Jaggers

If you want to get into corporate tax, it really doesn't matter who teaches the course. What matters is to get a job at a place that has enough corporate tax work to feed it to students and junior associates. No one in that firm will care who taught you your tax courses, and you won't learn any more or less because of who taught them.

And failing that, I suppose PARTNOR ON BAY STREET would be OK.

Yes, GC at a large publicly traded corporation is obviously much more highly paid than your typical Bay St partner. It’s a hell of a lot harder to get. The GC at TD was formerly a partner at Simpson Thatcher. Bay St partners typically get recruited into VP level positions at a place like TD.

GC is General Counsel, which is basically the highest level legal employee in a company. If you are making $300K, you are working whenever work needs to be done, whenever that is. It is not a 9-5 job. (And by "making", I mean all your compensation, not just your salary that is paid bi-weekly.)

That's still VP level salary, which is several levels down from the GC. (For anyone who makes this distinction, I suppose that is not "salary" as in your bi-weekly paycheque, but rather refers to expected annual cash compensation.)

The GC at TD Bank probably makes about $2-3M. You could report to the person who reports to the person who reports to the GC and you'd be in the $300K range.

I suspect the salary is near the upper end of this range.

I was right, my info is out of date! But there will always be plenty of firms doing the articling recruit that have labour and employment work.

Firms that do management-side hire at all stages. Sherrard Kuzz hires first year students, the main big firms (Fasken, Norton Rose, BLG, Hicks) during second year, and some other firms (Mathews, Filion Wakely etc.) in the articling recruit (though my info may be a bit out of date on those specific firms). Almost any of the big firms do enough employment law that you can at least get a taste of it during summer/articling, though the labour work tends to be more concentrated in those firms I mentioned above). For the ones that do only labour and employment (Sherrard, Hicks, Mathews, Filion Wakely) you will want to have real demonstrated interest. For the big firms, just having a labour or employment class on your transcript is probably enough. As for getting a job with one of these places, all of the tips above are accurate. It's a great job that opens up a lot of interesting opportunities. Good luck!

Just first year. I finished second after getting a B+ in evidence.

Yes. First in the class. Still didn't get a Bay St. job. But there are a lot of RA positions out there. Or at least there were at the time. You can do interesting work, develop research skills, have fun and build a network of profs to potentially write reference letters down the road.

I had an RA job the summer after first year and in the long run it was way better for me than working a law firm job would have been.

What kind of advice is "don't apply"? There is no harm in applying to anything, as long as you're realistic about your chances. But yeah, you need either impressive grades or an impressive resumé to get much traction in the first year Bay St recruit. There are plenty of other summer jobs available, though.

I didn't make that many friends in first year. There were a lot of people I didn't like. Law does tend to attract a group of people that are know-it-alls and strivers, neither of which I like that much. But it gets a lot better after first year, when you meet a bigger range of people, take more interesting classes, fall into social groups that are not as contrived as a first year class section. And once you start your career, law is like any job - you'll work with people you like (or not), people you can trust (or not), and people you loathe (or not). You will probably encounter all of those groups in similar numbers as you would in any career. With the exception of litigation jobs, where you will encounter a lot more assholes than people in most other jobs, but they're not your colleagues, they're on the other side of files. Or they're your clients.

If you are looking at where someone articled on LinkedIn for intel on opposing counsel... you should probably just focus on the strengths and weaknesses of your own case, because you have access to a lot more valuable information there. Articling and your first job do set up your career to some extent, because it determines the work you're exposed to and the people you'll meet. In my case, it opened up a few doors in the area I focused in, but there are people like MP who find they need a complete career switch. And articling at a well-known firm probably does give you a baseline of credibility if you're applying for other jobs. But there is probably not much difference between any of the big firms or well-known boutiques when it comes to that. And in most cases, specifics about the work you've done will be more important.