Kevin Butler and Lori Monk’s love story reads like a law school fairy tale. They met here at UBC in 1990, fell in love, got married on a shoestring budget, and are still happily together and living in Grand Cayman, more than two decades later. They have a healthy eleven-year old daughter, recently finished building a second home in the beautiful Muskoka region of Ontario, travel all over the world and volunteer their spare time with a literacy organization.
Kevin and Lori spoke with Your Alumni News about life, law school, choices, and how one seemingly small decision can change the trajectory of one’s life.
How did the opportunity to move abroad come about?
Lori: A friend of ours from law school was Bermudian, and she’d gone back to Bermuda, and a few of us went on vacation to Bermuda because, why not? So when we were there, she introduced us to a bunch of lawyers, and they said, ‘you know, if you have a commonwealth country law degree, you can work here.’ And we just sort of thought, ‘like that’ll happen because people are beating down the door to work here,’ and it turns out that they weren’t. When a job at her firm came up, which is the firm Kevin’s still at, she called and said ‘why don’t you apply?’
Then when they offered him [Kevin] the job we just really thought, ‘we might hate it but we’ll kick ourselves if we don’t try it.’ And it turned out that we enjoyed being offshore, and there you go. We moved towards the end of 1997 and while we were there I switched to in-house corporate law which was quite a change from litigation. I was the vice-president and in-house counsel at the Bank of Bermuda for six years and that bank is now part of HSBC.
What was the motivation for relocating to Bermuda from Vancouver (aside from the obvious)?
Kevin: When the job offer came, we thought, okay, it’s sunny, there is nice weather, no taxes, and it’s not quite as heavy a workload as at my previous firms. So we couldn’t say no. We thought we would take the adventure and it’s worked out really well.
Lori: There was also an economic benefit at the time, the Canadian dollar was doing quite poorly, even worse than it is at the moment, actually, against the American dollar, and when we went to Bermuda we were paid in U.S. dollars, and we both had massive, massive student loans because we both worked and paid our own way through school, so it was a real benefit that way too. We just looked at the opportunity to pay off our loans really quickly and live in a tropical paradise. It was just a no-brainer really!
Would you recommend living abroad to other lawyers or law students?
Lori: It’s not for everyone. You need to have a certain level of experience before you can look at going international. Both Bermuda and Cayman are similar in size, 55 to 60,000 people so it’s kind of a small town. It’s not urban, and if you thrive on downtown, Bay Street, or Georgia Street in Vancouver, it’s difficult for people to survive here, because it’s very small. But it’s more relaxed, it’s very family-friendly, and there is a bit more of a work-life balance.
How do you think your life is different than it would have been had you stayed in Vancouver, or in Canada?
Lori: We sometimes talk about what would have happened if we’d stayed in Vancouver. I think both of us probably would have had a career change at some point, or at least a shift. Like Kevin said, he was at a fantastic firm, but he was killing himself there. Whether he would have lasted through to partnership, I don’t know.
I enjoyed my litigation practice but it was also hard work, and eventually, once you have a family, you have to make some decisions about where you’re going to live and how you’re going to manage your career, so I don’t know where we would have ended up. It’s hard to say. I was writing a book when we left, I was working on a practice manual for small claims court, so I was even starting to move towards, I don’t want to say academic because that’s not the right way to say it but I was looking at doing other things already, and I don’t know that both of us would have stayed on the path we were on. It’s hard to say though.
Kevin: I suspect, having both grown up in smaller towns, we may have looked at moving out of Vancouver, maybe to the Okanagan or somewhere like that. I wouldn’t be surprised if I would have ended up with more of an in-house position at a small firm and Lori becoming a judge or something like that. But one little decision changes your entire life.
What motivates you to stay connected to the school?
Lori: I think it comes from a number of things. I did my undergraduate degree at UBC, so I’m a bit of a lifer, I spent a lot of time there, and I think for both of us it was a launching pad of sorts. We both look back at law school incredibly fondly, I think from every perspective, socially, academically, the connections that we’ve made.
We still count amongst our very best friends several people that we met in law school. So we’re still quite close to a lot of our classmates. And then, we had agreed, once we could afford to, that we should support students. Both of us were the lucky beneficiaries of bursaries and scholarships when we were at UBC and at the law school and I think we both felt an obligation, or a duty – and it’s something we’re happy to do – to give back and support other students who are in the same boat that we were in, and had it not been for loans and bursaries I wouldn’t have able to go to law school, so I’m very acutely aware of that, and I think so is Kevin.
And then sadly it came to the fore when a really, really dear friend and classmate of ours died, almost seven years ago right about now, and really the best way to honour his spirit was to set up a bursary, so that’s what we did with one of our other classmates. He was mister law school, he was the glue; he was just one of those people who was everybody’s friend. Then that bursary was starting to run its course when the Class of ’93 Memorial Bursary was set up, so it just made sense to merge those two together. It was something we had always intended to do and that just gave us a kick to do it in a really big way.
Do you have any advice for law students today or other law alumni?
Lori: If there’s one thing that made an impression on me in law school, it was a professor who is not there anymore, who gave us a lecture that he called ‘taking the blinders off’ and we got a really a good understanding that law school is not a means to an end, it’s just a springboard, and there are so many ways that that education can take you. So I think I would remind students that it’s so easy to develop tunnel vision and to think, ‘I have to be a trial lawyer or a corporate lawyer, and there’s really nothing else, I have to go a private firm and become a partner, and that’s the definition of success,’ and it’s so much more than that.
And the more you spend time in the profession and the more you see people move around, and unfortunately it’s a difficult profession and people drop out, particularly women, but you see how many opportunities it opens up and there’s so many things you can do with a law school education and it’s so easy to get that tunnel vision and you really have to work hard to keep from doing that, and to remember that you have skills and you have talent before you even get to law school. And law school just adds to them. There are so many great in-house jobs, and political jobs and all kinds of neat things one can do.
I think when you see our class, who are 20 years out now, and some of the things they’re doing – all the things they’re doing are remarkable and when you’re in law school you just don’t have a feel for that, you know, how many different directions it can take you. So I would certainly recommend people to just keep an open mind about where it can take them.
Kevin: The professor Lori mentioned said that because it’s a stressful profession, ‘dust off your CV every six months, no matter how long you’ve been at a place,’ and I do that. It keeps it up to date, and it makes you think, am I really happy? And if you’re happy in your job, then your home life and marriage is going to be a lot happier too. For anyone who’s in a job that they hate, and especially if it’s a stressful job, you’re going to take that home, and then your relationship is not working out. It really is important to make sure that you’re happy and doing what you want to do. And having a law degree is such a fantastic education, you can do anything with it, you don’t have to just be, as Lori said, a partner at a big firm, you can do tons of things with it.
Lori: It’s truly not an endgame. It’s a starting point, not a finishing point.