History

How It All Began…

by Frank Potts
(written for Lindsay Kenney’s 25th Anniversary in 2005)

Lindsay Kenney LLP was founded in 1980 but the firm was actually conceived six years earlier, in 1974, over a bottle of scotch, in front of a smoldering fireplace in a house on West 69th Avenue in Vancouver – when all of the original partners were in first year law at UBC.

(l-r: F.Potts, R.Lindsay, J.Kenney, K.Poje, T.Dunn)

Rick Lindsay had been a professional engineer but, due to a chronic inability to build dams that were watertight, had decided on a career change. Based on his considerable experience dealing with lawyers retained by disgruntled builders, he decided on law school. Kirk Poje was a Nanaimo resident prepared to do pretty much anything to get to the big city, and going to law school did the trick.

Rick and Kirk, along with a white samoyed dog named Nyla, and two piranhas, were sharing the house on West 69th.

Kirk, who had just moved to Vancouver, spent a lot of time in cultural pursuits hitherto unavailable to him so he wasn’t home much. The piranhas, until Nyla ate them, were always home.

I had gone over to the house under the pretext of studying for first year Christmas exams. Upon entry, it was immediately apparent there was neither heat nor light in the house.  On investigation, it turned out that absent regular and timely payment, BC Hydro was not disposed to provide ongoing services.

Who knew?

Anyway, the first thing we did was look for combustible items to burn in the fireplace. It hadn’t been used much so it didn’t draw very well and, as most of the furniture was plastic, there was a lot of smoke.

Absent light and what with all the smoke, it was, of course, impossible to study. One can, however, drink in the dark, so what Rick Lindsay and I did was help ourselves to Kirk Poje’s scotch.

During the course of that evening, the three of us, Rick, Nyla, and I, talked about not wanting to work for someone else. So, we decided that the thing to do, if we managed to get through law school, was start our own law firm.

As the evening wore on, and the contents of the bottle steadily disappeared, the basic plan expanded. We envisioned not just our own law firm, but a big law firm-as big or bigger than Vancouver’s then largest firm which, as I recall, consisted of 34 lawyers. We thought it unlikely that we’d ever manage to get that big, but it’s always best to have a goal.

Later in the evening, and still further into Poje’s scotch, it was also agreed, in consideration of Nyla’s services, to name the proposed firm’s management company after her.

Much impressed with Trigger’s fate, and to ensure that Nyla’s contribution would not be forgotten, we also resolved that upon her death we would have her stuffed and placed in the reception area, there to remain until either the new firm’s demise or in perpetuity, whichever came first.

To build our firm, and as we fancied ourselves litigators, we concluded we’d need at least two other solicitor type people to help us. We didn’t know exactly who, but we did know what personality types we wanted.

First, we needed someone who could not only communicate with accountants and bankers, but actually liked them. The ideal person would know which fork to use at a formal dinner, own a pin stripe suit and be, or at least appear to be, somewhat older and more sophisticated. Such a person, we felt, would lend us crucial credibility.

Second, we needed a marketer. We thought the best way was to look around the law school and see who everybody liked and then put this engaging personality to work hunting business for us.

We ourselves, of course, didn’t need any special attributes, since by coming up with the idea we avoided having to justify our involvement. And, anyway, everybody knows that if you are a litigator, you don’t need any other particular qualities.

Over the next few days we looked around the law school, and then hit up Julian Kenney, late of England (we were pretty sure his accent would sell) along with another fellow, to join our merry band.

I’ll let you decide which of the two positions Julian Kenney agreed to fill.

In any event, step one in the master plan was to run Julian for Moot Court Registrar of the law school. That got us a free office to hang around in, and the use of a telephone which, in the days before cellular phones, was no small thing. It also gave us a base from which we could make some investments and try to turn a buck, thereby seeing if we could work together. Turns out that although we worked together pretty well, as investors we were a bust.

By second year law, we realized that to ensure we had at least four people who, when the time came, would actually go through with starting a new law firm, we needed to enlist more people.

Most importantly, given our lack of business success, we needed someone who knew the value of a dollar and who wasn’t prone to taking undue chances. Or, for that matter, any chances at all. Someone with a good grounding in business reality. The sort of guy who will point out, with infuriating logic, all the good reasons why whatever it is that you want to do is really stupid and entirely too risky.

And, given the way we had been steam-rollered in our earliest investment forays, we decided we also needed a guy who knew something about the law and possessed a healthy degree of skepticism.

Now, it wasn’t too hard to figure who filled the bill caution-wise.

“Coupon Terry” Dunn, as he then was, fit the bill perfectly. Terry not only had a budget, he followed it and, better yet, he had managed to pay off his mortgage entirely from funds he saved using coupons.

So we asked him to join us and, after mulling it over for a couple of months and pointing out that a lot could happen between second year law and starting a law firm after articles, and verifying that, in law, his agreement in principle was in no way actually enforceable, he agreed to join our new firm.

If it actually opened. And if he was unhappy with whatever firm he was then working for.

And, if it wasn’t too risky.

The first thing he did as a potential partner was kibosh stuffing Nyla.  He felt the expenditure wasn’t warranted and that a dead dog in the reception area could trigger some health and bylaw issues.

Over the years, he has prevented us from doing lots of other stupid things, too.

So that took care of finding the anchor. But finding the savvy, cynical guy was tough.

One of many ventures we ran out of the Moot Court Office at UBC was the creation and sale of the law school Legal Who, a publication that simply lists all the law students with photos and their contact information. Usually, it was put together by volunteers from the Law Student Society, but no volunteers were forthcoming that year. So we offered to do it on condition that it would be done at our cost, would contain at least as much information as it had the previous year,  and would be sold for the same price as the previous year.

Provided that we got to keep any profit.

Being law students as opposed to, say, businessmen, the Law Students Society agreed to that so we went out, sold a bunch of advertising, and had the thing printed. We also got one of the profs to agree to buy a couple of hundred copies for the law school and between that and the advertising revenue, were up a ton before we even started selling it to the other law students.

When we did start marketing to the great unwashed, only one student in the whole law school refused to buy a copy. What he said, in conjunction with a host of Anglo Saxon derivatives, was, “You’re not getting a cent off me.”

I’m paraphrasing here.

That same guy tended to get really good marks. Which, of course, was pretty impressive since, as I have already mentioned, he had just recently been released from Nanaimo and all those big city cultural pursuits didn’t leave much time for law school.

So, we asked Kirk Poje to join and he did. Actually, we would have asked him sooner but it was a real problem finding him.

We were still worried about attrition so, in third year law, we talked to some other people and by the time we all started articles, a total of seven, all in our year, had more or less committed to the master plan.

Collectively, we spent a good part of third year researching what was involved in starting a law firm, reading up on all the available CLE material, and having endless meetings about whether to open downtown or in the suburbs, compensation systems, check lists for practice areas, marketing techniques, and anything else we thought would be helpful.

That research and those meetings continued all through articles, except that by then we had access to real live lawyers and clients.

It was, of course, necessary to keep our mouths shut about the master plan because if word got out that you intended to swan off and set up your own firm, you could reasonably expect your employment to end in pretty short order.

At the time, we thought that to be an unfair and arbitrary over-reaction to competition.

We are no longer of that view.

In any event, at the end of articles, we arranged a day long meeting at the Doric Howe Hotel to come to some final decisions. We had lost a few people but what emerged from that meeting was a general agreement that we’d borrow a ton of money and open a downtown law firm on February 1, 1980. There was some discussion about opening immediately after call but the “you should have at least a year of experience before you hang up a shingle” argument won the day.

That’s not to say, of course, that the period between the Doric Howe meeting and the actual opening of the firm was without problems.

There was the selection of the firm’s name, for example. I was the firm name committee and for a variety of reasons which at that time made sense to me, I recommended the name Lindsay Kenney. I was younger then and hadn’t fully grasped certain business nuances.

It was also necessary to come up with the partnership agreement. The first time anything was actually reduced to writing was at a meeting between me and Julian Kenney at the now defunct Metropolitan Café.

In that Terry Dunn and Kirk Poje were not going to be able to make the February 1st date, and since we didn’t want to bother Rick Lindsay with minutiae, Julian and I felt it appropriate to sort out the details without him. That, I believe, was the first in decades of temporary alliances and inter-partner conspiracies.

So, on February 1, 1980, Julian Kenney, Rick Lindsay, myself, and a late addition and classmate, Linda Hogg, opened Lindsay Kenney’s doors at 475 Howe Street. Kirk Poje, true to his word, joined us as partner a short time later, and then we were five, plus three support staff.

But as the five of us had all been called at the same time, and as none of us had anything like the experience we needed to actually do all the lawyer-like things that were required, we soon decided we needed a more seasoned practitioner. We couldn’t afford to hire one, so we prevailed upon Peter Altridge, a University of Toronto graduate, to join us as a partner. We reckoned his extra year of practice would be just the thing to make up for our inexperience.

Now, you will recall that I earlier mentioned inter-partner conspiracies. The second such conspiracy involved, notwithstanding our chronic shortage of clients and cash, the hiring of our first associate. What we wanted to do was find a really good junior to work with Rick Lindsay to ensure he actually rendered reports and bills in a timely fashion (or at all), remembered where he was supposed to be, and generally did all the lawyerly things that a nervous banker and outstanding credit line required.

We also thought the way to go was to find a really good, detail oriented associate and, without bothering Rick, quietly instruct that associate to work very closely with him and ensure all the boring stuff got done.

And, as it turns out, we were right about that. The associate we found was Jan Klassen. She transferred the last few hours of her articles to LK, was called to the Bar, got her secret instructions, and commenced working closely with Rick. Her job, amongst other things, was to keep him in line and I think it is fair to say that, in this, she has done an outstanding job.

I say that because, of course, she ultimately became Mrs. Jan Lindsay, a partner at the firm, a Bencher of the Law Society, and was awarded a QC. Plus, Rick’s bills and reports have been going out regularly ever since Jan started.

But I digress. I was talking about the original partners. Which brings me to Terry Dunn. Remember Coupon Terry? The cautious guy we talked to in second year law about joining our firm? The one who was all for it if it wasn’t too risky?

Well, Terry had been watching the firm’s progress and concluded that since we had been around for two years without going under and could now afford to hire an associate, maybe it wasn’t so risky after all. So, after a 40 second lunch time negotiation, Terry agreed to give up his partnership with another firm, and as had been agreed in principle some years before, joined Lindsay Kenney as a partner.

Now, three decades later, along with the other original partners, save Julian Kenney, and along with our first associate and now partner, Jan Lindsay, he’s still here.

We have, of course, in the intervening years, had many other people who have contributed significantly to the firm’s growth and success, including our other 13 partners at Lindsay Kenney, our 40 associates, the administrative staff, and the 100-plus paralegals and support staff currently at the firm — not to mention Kelvin Stephens — our managing partner since 1996.

We have also been very fortunate to have first rate support staff, some of whom have been with us for decades. Others, having made their contribution, have left to go to law school and are now practicing law or, in at least one case, have gone to the Bench. Some lawyers who articled here are now partners at LK. Others have gone on to be partners at other firms or are with various government agencies-and some have even banded together to set up other successful law firms.

And there is simply no question that without the help and assistance of all those people, Lindsay Kenney, if it existed at all, would certainly not be the firm it is today.

But if you want to know how it all started, it all started over a bottle of scotch, in the dark and smoke, at a house on West 69th Avenue in Vancouver, and with a group of law school classmates who wanted to build their own law firm.

And did.

Addendum: As at January, 2011, four of Lindsay Kenney’s five original partners still linger on at the firm. Rick Lindsay, Q.C. heads up the firm’s Insurance Defense Group. Frank Potts leads the firm’s General Litigation Department. Kirk Poje presides over the firm’s Corporate Commercial Empire in Langley. And Terry Dunn, to absolutely nobody’s surprise, practices banking law and is a favourite of bankers everywhere.

Julian Kenney, true to his English heritage, after 28 years at the firm, swanned off to the wilds of Northern British Columbia and became a gentlemen farmer. When not shearing sheep or doing other gentlemen farmer type things, he practices law at Messner Kenney in 100 Mile House.