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Harris Rosen is the Principal Lawyer at Harris Rosen Professional Corporation. He graduated with an LL.B. from the University of Ottawa in 1992. Harris specializes in higher education law, and provides legal services to investors, career colleges, ESL schools, corporate trainers, degree granters, law firms, & private high schools.
To be a change-maker where change is desirable and to make my small contribution to the democratic process. More specifically, I have always had a deep-rooted belief in the idea that for all great democracies to survive and thrive, they have to be nations “of law, not of men”, as expressed eloquently by John Adams, the Second President of the United States. Laws maintain civility in an otherwise lawless society.
It has been thirty-five years since I applied to law school! The benefit of hindsight tells me that I wish I had better understood the nuances in the application processes among different jurisdictions and the bases for those nuances. For example, do law schools in the UK take a closer look at the individual versus “objective” LSAT scores? If so, why? There were only 16 law schools in Canada at the time I applied, i.e. a small fish bowl, and the process was relatively homogenous for each. I received an admission from a top UK-based school but had to interview in London before receiving an admission. My mother had terminal cancer, and I opted to remain in Canada to complete my law degree. It was a rigorous education and high-value credential to receive in Canada,, and I don’t regret it.
I honestly cannot remember, given the years that have passed! However, I have a rule that I live by when it comes to writing or speaking: nothing is more powerful than sincerity. Put another way, be authentic. Let the world know who you are. If you’ve come this far where you are a contender to get into a law school, you’ve got your own style, your own passions, your own hobbies, your own brand, your own authenticity. Show it, convey it. Celebrate it. Who you are is likely more interesting than who you subjectively believe interviewers want you to be.
I scored very well on the LSAT, but my score in the “Logic Games” section was underwhelming. I was not as mathematically gifted as many others who wrote the LSAT.
My work experience was not extensive, and none of it was law-related. I did work as a tennis teaching pro for several summers at a young age. Any discipline I apply today in my capacity as a lawyer, husband, and father of three didn’t come from law school. It came from hitting a little green ball back and forth over the net. If you are a disciplined athlete or musician, you may already have a leg up in the application process and not know it. Be confident that this will help you. While I was a capital partner for many years in a larger Toronto law firm, my own bias favored the hiring of athletes and accomplished musicians. At least, those attributes did not hurt in hte eyes of many hiring partners.
I had many setbacks in the admissions process. While I got into a law school with a global footprint outside of Canada, many Canadian schools rejected my application. In the end, this was a good lesson for me because once in law school, students no longer stand out: you have extraordinary achievements, and so do all of your peers. If you are too afraid of rejection, don’t apply to law school. Rejection is ubiquitous once you are a practicing lawyer. If you are a corporate lawyer, you’ll have difficult negotiations. If you’re a litigator, you won’t always win cases, and you’ll be humbled routinely by judges. My message is that rejection is character-building. Embrace it. It makes you stronger. You’re still “alive” and maybe even thriving the day after tomorrow despite all that rejection in your rearview mirror.
Nothing short of an accident, albeit a “good” one, if I am honest with you. A retired Legal Director at the Ministry of Education had returned to private practice, bored to tears with the concept of “retirement.” He mentored, advising me to start representing private career colleges here in Canada – known as career schools in the United States. To which I literally replied, “what’s a private career college? … what’s a career school?”. More than two decades later, I have co-authored two legal textbooks with one of the world’s largest legal publishers and with that same mentor! A former Prime Minister of Canada wrote the Foreword to our latest edition, and I have had the good fortune of being a trusted authority in this area.
These are vocational training institutions that train pilots, truck drivers, paramedics, denturists and personal service workers, to name a few. The labor market demand in Canada and the United States screams out for vocational training because our workforce is aging. The graduates of my clients’ programs transport food to your table, fix your roof, resuscitate you in an ambulance, and fly your planes. And that’s just scratching the surface.
When I started in this arena, I represented many institutions who were in jeopardy of losing their license to run a private college. I was the emergency ward to a lot of questionable schools. These days I spend as much time representing top-tier investor groups in the space or law firms to which I am regulatory counsel on transactional higher education deals.
I feel that the mistake many young lawyers make is placing too much emphasis on knowing the law versus knowing enough about their clients, stakeholders, and the industry they are representing. An industry-specific approach will get you further. Get to know the people. Get to know their pain points so that you can be a “fixer” or at least mitigate their problems. Get to know what motivates them. Maybe what motivates them is generating enough enrollment to have a stratospheric valuation. But maybe what motivates them is simpler than that. Case in point: I represented one of Canada’s largest transport training schools not long ago. When I asked the owner what motivated him to start his business, he said, “I like to drive”! He built a business that today could be worth nine figures but which is at least a healthy eight-figure business because he liked to drive. Also, focus on sectors with high demand for growth. Transport Training is one of them (15% to 20% of the private career college sector is comprised of Transport Training schools), Personal Service Workers and Denturism are two more examples: the entire North American demographic is aging.
Focus on AI and how it will be regulated with respect to Education. This will be a monster to tackle because it subsumes academic dishonesty issues and what constitutes permitted “collaboration,” curriculum mapping, micro-credential badging (getting a fast credential by learning a skill-set that is in demand in a dynamic, changing environment).
I graduated $60,000 in debt after law school in 1992. My mother had terminal cancer and died during my first year of law school, and I had to write my final exams in the summer of 1990 after all my colleagues had finished.
There is no amount of money that you could pay me to take the LSAT again!!!
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