Fifty years in the Practice of Law (review)

Work-life balance? For Frank Manning Covert, work was life. He acknowledges cheerfully and without noticeable remorse that he neglected his wife Mollie and their four children 'in the pursuit of the law.' But this account of Covert's rise to pre-eminence through his work as a corporate lawyer is very lively indeed.

In 2000, independent Halifax scholar Barry Cahill published The Thousandth Man: A Biography of James McGregor Stewart – founder of the leading Maritimes law firm now known as Stewart McKelvey Stirling Scales. Stewart was Covert's principal and hero. However, through his memoir – diaries he distilled after retirement, enhanced with foreword, epilogue, and footnotes by Cahill – Covert himself emerges as a prototypical hero of contemporary corporate Big Law in service to Big Biz.

Covert describes an idyllic childhood in an apple-treed Nova Scotia village; the diligence and discipline modelled by his doctor father, who died when Covert was only fourteen; lessons learned from the gritty reality of agricultural labour; early schooling and Dalhousie arts classes endured as prerequisite to the study of law, at which Covert immediately excelled; and then ten years of practice in a wide range of solicitor and barrister matters. When the Second World War broke out, Covert had achieved sufficient prominence that he was called to Ottawa to serve in the Department of Munitions and Supply. However, this prestigious safe berth was not for Covert while others fought and died. Already thirty-five, he quit to train as an rcaf navigator, flying missions so terrifying that he candidly acknowledges that he would never have had the guts to sign up had he known what he would face.

Covert never preaches, but his account might make us question the relative efficacy of an mba-llb preparatory to tightly focused practice group as training for corporate law. Back in Halifax, and in response to the demands of postwar business reconstruction, he reimmersed himself in tax law while persuading his corporate clients that fair treatment for trade unions was fundamental to industrial peace. There followed a dazzling multiplication of appointments to directorships of corporations regional and national, small and large, with Covert drafting necessarily ingenious reorganization documents and sometimes himself stepping in to run soon-prosperous companies.

Covert served on the Royal Commission on Transportation. He was a lifelong Liberal, proud of establishing a trust fund that ensured financial independence for Nova Scotia's Liberal leader (whether in power or in opposition) and instrumental in encouraging Pierre Elliott Trudeau to become leader of the federal Liberal party. And through board memberships Covert was also instrumental in consolidating academic and financial solidarity for many Nova Scotia post-secondary and health institutions.

By his own account Covert worked continuously and very hard, fascinated by the complexity of the law, the structures that can be achieved through law, and the human dynamics that can be controlled through law. He worked too hard to spend much time with his family, but he was clearly devoted to them. His references to his wife are shyly tender. He tells us, for example, that when he started dating Mollie 'the whole world was suddenly wonderful – not just the practice of law,' and that he wrote to her every day of the seventy-one days he initially spent in Ottawa at the start of the Second World War before she could join him.

Covert worked in an era when wives and families supported the work of the breadwinner and his contributions to civic life, and were supported in return. Such single-mindedness may no longer be fashionable, such family structures no longer fathomable. But for all his differences from us and from our times, Covert comes across as a consummate navigator to substantial accomplishment. He was not just a corporate lawyer, but also a singularly admirable human being.