"[People] are forever fiddling with their BlackBerrys or their cellphones. You cannot give considered advice when you're responding momentarily. There's nothing in law that can't wait for a few hours. And if you just take the question, think about it, and call your client back, you're much better off.

"All I do is go to meetings and they're not paying attention. They just have an addiction; the fear that they're going to miss something. They're not comfortable with silence."

He says he feels lawyers have lost their ability as professionals to control clients these days.

"We are a profession. You can't get a doctor 24/7. The fact is, yes, you have to be available to a client when he's got a problem, but you don't need to be available constantly, the way we are.

"We've allowed ourselves to be overrun by our clients, and most of their requests, if they had to stop and think about it, they wouldn't put. If they couldn't get you, it would wait."

Partner and long-time colleague Peter Griffin says that while Lenczner isn't "electronically connected, I think is a fair way to express it," when you need him, you can find him.

"So much of the electronic stuff, it's like the more accessible you are the more it begets the need for accessibility, and it sort of feeds itself. If you're somebody in that category who says, 'I'm not going to carry a cellphone. I'm not going to carry a BlackBerry. I don't use e-mail. If you need to find me, call my assistant,' it works and people live with it," says Griffin.

"Does it mean people aren't going to retain Alan Lenczner because he doesn't have a BlackBerry? Not likely. There's a certain forgiveness in how good a lawyer he is and how much in demand he is and remains. It doesn't seem to have caused him to miss a beat."

And Lenczner is a good lawyer who doesn't miss a beat. In fact, he's a great lawyer who's been on practically every major commercial law file and has an amazing career (see sidebar). He's a lawyer's lawyer, the kind that is well respected by all sides of the bar, and he's a heck of a nice guy to boot.

The storied career of Alan J. Lenczner started out a little different from many other lawyers. His dad wasn't a lawyer, his mother wasn't a lawyer, and up until he attended law school at the University of Toronto, he had never met a lawyer in his life.

"I had no idea what lawyers did other than what I saw on television," he jokes.

Fresh from a bachelor's degree in 1964, with a background and interest in literature and languages (French, Italian, and German), Lenczner started to contemplate his next move.

"I almost went in to do a master's degree, but I didn't really want to become a teacher or a professor, and I really went into law school by default," he recalls. "I just had no idea what to do and it's a degree that you can take after your primary degree."

The McCarthy years

His interest in law grew throughout his time spent at law school. When he was done, he articled at McCarthy Tétrault LLP (then McCarthy & McCarthy) and remained there for 22 years.

Lenczner's swansong for McCarthys was most likely Lac Minerals Ltd. v. International Corona Resources Ltd. before the Supreme Court of Canada. The decision basically wrote the book on fiduciary duty at the time and was then the largest civil award in Canadian history.

It's a case that's also dear to his heart and he cites it as one of the most challenging he's worked on.

"The challenge was, it was a fairly undeveloped part of the law, the area of fiduciary duty, at the time. Asking the judge for a huge reward, that was a challenge. They were psychological more than anything else."

Controversial and ground-breaking cases like that have contributed to Lenczner's stellar career, and garnered the profession's attention.