Legal dynasty comes to end after four generations
Friday is Bob Lees’ last day before he retires from a 45-year career at his downtown law practice Lees and Lees. He is the last in a family line of lawyers that goes back to 1884.
For decades, lawyer Bob Lees has had a bird’s-eye view of Hamilton.
THROUGH THE PANORAMIC WINDOWS of the corner office of his 22nd-floor law practice at 25 Main St. W., he could tell you when storms were coming. He could see the ships making waves in the harbour and he could get a sense of how the local economy was doing by the amount of construction taking place below.
But later this week, Lees, 71, will be stepping down from his wood-walled box in the sky, a family law practice that spans four generations.
Local law history will be made when one of the city’s longest running family legal dynasties comes to end.
Lees and Lees, which specializes in estate planning and real estate law, will be taken over
Bob Lees is retiring after a 45-year law career in a multi-generational practice with roots that go back to 1884 with his great-grandfather William.
by a lawyer named Jamie Mendelovitch, 37 — no relation. The practice will still be known as Lees and Lees, but there will not be anyone named Lees who works there.
Bob Lees is retiring after a 45-year law career in a multi-generational practice with roots that go back to 1884 with his great grandfather William. When Lees started at the family firm in 1973, both his dad, William Frederick, and his grandfather, William Kenneth, worked there.
It’s not uncommon for a parent to pass on a law practice — or any family business — to a son or daughter. But it is highly unusual for that to happen more than once in the same family.
“Most family-owned law firms don’t go beyond two generations,” says Paul Milne, a longtime Hamilton business lawyer who now runs a consulting service called Business Families in Transition.
“With the Lees family, they made it through four generations and that is quite something,” said Milne, who is also a close friend of Lees. “It was one of those unique situations that with each generation it was the right job for them.”
That was, until the fifth generation. Bob’s son Michael William, 36, decided after getting his law degree that being a lawyer is not for him. And Bob’s daughter, Christie, who trained as a registered nurse and is living in California, had even less interest in a law career.
Michael is a mountain climbing enthusiast who lives in Calgary, where he’s hoping to work in business administration. On weekends he climbs the Rockies and in May actually made it to the summit of Mount Everest, the 112th Canadian to safely make the journey up and down.
“Frankly, I don’t think Michael found legal work appealing. And I don’t think staying in Hamilton is where he wanted to be,” said Bob.
“To him, it would not be an exciting life climbing the escarpment.”
According to Milne, “he learned in becoming a lawyer that he didn’t want to practice law full time in the usual sense, but used the education as a jumping off point for other things.”
Milne says Michael made the right decision if his heart was not into practising law.
“Taking over a parent’s law firm has to be the right thing for the next generation to do. If they are doing it out of obligation, it is not going to work.”
Interestingly, while Michael gravitated into law school and then away from practising law, Mendelovitch’s career went in the opposite direction. He grew up in Laval, Que., and after finishing high school wanted to be an actor.
But after years of struggling financially and living in a basement apartment, he grew pessimistic about his prospects.
The final straw came during a television commercial shoot for a chewing gum maker. Mendelovitch was supposed to hail a cab while chewing a piece of gum and “the director kept saying, ‘Chew bigger.’ And I said to myself, ‘What am I doing? My financial future has come down to chewing a fake piece of gum — bigger.’”
So he enrolled in business administration at Ryerson, where he became interested in business law, and then moved onto Osgoode Hall law school. Along the way he met Stephanie Di Ianni, daughter of former mayor Larry Di Ianni, and the two married.
They live in Toronto where Stephanie works as a teacher. For the time being, Mendelovitch will continue commuting, as he has done over the past year while learning the ropes at the practice while working as an employee.
The end of family ties to Lees and Lees comes more than two years after another Hamilton multi-generational law firm reached the end of the line. Lazier and Lazier had roots back to 1864 when Stephen Franklin Lazier, the son of a dry goods storekeeper in Dundas, was called to the bar. The family practice is now closed with a fourth generation Lazier — Thomas — working at Ross and McBride in Hamilton, and two members of a fifth generation practising in Toronto.
As for Bob, he says he plans to travel, play golf, garden and read in his retirement. He said he will miss the legal work, which he described as “helping families with thorny problems. You can imagine different families have different issues. Sometimes there are health issues or discord in the family.”
And as for Lees and Lees not making it to a fifth generation, he said, “Sure, it would have been great. I would have been proud of that. But it is what it is.”
He says he’s confident he’s left the practice in capable hands with Mendelovitch, who will receive assistance in the short term by Lees’ legal assistant Sylvia Vlaho.
As for Bob, he says he plans to travel, play golf, garden and read in his retirement. He said he will miss the legal work, which he described as “helping families with thorny problems.”