able to envision new applications of their education.”  Obviously I like these ideas; in a smaller way, the same ones are reflected in L21C.  (On the other hand, I’ve seen the LOI described as “buzzword bingo” – I don’t really agree but I still think it’s funny.)

We’ve had an interesting debate on our internal course site (Mattermost) about this.  With the permission of those who contributed, I’ve moved it here so that it can be read more widely.

I hope others, in L21C and beyond, will add their thoughts.

Me: this is the letter of intent outlining Ryerson’s proposal to open a law school. I’d be very interested to know what you think of this. I expect that many of you will share the views of skeptics who have pointed out the shortage of articling positions in Ontario (and generally), and questioned whether Toronto needs another law school. Personally, I’m very persuaded by the argument that there is a need in society for a different kind of law school, one that uses innovative approaches to build skills and provide hands-on experience, focused on the needs of the users of legal services. I think it will be challenging to turn that aspiration into real results, but Ryerson has already shown real leadership in legal training, and they might just pull it off. Chris Bentley is one of our guest speakers, so you will have a chance to talk to him about it.

Lorna: The job market being what it is, they’d only be doing their students a disservice to start running a program and graduating people out into the employment void. If it is the case that they will provide the kind of training that’ll comes from articling, and where a good part of the curriculum is aimed toward alternative careers in law, then it could be quite promising.

Me: think they have thought very carefully about the argument that Ontario doesn’t need another law school and that they will be adding more people to a saturated job market. Those are serious concerns. In my opinion the proposal has serious, convincing answers to them. One of the answers – and I find this very compelling – is that there is clearly a huge need for more lawyers, if you look at it not from the point of view of law firm hiring stats but at social need. Ontario’s population has doubled in the last 30 years, but only one new law school has been added in that time. Most people who experience legal problems don’t get help from a lawyer because they can’t afford it. If something is too expensive for those who need it to access it, that suggests an undersupply, not an oversupply. Of course it does nothing to fix this problem if you create another law school like all the others that trains lawyers in a way that fails to bridge the gap. But I think Ryerson has genuinely considered how to do that and has come up with a well designed, well considered plan. A couple of other points mentioned in the report: there are high numbers of Canadian students training in law schools overseas (US, UK, Australia) who come back into the market here, and would train in this country if there were places for them, so to that extent opening a new school doesn’t increase the supply of law graduates. And, last point, as Omar Ha-Redeye says in this Slaw post, Ryerson aims to prepare law graduates who will create the jobs for graduates of other law schools.

Anita: I think it is a great idea but only if the program satisfies the articling requirement and if the tuition is not too high. I feel that one of the greatest barriers to new graduates who may want to practice differently from the traditional models is that there are very few articling positions with firms who don’t run with the traditional model and so if we do find an articling position, it will most likely be one with a traditional model. Articling with a firm steeped in the traditional mode of practice arguably instills that model in the articling student. Furthermore, a heavy debt load after graduation would prevent a recent graduate from taking riskier paths for fear of unpredictable financial returns. At least that is how I feel when looking for ways to practice law differently in my own career.

 

See also:

Omar Ha-Redeye’s post in Slaw

Discussion on Lawstudents.ca

Blog post on Legal Feeds, including comments from Chris Bentley

Article in the Ryersonian, which I just had to include because, um … that’s not Osgoode Hall Law School!

The long and winding road back to law school

Last Wednesday, I embarked on the long and winding road back to law school. Literally. Leaving Vancouver in the early hours of the morning, I hopped on the highway and took the scenic drive through the mountains heading northeast to Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC.

A couple of months prior, I’d been invited by Katie Sykes to speak to her new class “Lawyering in the 21st Century” (L21C). This is not your typical “black letter law” class.  Instead, students sign up as partners in a fictional law firm, L21C, work in teams to develop new ideas and practice models, and then defend their business pitches to a legal “Dragons’ Den” panel. As Katie explains, “The 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.”

I’d been asked to participate in the class for two reasons: 1) to share my story of building Knomos with the students as an example of a non-traditional legal career path (“Hey, this is possible!”); and 2) at the end of the term, to be one of the “legal dragons” evaluating student pitches & proposals.

Speaking with the class was an awesome experience, albeit a little surreal at times. It’s a honour to be included among guest speakers who are thought leaders and key influencers in the legal industry including Mitch Kowalski, Sarah Sutherland, Hersh Perlis, and Fred Headon to name a few. Being on the “legal dragons” panel later this fall is equally rewarding, as Knomos itself started as a student submission to the McGill Dobson Cup startup competition back in 2014.  While I don’t yet consider myself a legal industry expert, given that the more I learn the more I realize I still have a lot to learn, I’m happy to offer students insights & advice based on my experience thus far.

On the platform development front, it was great to give the students a sneak peek at some of the core features we’re implementing right now, and get that direct feedback that lets us know we’re on the right track. In “customer validation” terms, there’s nothing quite like having people come up to you after a demo saying “Can we have it now?” (The answer is not yet, but very soon, so stay tuned!)

The experience was also validating on a personal level. One thing about law school that often goes unmentioned is that it’s not just a education, it’s an indoctrination. Throughout 3-4 years of classes, extracurricular activities, and firm-sponsored events, there’s a subtle but ever-present undercurrent reinforcing a belief that the career path towards becoming a senior partner in a big law firm is the holy grail to which all students should aspire. The flip-side of that mindset is that doing something different is doing something less.

Like millennials in many other professional industries, it’s a narrative I’ve personally struggled with over the past couple of years since leaving school. I transitioned from practising in BigLaw, to being a sole practitioner, and then co-founding a legal tech startup. Much like the drive to Kamloops, my journey has not always been a straightforward one. There have been some unexpected twists and turns, and more than a few bumps along the way. But I am better for it, and that much better prepared for the road that lies ahead. It meant a lot to share my story with the students and I hope it will help some of them too as they prepare for life after law school.

I’m excited to hear the student pitches later this fall and their innovative ideas for improving legal practice. Just as important as the idea, however, is the execution. So my best advice to the students is this: Do things. Tell people. Listen & learn from their feedback. And then keep going.

While the destination may not always be the one you set out for, the journey is worth the while.

– Adam

Co-founder & CEO, Knomos

Follow me on Twitter: @EhLaFrance