For Andrea St. Bernard, law has always been a passion, as has competitive sports. But rather than choose between the two, she’s managed to find room for both in her life — although it’s a tricky balance. St. Bernard is an associate at McMillan LLP in Toronto as well as a third-degree black belt in taekwondo who has qualified to represent her native Grenada at this summer’s London 2012 Olympic Games.

Growing up, she would watch the Olympics with her family and imagine being there — doing whatever sport she happened to be doing at the time. But she didn’t start taekwondo because she saw it as an avenue to the Olympics. At some point along the way, the Olympics became a goal within reach.

But St. Bernard also had a passion for the law. Before she went to law school, friends who she hadn’t seen in years would ask her when she was going to do “the whole law thing.” After attending Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pa., on a volleyball scholarship, she pursued business law at the University of Toronto. During her time at U of T, St. Bernard discovered martial arts — about eight months before starting law school. “I’ve always been interested in martial arts, but hadn’t found the opportunity or right coach and situation,” she tells Canadian Lawyer, admitting she was a relatively latecomer to the sport. “I was comfortably ready to move on from volleyball having done it for many years and quite possibly reached the height of my volleyball career.”

With volleyball, her options were limited: She could either play for the national team or pursue a career in Europe, where the sport is more popular. But volleyball is also a team sport that requires a commitment to scheduling, which wasn’t something St. Bernard could do through law school. She met a taekwondo coach through family and tried out a class at Young Choung Taekwondo Academy in Toronto. During her first class, someone held a target for her and told her to kick it. She started kicking, and hasn’t stopped.

On a physical level, taekwondo requires strength, balance, and speed. But it also requires mental focus and discipline, and helps to build confidence. “I fell in love with the sport,” says St. Bernard.

At the time, the club was home to several members of Canada’s national taekwondo team, so from the start, she could take high-level classes. Even though she didn’t have a background in the sport, with her volleyball experience, she was athletic enough to move with the class. “It was kick or get kicked, [and] I was getting kicked a lot. Eventually you kick back or you go home. I kept going,” she says.

It’s something she has managed to fit into an unorthodox schedule, although it can be tough. She had a major competition the weekend before her first law school exam. “It was crazy. Having gone through university as a varsity athlete and getting all the privileges of a varsity athlete, this was different. I was a complete beginner, and I was going to be late for exams because I was going to some competition.”

She joined McMillan as a summer student and in her interview  was honest that competitive taekwondo was something she was going to pursue alongside law. Fortunately, the firm thought it was “awesome,” she says, even though that was not everyone’s initial reaction (generally more along the lines of, “When are you going to focus on what you should really be doing?”). The firm even extended her articling by three weeks so she could compete. “McMillan gave me the opportunity,” said St. Bernard. “I tend to work hard at everything I do, so as long as the work was good and the hours were there, they had no problem with me pursuing [taekwondo].”

St. Bernard has been with the firm since 2006 when she was called to the bar. As a member of the debt products group, she acts for lenders and borrowers in a variety of debt financing transactions, from corporate lending to debtor-in-possession financing. She also completed a secondment at the Ontario Securities Commission’s corporate finance branch during her articles with the firm.

During law school and for the first five years of her practice, St. Bernard would work during the day and train at night. “There were many nights where I was in the midst of a deal where work had to be done but I had a competition coming up and I had to train,” she says. “So there’s a constant pull.” But she’s always participated in some sort of competitive activity, so she makes it work. “There are a few 24-hour gyms in Toronto, so I do crazy things at crazy hours, I go with the flow a lot,” she says. “I do have to and need the benefit of the unit to be able to spar and do technical training, so I try to commit to regular evening classes at Young Choung,”  which  means sometimes heading back to the office late at night after a training session.

Now that she’s chasing the Olympics, St. Bernard has taken time off from law to focus on training (from two to eight hours a day). And while Toronto is still an important hub, she’s also training in Grenada and Cuba.

Taekwondo is quite new to the Olympics, and only 16 athletes compete in each of the four female divisions. She will compete in the under-67 kilograms sparring division. It’s her “last hurrah” at this competitive level, she says, and afterward plans to go back to the law and take it from there. “I’m enjoying the full-time athlete life but the grass is always greener,” she laughs. “I enjoy the practice of law and want to return to the practice of law.”

St. Bernard enjoys the nature of banking work, which she admits sounds odd to most people. “But you find your niche. There are a lot of negative or tough things that come with it — it is a tough profession [but] I enjoy the challenge.” It also involves both teamwork and independent work — much like the sport of taekwondo. “It doesn’t keep me in any type of box. . . . I’m always doing something different. I really enjoy the feeling of having accomplished something that seemed impossible,” she says of her law career — a statement that could equally apply to martial arts.

The greatest challenge of her job, she says, is finding work-life balance. “In more positive, lucrative economic times, it’s hard to stop and enjoy life and not just get sucked into the flow,” she points out. “Myself and many lawyers tend to have the type of personality to try to do more and more and more. The challenge is to slow down sometimes and not try to conquer the world every day.”

Perhaps not every day, but this summer in London, St. Bernard will indeed set out to conquer the world.

Despite efforts to give it away, it seems that no one wants Jim Balsillie’s money.

In the wake of his failed attempt to purchase the Phoenix Coyotes NHL team, Balsillie has been rejected again — this time by Canadian universities.

Last week, York University turned down a $30-million offer from Balsillie’s Centre for International Governance Innovation to establish a school in international relations and 10 research chairs in international law — which would have been matched by the Ontario government with an additional $30 million.

Dozens of York professors argued the deal would threaten the university’s academic freedom, and on April 2, Osgoode Hall Law School’s faculty council voted 34-7, with eight abstentions, against it.

In a statement, York provost Patrick Monahan expressed his disappointment: “We believe this initiative held tremendous opportunity and promise for the university. We also believe that, with CIGI’s full co-operation and support, we had developed an academic governance framework that would have provided strong protection for academic freedom and institutional autonomy.”

In a letter to The National Post, Osgoode professors Gus Van Harten and Stepan Wood wrote: “The deal would have channelled public and private funding to the university through an external gatekeeper, with unprecedented strings attached. . . . CIGI had alarming rights regarding appointment, renewal, and termination of faculty. York’s obligations to give CIGI a role in academic affairs were enforceable in binding arbitration, but CIGI’s commitments to protect academic freedom were not.

“Private funders must recognize that there are important limits to what they can request in exchange for money. Serious academic institutions will ensure the limits are respected,” they added.

The University of Ottawa is among those “serious academic institutions” since last year it also backed out of a potential deal with CIGI. Louis de Melo, uOttawa’s vice president external relations, says in that case it wasn’t a matter of academic freedom, but rather the long-term sustainability of the agreement.

CIGI’s proposal would have provided funding for 10 years, but de Melo says the university wouldn’t be able to sustain the program in the long term.

“We just decided that as much as we’d like the deal to happen, the conditions weren’t fully there for it to be a successful one for both parties,” he says.

To ensure the success of a deal with the private sector, de Melo offers his advice: “You need to have very clear guiding principles from Day 1 to ensure that both parties really understand what they’re getting into.”

It’s also important to have a solid framework to protect both parties, he adds. The University of Ottawa has a specific designation policy to determine how to handle private donations. And support from the faculty is essential.

“In order for a gift to be productive and to be effective, you have to ensure that your internal champions buy into it,” he says.

He notes many universities have had success with donations from the private sector. Last year, the University of British Columbia received an $11.86-million donation from alumnus Peter Allard, which helped build its new law school building. The University of Toronto recently received donations worth more than $2 million each from law firms Osler Hoskin & Harcourt LLP and Torys LLP to help with its new law school building project.

And with the increasing lack of government funding to post-secondary institutions, de Melo says private donations are becoming critical. However, he warns against accepting donations to fill a void.

“I think we need to be very careful that we don’t see private donations . . . as a replacement for budget operations, but rather to what will enhance the academic mission of the university or the research mission of the university.”

Law students know that it is hard to get a C (or worse) on written work. Most law schools have something approximating a B curve and most grades are in this range. Most law professors don’t like giving law students low grades. However, some students work very hard to obtain low marks on writing assignments. I want to share their secrets with you so that you too can obtain a C (or maybe even a D!) on your next paper. If you want to avoid such a fate, the information below will also be particularly useful.

1. Spell my name wrong

Nothing puts a professor in a bad state of mind quicker than seeing his or her name spelled wrong on the first page of the assignment. Try “Dodeck” or “Dodk” or one of my various nicknames like “Dodekian” or “Dodecanese” (the later is a group of Greek Islands I believe).

Spelling the professor’s name wrong is quite the feat, after all. It appears on every document and every web site associated with the course. The professor works hard to learn the names of 20, 40, or 60 students in his or her class. You only have to learn one name: the professor’s. So spelling his or her name wrong is quite a challenge.

If you are effectively able to do this, you will successfully communicate to the professor a cavalier attitude to your paper worthy of a poor grade. In fact, you will immediately put the professor in a “D”-stabilized state of mind and even if the rest of the paper is superb, you will force the professor to overcome this very negative first impression. Way to go!

2. Get the name of your textbook wrong

Since No. 1 is so challenging, you may have more success in getting the name of your textbook wrong. After all, you don’t actually see this person. Who is this “Hoeg” character anyway? Is his text Constitution Law of Canada, Constitutional Low of Canada or heck, why not Constitutional Law of Canadian? Who cares anyways? We all know that details don’t really matter in law. Try to compound this error by repeating it throughout your paper in multiple footnotes or even better within the text.

3. Don’t follow the rules

This is one of my favourites. Nothing gets my attention more than a student who completely disregards the rules that I set out in the syllabus or in the assignment and that I have probably repeated at least twice in class. I also teach public law and that whole rule of law thing. Why should the rules apply to every student in the class? You are special! Indeed you are, gunning for that C. You are well on your way.

4. Bury your thesis statement

Notice that I made this No. 4 and not No. 1 so that you had to work hard to find it. In order to get a low grade, the best place to bury your thesis statement is in the fourth sentence of a page-long paragraph on page 3 of a five-page assignment. I will have to work very hard to find your thesis there. With any luck, I won’t even notice that it is your thesis statement. Whatever you do, don’t put your thesis statement in the first paragraph or worst yet, as the first sentence. Effective lawyers know that the first line in a factum is “This case is about . . . .” Don’t be effective if you want to get a C.

5. Make me read a sentence three times to understand it

The tortuous nature of your sentence is inversely proportional to the grade to which you are likely to be attributed on your written work; to wit, it will be a low one. What the hell was that? I don’t know and often I feel the same way when I read a convoluted sentence in written work.

6. Regurgitate what I said in class or what’s in the text

Law school is different than undergrad. It is about analysis. If you want to remind your professor that you haven’t quite got that point, make sure to have as little analysis as possible in your written work and just summarize what was said in class or in your text.

7. Don’t proofread your wookie

Damn! I can’t believe spell check didn’t catch that one! I meant “work,” not “wookie.” Typos telegraph to the reader that you haven’t taken your work seriously so why should the professor? If employed successfully and strategically, typos can even drag down very strong substantive arguments. Good lack with thsi won.

8. The passive voice will be used as much as possible

In this paper herein before this honourable professor, it will be argued that the effectiveness of writing will be weakened by the employment of the passive voice. Wow! I impressed myself by how horrible that sentence is. Not a single active verb. You get the picture.

Law school is hard. Getting consistently poor marks on written work can be a real challenge. But if you employ most of the strategies above, I can virtually guarantee you that there’s a strong likelihood of your getting very poor marks on written work. Or you can avoid these traps and head on the road to becoming a strong legal writer.

Adam Dodek is an associate professor at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law (Common Law Section). He is the co-founder with professor Ellen Zweibel of the faculty’s Legal Writing Academy. He hates giving students Cs but some students outsmart him and he is left with no choice.