Frank Manning Covert: Fifty Years in the Practice of Law

Christopher English is a professor of history at Memorial University of
Newfoundland. He is the author of A Cautious Beginning: The Emergence of
Newfoundland’s Supreme Court of Judicature in 1791–92.

Like father, like son: Frank Covert (1908–1987) was the leading
corporate lawyer of his generation in Atlantic Canada. He succeeded his
mentor, James McGregor Stewart (sensitively profiled by Barry Cahill in
a previous biography) as advisor and deal maker to the corporate elite
and to their political friends in Halifax and Ottawa. Their law firm is
still the largest in the region, setting a pace that ensured “that the
legal profession ... is [now] built around large law firms, large law
firms around corporate lawyers, and corporate lawyers around big
business clients.” His loyalty to his clients was absolute, extending
to strikebreaking at the same time as he educated his business clients
to recognize that the Trade Union Act was not anathema but a tool that
could benefit corporate interests.

These diaries, kept over 60 years, chart the emergence of a country lad
who sought to excel. He subordinated family, friends, recreation,
intellectual and spiritual interests, and public and charitable service
to the pursuit of legal excellence. In his first year of practice,
“[he] argued 39 cases, and won 38, worked 134 nights, received a
raise, and took out more life insurance.” All of his many anecdotes
show him to good advantage. He was rewarded with status, wealth,
influence, and corporate directorships, but there is pathos in his
introductory dedication to his family, “all of whom I neglected in
pursuit of the law.”

Cahill is modestly critical of his subject (Covert was “a driven man,
and obsessive-compulsive hyper achiever”), and he offers some
contextual hints as to what drove him: the loss of his father at 14, a
dominating and rebarbative mother (he showed up for undergraduate study
at Dalhousie University in short trousers), a search for a mentor father
figure, an obsessive concern for recording the successes of daily
practice. He inhabited a male world: law school and lawyering, military
service overseas, corporate finance. Of the 44 individual portraits of
his contemporaries reproduced here, one is of a woman. As a portrait of
legal practice in an age of transition, this is a diverting and
revealing memoir.