Make sure his digestive system is okay.
Steve- Now John, you were saying earlier that there was a rule against having too many lawyers in the Rotary?
John- No, it's not against lawyers. Some people in my club might want that rule, but no. There's a rule against too many people from one profession. We try and get a wide spread of people from different occupations. And, you know we have me representing the legal community, and we have a couple of others that we allow in just to supplement me in case I can't be there. Steve- Now, do people contribute? In other words, does your background as a lawyer, or some of the other professional backgrounds here, are they, is the Rotary able to take advantage of that, or is that part of what you contribute to the Rotary?
John- Well, when the legal questions arise, yes, they'll ask questions, and we certainly draw on the backgrounds of our members to assist. But primarily the type of things we are doing, you know people like Neil, with his second career in construction, are much more useful for the type of work we are doing; or John with his medical career in terms of some of the programs that we run internationally; or we have Bill, who is an optometrist with some of the programs run that way. Those are useful occupations. Lawyers, we just check the legal contracts and let them do their work, I guess.
Steve- What kind of law are you engaged in?
John- For most of my career, about 19 years, I did primarily family law. And I'm in a firm that is a general practice firm, so we also have a lot of real estate that we deal with, and companies, and over the last year that's changed for me, where my schedule got so busy I couldn't afford the time to go to court as much, so I'm primarily doing in-office stuff with real estate and corporate law. Steve- Now, have you seen, I guess, this community has changed over the last 20 years. Has that affected your clientele? Perhaps you could explain a little bit about the nature of the community here and how that has affected your business.
John- Well, I was raised in Surrey, and when I was young, of course, this was the outer skirts of civilization and it was, you know for some an all day trip to come from Vancouver out here. Now it's a 30 minute drive. The roads have improved and the cars have gotten faster. We're not relying on trolleys anymore. So what I've seen is just a huge influx of population for Surrey. It's now to the point where it's going to be larger than Vancouver in terms of population. Along with that we've seen an influx of many different kinds of people. Probably the most notable one is the number of Indo-Canadians that have moved to this area. In my business itself, probably 70-80% of my clientele now are Indo-Canadians. That's been quite a change, and the school that my children to go has lots of Indo-Canadians, Philippinos, people of all ethnic backgrounds, religious backgrounds, cultural backgrounds. So it's made it a much more interesting culture, I think. Steve- Now, do you have any trouble communicating with your Indo-Canadian clients? Are these people second generation, therefore fluent in English, or are some of them first generation people who might not be so comfortable in English?
John- Hanji, Hanji. There, certainly, I've picked up some Punjabi. But, most of the clients that we deal with, the younger generation has a very good command of English. The older generation typically needs some help, but they'll bring along the children or they'll bring along some relatives. And I also have some staff in my office that speak Punjabi, and Hindi, and different languages to assist.
Steve- Now, would their, some of these people who, I guess the legal system in India would be similar to ours? Do they have different traditions, different concerns? Do you deal with them? Do you, are you forced to take their culture into consideration in dealing with them?
John- To a degree, most of the people that move out here quickly learn our culture, our legal system, and our way of doing things. Because they're such a large community, they certainly have a different focus. It's much more community based. If there's a problem, they'll try and solve it within the community by having people they respect get together and try and resolve it. For example, with most of my practice as a family lawyer, most of my cases were Caucasian or were people who had been Canadians for generations and were used to the legal system. With the Indo-Canadians, I really didn't have much of a clientele, because if there was a problem, the two families would get together, or they'd have a mediator or priest or someone get together, an uncle as they'd say in their culture, to try and help them resolve it within the family. Steve- And, so, but now you're covering a variety of things, real estate being one. Getting back to school, as you mentioned, your son goes to a school which has a lot of different cultures. How is that working out? Do the kids, do you find that your son brings home other kids that are from a variety of different backgrounds? Do the kids mix, or do they tend to stay within their own groups?
John- A bit of both. I think with the schools that we've had our children go to, and one of the things that we purposely did was move to an area that was a middle-class neighborhood that had a good variety of people and neighbors. And we wanted the children to go to a local school and to know the neighborhood kids. And in my experience, the kids have gotten along very well from all the different backgrounds and cultures and, you know, typically, where I see more problems is when you have a majority of one background or another. So, a majority where most of them are Caucasian, or a majority where most are Indo-Canadian, there tends to be some clicque -iness and groups, but for the most part, I see that where you have significant sizes of different groups, they get along well, and you don't see any problems, as far as I'm concerned, with seeing children that look physically different, but are all Canadians, and they get along very well. Steve- Is there a big ESL component at the school?
John- That's been one of the largest challenges, I think, for our school system, in that more and more resources and more and more teacher time have gone into the training of the ESL students, the English as a Second Language Students. And what it's done is it's drawn a lot of resources away from students who would otherwise excel or might need that little help to go from being an average student to a good student or from a good student to an excellent student. Steve- Now, did you study, take your legal studies here in British Columbia? And what are the qualities, what makes a person a good lawyer? What makes a person likely, first of all, to succeed at law school, or likely to get in to law school, and then do well later on? What are the sort of inherent qualities of a good lawyer?
John- From what I hear, I, just looking at the lawyers that I work with in the community, there's a completely huge range of personalities and styles and types. So I don't think there's any one particular quality that makes you become a good lawyer. I think a lot of it has to do with people skills, as it does with any job, you have to know people and get along. You obviously have to have some reasoning skills as well. The toughest part probably is getting into law school because there's a limited acceptance at the law school. So for that, you need the academic background, usually, although, certainly they will take adults who have life experience, or they will take people from different backgrounds just to have a variety, different types of lawyers. But, the toughest part is getting into law school. Going through law school, I found, was fairly simple. You do one year of articling, which is like an apprenticeship type program and then you're on your own, either working with a firm or by yourself. And, as with any business, you make it by your personality and your wits and how well you get along with people.
Steve- Now of course, we hear about a shortage of doctors in Canada. Have we got a shortage of lawyers in Canada?
John- I don't think anyone would say that there's not enough lawyers in Canada. We certainly, as the population has grown in B.C., the lawyers, the population of lawyers has grown as well. We only have two law schools in British Columbia, but there are a number of law schools back in eastern Canada, and a lot of those people move out to British Columbia afterwards. So, certainly, in my time the population of lawyers has grown large. And as they say, if you've got one lawyer in a town, he's going to starve, if you've got two, you have an instant business. Steve- And, right, which brings me to my last question here. I guess, in many parts of the world, and you mentioned the culture of the East Indians, Indo-Canadians, people are less litigious. They are less likely to go, and make a legal case out of something. North America is seen as being more litigious, and I guess the Americans more so than us. Is there a tendency in Canada for us to become more litigious, to sue more, to create more, sort of legal hassles the way they do in the U.S. or do you think we will remain a slightly toned down version of that tendency?
John- The general rule-of-thumb is that we're probably about 10 years behind the United States in terms of our practice, but certainly, the U.S. is much more likely to sue than in Canada. And one of the nice things that I've seen on the trend, especially in the family law area, is we're introducing a lot more mediation. We're introducing a lot more arbitration, so different methods of trying to resolve disputes. One of the biggest changes in family law has been, when you start a court action now, you are required to go to a settlement meeting with a judge. So, you know, even though family law lawyers tend to do a lot of mediation themselves, nothing helps settle a case like being in a courthouse with a judge looking down at you saying, why are you fighting?
Okay, well I think that's been a nice, little visit to the legal side of things. And we'll now move along to Bob and try and catch up with all of his activities.
