Bill Reynolds - Life Real Loud - John Lefebvre, Neteller and the Revolution in Online Gambling

Lefebvre stuck it out at McCaffery for a couple of years. He was invited to a Bar admission party for a guy at another firm, Black and Company, in November 1984, and he bumped into a woman named Jane Bergman. She had been two years behind him at U of C law school and was now articling at Black. Lefebvre was larger than life and friendly at school — difficult for a woman not to notice, really — and they had said hi occasionally. At the Bar party, showing panache, he had put on eyeliner for the occasion. She noticed him, again.

“I was eating a cookie and John came up to me and said, ‘Why don’t you just slap that right on your hips?’ Not being particularly large-breasted, I put one on my bosom and said, ‘I’d rather put it here.’ And that was it.”

Six months later, Lefebvre and Bergman were living together at 802-B Memorial Drive, a condo they rented and then bought. They both switched firms, Lefebvre to Burstall, where he continued to chafe, this time practicing real estate law, and Bergman to Dome, before deciding to go out on her own. “I was doing part-time in the office and working from the house and it just didn’t feel right, so I was the one that initiated it. ‘I’d like to start a more formal practice.’ John said, ‘I’m coming, let’s do it.’”

That was the beginning of the pair’s adventure in street-level law. They found a great location, a former art gallery space on Tenth Street NW, a storefront located in one of the only Calgary neighborhoods that remotely might be called bohemian. Just outside Calgary’s corporate downtown core, its main drag even today is a laid-back stretch of coffeehouses and restaurants, not quite overrun by yuppie stores, with a family-owned bike shop and one of the longest-running used vinyl shops.

Bergman and Lefebvre had a business plan involving bringing the law to the people, but they had no money. The Bank of Nova Scotia initially agreed to lend them start-up capital before backing out because the couple had no financial history. The project looked stillborn. Even Lefebvre said, “We’re screwed.” Then Bergman’s parents came to their rescue and financed them with a lien on their house. Bergman was sick with worry until the loan was fully repaid. Lefebvre tried to calm her nerves: it will work out, don’t worry.

“John’s always been the pirate,” says Greene. “He gets out there and just goes for it. And sometimes that’s worked for him and sometimes it hasn’t.” Actually, more often than not it hasn’t worked out. And perhaps never worked out until he made one dramatic play when everyone else was staring at the horizon, seeing retirement and wondering what they were going to do with themselves and if they would have enough money saved to do it. Most people who knew Lefebvre and thought he was a great guy probably figured he was just one of those misfits whose plans would continuously misfire.

Theirs was a good balance — Bergman was careful and Lefebvre wasn’t. She called herself the “peasant girl,” saying she came from low means, that her father was a house painter and her mother didn’t work, so she was naturally cautious about money. Later, Lefebvre would remember this about her and ask her to help him out with Neteller.

In 1987, a popular Canadian television series called Street Legal , which portrayed a small Toronto law firm, began its run. It was the sort of business Bergman had in mind when she said she didn’t want to answer to anybody. Lefebvre was probably thinking more about being funky and different, more New York. They found a designer who gave them an idea they thought was fresh — bringing the street front into the office. “There was a street inside the building,” Bergman says. “There was a park and we had a park bench and a light and plants and then the offices were little houses down the side. We had the boardroom, a burgundy-colored house with a blue roof.”

“It was a really cool office to hang out in, thanks to John’s aesthetic sense,” says Greene, who joined the founders after returning from Europe. “It was designed to make you feel like you were on the main street of a small town, because the offices looked like little shops.” There was also a trap door to a dank basement, which is where Lefebvre would go for a toke. Maybe not too often — the customers were right upstairs, and there were grates.

Lefebvre and Bergman wanted to be regular-guy lawyers, with hours like medical clinics, nine to nine Monday to Thursday, nine to six Friday and Saturday. “We weren’t going to offer the cheapest legal services in town,” said Greene, “but we were going to be accessible to the public and less intimidating.” About eight months after opening, former mayor Rod Sykes, who had a column in the Calgary Herald , went to a Friday evening “clinic-warming” to meet the young lawyers and came away praising the U of C law grads’ gambit: “Most lawyers are barricaded behind secretaries and receptionists, and it takes a good deal of resolution to tackle these towers of powers,” he wrote, opining that Sunnyside Legal Clinic took “all the mystery out of seeing a lawyer.”

The work they did, and there were about four of them in the office at any given phase, was a hodgepodge — young offenders, family and wills, general practice, real estate, unions, and labor law; whatever previous agreements had been set up, and whatever came through the door.

Bergman thought it best that the company had two names. One was Sunnyside Legal Clinic, the named they wanted, to emphasize openness. The other was Lefebvre Bergman, the name they also used on signage and letterhead to stay on the good side of the Law Society of Alberta. They fought over the right to use a trade name that sounded closer to the people — the first time anyone had done it in Calgary. The knock from the Law Society was, “Hey, how do you know who the lawyers are behind the trade name?” About a year in, they were hauled before the benchers to justify this breach in protocol, but they survived the admonitions. The restrictions were subsequently relaxed, and more clinics and trade names followed. Bergman was proud to have led in easing some of the “hoity-toity-ness of the legal profession.”

However satisfying it was to genuinely help real people and be non-corporate — Lefebvre would wear blue jeans in the office — it was hard to make a buck doing this kind of work. The hours could be grueling, and many clients didn’t have much, if any, money. Lefebvre and Bergman later joked they made more money selling the building than they ever did on the practice.

And life became busy and complicated. When Lefebvre opened the law shop with Bergman in late 1985, Emily turned five. They were business partners and they were a couple. They spelled each other off at the legal clinic, but the hours were long and Lefebvre had to mind Emily one week on, one week off. After they had been living together for two years, his ex Katharine began dating a child psychologist named Jon Amundson, another Jon, thoughtful and kind. He wrote a letter to Emily’s father applying for the position “Not a dad.” He was committed to bringing Emily into his circle, which included children from a previous marriage, in whatever way the parents deemed appropriate. He understood too well from his work the potential difficulties that might develop between a daughter and stepfather. He offered to teach Emily how to fish.

Bergman, who later became president of Lefebvre’s company, Eagle Medallion Fortress, had a relationship with Emily that was even more nuanced. At first there was a naive attempt at parenting, encouraged by Lefebvre. That didn’t work out so well. Then there was an attempt to find common ground, which was difficult and took time. “Emily and Jane are in a deeply respectful relationship with one another now,” says Lefebvre of their lifelong bond. “I wouldn’t say they’re friends. They consider themselves a particular kind of dear friend.”