External counsel a good bet when lacking in-house experience

External counsel a good bet when lacking in-house experience

December 31, 2007

When Toronto litigator Matthew Urback tells people his first university degree was in math, most are surprised and curious as to how that prepared him for a career in law.

As an undergraduate, he worked for a professor who had degrees in both disciplines.

“It's not that apparent, but he helped me realize how math and the law can overlap,” Urback, an associate with Shibley Righton LLP, tells AdvocateDaily.com.

“They share a logic-based approach,” he says. “It's the way of thinking and the analytical basis.”

Set on the path to law, Urback was then faced with the decision of practice area.

“When I started working as a lawyer, I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he says. “So, I started applying to firms that had a broad practice, so I could try different types of law.”

During his articles with Shibley Righton LLP, which he joined as an associate in 2011, he took an interest in various areas. He enjoyed advocacy, so litigation was a natural home.

Today, Urback practices civil and commercial litigation, with a focus on wills and estates, employment law and professional liability.

“I’ve kept it pretty broad,” he says.

He has appeared before the Ontario Court of Appeal as well as various courts of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, including the Estates List, Commercial List and small claims court.

Urback also enjoys writing about legal issues, continuing the work he did as a columnist for the law school newspaper during his studies at Queen’s University, where he was also president of his graduating class. He recently penned a piece for the Ontario Bar Association about social media and digital assets.

“The articles are often inspired by an issue or a problem in my practice,” he says. “Usually, it begins when I don’t the answer.”

That search for solutions and constructing strong theories inform all of his practice, but especially the estates area, which is a more recent addition to Urback’s general litigation practice.

“In many estate litigation matters, you are dealing with a bit of a mystery,” he says. “So you’re trying to reconstruct the broken glass after the fact, but without the help of the designer,” Urback says.

Unlike in math, where there is one provable answer, there isn’t a definitive right and wrong in estates law.

“You can have theories that might seem more correct than others. But you can never really know,” he says. “I like that because there’s isn’t necessarily ‘the’ answer.”

Urback recounts an interesting recent case that reads like a Hollywood movie plot. The deceased, a woman without any close family, made a formal will in the early 2000s that left all her more than $10-million estate to various charities. After she passed away, however, her caregiver presented a handwritten will drafted years later, during a time when the woman had begun to suffer from dementia, in which the entire estate is left to the caregiver.

Each side argued their will was the legitimate one.

“That was your classic competing wills case,” says Urback, who represented the charities named in the original will.

“There was a great deal happening in that one,” he says. “Ultimately it was settled.”

Urback’s focus on employment law evolved from early in his career, when he began defending people who had been wrongly dismissed.

“That was more about a call to justice, and looking for compensation to right a wrong,” he says. “So that appealed to me in a different way, in a human interest kind of way, rather than analytical.”

Rounding out his practice, Urback’s professional negligence work allows him to leverage the kind of critical thinking and analysis he enjoys so much.

Whatever practice area he’s working in, he takes a collaborative approach whenever possible.

“I try to find a solution, and quickly,” Urback says. “I think that’s always the best and most cost-efficient way.

"In some practice areas, particularly wills and estates, there is good collegiality within the bar, as well as mandatory mediation rules requiring sides to seek out-of-court settlements due to backlogs, and because, for most people, the costs of litigation are debilitating.

“When you put that all together, the natural inclination is to say, let’s deal with our conflicts quickly and efficiently, out of court,” Urback adds. “In the other scenario, when you go to trial, sometimes it’s just the lawyers who win.”