35 Years, 35 Voices: Meet Adam Wagman
35 Years, 35 Voices highlights the members who have contributed to the Ontario Trial Lawyers Associations (OTLA) growth, strengthened access to justice and supported a collaborative plaintiff-side community across Ontario over the past 35 years.
Meet Adam Wagman, OTLA Past President and member since 2000.
Member Profile
Name: Adam Wagman
Firm: Howie, Sacks & Henry
Year called to the bar: 1996
Joined OTLA: 2000
We asked Adam to reflect on his time with OTLA, the role the association has played in his career and what being part of the OTLA community means to him.
What motivated you to join?
In 1994 when I started my career in personal injury law as an articling student, smartphones and the internet as we know it were not really a thing. I still had a typewriter on my desk. If you wanted to learn and network, you had to do it face to face. I wanted to do both and OTLA was the perfect place for that!
Do you have a memorable OTLA moment or story you’d like to share?
My most memorable stories took place towards the beginning and the end of my involvement with the OTLA Board. My first attempt to join the Board was in 2003. As I sat outside of the Board meeting waiting for my turn to make my election pitch, I became friends with one of the other candidates, Judith Hull. We bet a beer on the outcome of the election. She won, I lost and I bought her that beer.
A few years later, Judith and Richard Halpern approached me. They suggested that it was time for me to run again. Their support and encouragement was all that I needed and the rest is history. I am blessed to have spent almost a decade on the Board.
Many years later, I had the honour to host the Celebration of the Personal Injury Bar as the President of OTLA. Not only did I get to share the stage with the award recipients and my good friends, Jim Vigmond and Paul Tushinski, but my kids got all dressed up and watched me interact with hundreds of lawyers at the dinner. It was the first time that they witnessed the camaraderie of the bar that I had talked so much about, the respect that we have for each other and the friendships that OTLA has helped us all to forge. They learned some very important life lessons that night and gained a much deeper understanding of why I wasn’t home for dinner all the time! It was a night that my family still talks about to this day.
How has OTLA influenced your practice or contributed to your career growth?
I would not be the lawyer, or the person, that I am today without OTLA. I learned professionalism from lawyers like Paul Harte and Ron Bohm, who led the OTLA Code initiative. I learned advocacy from some of the best litigators to have stepped into a courtroom like Barb Legate and Richard Shekter.
I became friends with the Presidents who preceded me and who I served with, like Judith Hull, Russ Howe, Steve Rastin, Maia Bent, Pat Brown, Dale Orlando, Claire Wilkinson, Charles Gluckstein and so many others. I got to spend time with the legends – John McLeish, Dermot Nolan, Greg Monforton, Stephen Firestone and so many more. I also had the rare pleasure to sit on the Board with my close high school friend Allen Wynperle. As the two of us, underage semi-delinquents, were hiding our childhood wrongs from our families, no one could have predicted that decades later we would both be Presidents of the leading trial lawyers association in this country.
I am blessed to have had this experience and I am no doubt a better lawyer as a result. I cannot thank OTLA enough for these opportunities and I was privileged to be able to give something back to the organization as a Board member and later as a President of OTLA.
What advice would you give to new OTLA members or lawyers just starting out?
My advice to young lawyers is to get involved! Put up your hand. Volunteer. Join the Board or join a committee. Meet as many lawyers as you can and soak up as much advice from them as you can. The benefits that you reap will be many times the effort that you invest. You cannot truly succeed in this profession on your own. The OTLA community is here to help!