“I’ve been wanting to be a lawyer since I was a kid. Nobody in my family or relatives were shocked whatsoever when I became a lawyer…People want to be cops, firemen, others asked me ‘What do you wanna be?’ ‘I wanna be a lawyer.’ I always did. – TJ Dhillon, Coca-Cola delivery trucker, real estate lawyer, car enthusiast, immigrant, father, Class of 1997.
TJ Dhillon was born in India before immigrating to Canada at the age of 2. He grew up on a farm in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley, and first came to the University of British Columbia to obtain an undergraduate degree in Science. Sick of being a poor student, Mr. Dhillon worked for 3 years as delivery trucker for Coca-cola, transporting Coke bottles to convenience stores all over lower mainland. Having saved enough money for school and to buy a car, a 1969 Firebird, he enrolled at UBC in law in 1994.
He remembers days of playing foosball in Magda’s cafeteria and studying first year torts from Professor Burns in the Curtis Building. “It was like having an ugly dog,” he reflects on the building’s concrete bunker aesthetic, “after a while you start to say ‘I love the fact that dog is ugly.” By the time TJ Dhillon graduated in 1997, he’d been covered with old milk in the Trike race, finished an exchange term in Copenhagen, and hosted numerous post-beer-up socials at his shared house off-campus. There must have been time for a little studying in there, because TJ received multiple offers for articles.
Finding articles was no less stressful in 1997, but more so for TJ Dhillon, who continued to work to pay his way through law school. When interviews for articles came around, he was required to work nights at the Wheat Pool in order to keep his job. When he had to leave a dinner event hosted by Lindsay Kenney to get to work on time, the partners were impressed by his attitude to hard work. In the end, the firm offered him a position and TJ Dhillon completed his articles at Lindsay Kenney LLP.
In addition to being called to the bar in BC, Mr. Dhillon is also a member of the bar of Ontario. He practiced in Toronto beginning in the year 2000, as corporate in-house counsel for Husky Injection systems. He never planned to work in corporate affairs, but remembers “the job, it came with a six figure salary and a company car, so I said ‘yes, I will be your director of corporate affairs.’”
After working in-house for several years, TJ moved back to British Columbia to be closer to his family, settling in South Surrey and focusing his practice on real estate conveyancing. He believes that this led to the case that his is proudest achievement. A realtor, administrating an estate, contacted him to convey some property, but something seemed odd. TJ tried to get in touch with the beneficiary, but “all I knew was her address and a name in England, so I used Google maps street view to look.” With a bit more work, he got lucky, “there’s a pub down the street so I called the pub...her [the beneficiary’s] son comes in there to drink almost every day.” In the end, his action helped stopped the realtor from defrauding the beneficiary of hundreds of thousands of dollars. He never sent a bill to the family.
While his fulfilling legal career has taken him from Vancouver to Toronto to Germany and digitally to England, TJ Dhillon greatest fulfillment comes from his family. He admits “the three greatest days of my life were my marriage, and the birth of my two children.” He laments the profession for cost to families and the mistake of business, and faces the challenge of a busy schedule by structuring his work around his family, saying of his kids “they’ll be 20 soon enough, they won’t want to be around me. But when they want to be around me, I make myself available. Period.”