In the summer of 1976 I began practicing law in the Town of Almonte with Messrs. Galligan and Sheffield Barrs &c. I was the new guy on the block. It was about that time I first met Cindy Edmonds, then a young legal assistant at the office of Paul D. Courtice LLB in nearby Town of Carleton Place. Cindy and a number of other legal types (lawyers and legal assistants) had invited me to join them for a beer and munchies at a popular pub overlooking the Mississippi River. Though my memory is not perfectly clear, my recollection of the entire congregation is predominantly Cindy’s captivating sense of humour (something which to this day she has thankfully never abandoned). It would however require a year or two before I became acquainted with Cindy’s more celebrated stamp as an expert legal assistant.

From the time of my graduation from law school when I articled with a large law firm on Sparks Street in Ottawa, I learned that legal assistants often appeared to know more than the lawyers for whom they worked. Naturally the legal assistants hadn’t the credentials equivalent to that of a member of the Law Society of Upper Canada. Yet the superlative nature of their contribution to the daily mechanics of a law office afforded the legal assistants an aura of indispensability.

Cindy was notable throughout Lanark County for her focussed work.  When Paul D. Courtice retired from the practice of law it was no surprise that she was straight away absorbed into the local current of legal practitioners, specifically the highly reputed office of N. Alan Jones LLB.

Al and I were confrères at Osgoode Hall in 1975 when we were both called to the Bar. It is no embarrassment to me to acknowledge that the office of N. Alan Jones was far busier than my own. Undeniably the source of some of that gusto resided in the professionalism of people like Cindy who assisted him in the practice.

This afternoon – 46 years later – I chanced to speak on the telephone with N. Alan Jones LLB. After conducting the usual ceremony of enquiry into one’s health and the weather, the conversation descended to the more enlivening detail of last man standing.  As though by design we summarized who among us was no longer current. Al and I concur that he is likely senior counsel in the Bar for the entire County of Lanark. With one conspicuous exception everyone else among our contemporaries is gone or retired.  The exception is Cindy Edmonds.

Here I am afraid to say Al suffered a sudden lapse into the vernacular. He stopped mid-stream in his narrative. With what I am certain was a gleam in his eye, he added, “But I insist Cindy is only the second best lawyer in Carleton Place!”