Stikeman Elliott: The First Fifty Years

H. Graham Rawlinson is a corporate lawyer with the international law
firm Torys in Toronto. He is coauthor of The Canadian 100: The 100 Most
Influential Canadians of the 20th Century.

This is a celebratory history of one of Canada’s leading business law
firms, written by one its most famous partners. Prominent Montreal
lawyer Richard Pound tells a lively tale of how two young Montreal
lawyers, Heward Stikeman and Fraser Elliott, turned a small tax practice
into a national corporate law powerhouse. Not surprisingly, the recipe
for Stikeman Elliott’s success is an old-fashioned one: hard work,
brilliant employees, and gold-plated family connections. By the 1990s,
the firm was one of the most trusted and respected in the country.

Viewed from a distance, the Stikeman Elliott story is Canadian postwar
business history in a nutshell: the shift of the Canadian business
centre from Montreal to Toronto, the tensions between French Canadian
and English Canadian business, and the consolidation of the practice of
commercial law are all in evidence here. But while these broad themes
are suggested, Pound makes little effort to give his subject this sort
of historical context. Instead, most of the story’s nearly 600 pages
are devoted to affectionate portraits of the firm’s leading lawyers
and to tales of strategy and growth that will hold the attention only of
the lawyers profiled—or those who want to emulate them.