Fostering Leaders in Law
From the Spring 2006 issue of Nexus.
After graduating from the University of Toronto with degrees in electrical engineering and law, Ted Donegan spent 25 years doing the legal work that built towns, refineries and mines, restructuring companies and advising newspapers before taking over management of one of Toronto's largest law firms.
Now, the 70-year-old former chairman of Blake, Cassels & Graydon wants other deserving students to have the same advantages he had - a U of T education free of debt - and so, he has donated $2 million to the faculties of Engineering and Law.
"I wanted a student to go through, first, engineering school, then law school, and not have to borrow a penny," says Donegan, who practised business law before becoming managing partner of Blakes and retiring as chairman in 1994. "Not [borrowing] for tuition, room and board, or books - it's all paid for."
To this end, Donegan has given $600,000 to the Faculty of Engineering and $800,000 to the Faculty of Law for endowed student scholarships, with another $500,000 earmarked for a proposed law conference centre, and $100,000 for a student design and study facility at engineering.
The engineering scholarships will be directed to top highschool students who have been accepted into U of T engineering and plan to take a law degree. The law scholarships are for top students from Canadian engineering schools entering U of T law. And, they should all be "honest, good community people."
"What I wanted [in making the endowed scholarships] was to get somebody trained by U of T just the way I was trained, [but] with modern technology," says Donegan. Then, "to get a really great job on Bay Street and then that they lead their law firm, the way I did."
A high-profile career in the law wasn't necessarily in the cards for Donegan, who hails from the northern Ontario mining town of Sudbury. Nobody from his family had ever gone to university, but his father, who owned a small general insurance business, had bigger plans for his son. He talked to some of the professional, university-educated men in town who suggested engineering as a course of study for young Ted due to his interest in mining.
At U of T, Donegan earned his first degree in electrical engineering in 1957. Back in Sudbury his father needed help with his insurance business but Donegan's professors were encouraging him to go on to graduate school. Since he was interested in business, though, a Sudbury lawyer suggested patent law, where he could make use of his engineering degree. The field was also "very well paid, and that kind of attracted the Irish in me," he quips.
At that time, "there had just been a huge split between Osgoode Hall and U of T Law School," he says, which "involved all the legal lights of the Ontario legal community." The old dean of Osgoode Hall left and became Dean of U of T Law School, and brought with him a group of scholars including Bora Laskin, who taught Donegan constitutional law.
Donegan says his teachers constituted "the historical leadership of the legal profession in Ontario." At the end of his career at U of T, he not only had "this tremendous engineering degree, but now this tremendous law degree, recognized throughout North America as being the [home of] the top legal teachers."
At that time, the law school was located at the estate of Glendon Hall, which now belongs to York University. "We had all these tremendous professors, like Wright, Laskin, [and] you could go out during breaks and walk around these beautiful grounds," Donegan recalls, where the professors would discuss legal principles and play bridge with their students. "Even after law school, I still played bridge with them. They were a very, very friendly group of people."
After earning his LL.B. in 1960, Donegan articled in patent law at Smart & Biggar in Ottawa. But a couple of his professors told him they thought patent law was too narrow for him, and Donegan began to consider business law. He considered only two firms: McCarthy & McCarthy, where the noted advocate John Robinette practised ("I would only go there if I could work with Robinette," he says, but the job had been promised to a classmate), and Blake, Cassels & Graydon, where one of the top partners was the brother-in-law of his law-school roommate. Donegan arrived at Blakes in 1962.
"I found I had an immediate interest in newspaper law," he says, and joked to a senior partner at the time that he couldn't understand why he was being paid $25 an hour to read the newspaper. He would end up serving as a director of the Torstar Corporation (1993 to 2002), as well as Southam Inc., Southam Communications Inc. and Southam Printing Ltd. He also did the legal work for many of Toronto's large office buildings being constructed in the 1960s and 1970s, including Commerce Court. "I was becoming interested in financing law; all those big buildings have to be paid for somehow."
Donegan then got involved in mining and development law, working on a power plant being built in Quebec, on the Ontario Hydro uranium contracts, on building towns in Manitoba, refineries and mines. Internationally, he worked in Japan, Europe and Korea.
Later, he worked in restructuring, on such projects as Massey Ferguson and Dome Petroleum. The work was hard and intense, he says; "at least 10 hours a day to get things done, six days a week, sometimes 10 hours a day for seven days a week."
As he became more senior, Donegan became a director of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, in addition to the newspaper boards. "I'm thinking as all this is happening, it all goes back to the education, and how without the U of T education - both degrees - I couldn't have done it. That was key to
why I was sitting at the [boardroom] table."
As he got closer to retirement, he says he began to think more of the tremendous value of a U of T education, but also of the financial strains a law degree can put on some families. Donegan had just given $1.25 million to Johns Hopkins University, and believes individual Canadians don't give enough to their universities.
"I thought, 'I've got the money, I'm going to do it.'"
The lifelong bachelor says he's happy to give to the university that gave him so much, "so that the people who will receive [the scholarships] will get as good an education as I got, and then they will be able to contribute to the university."
His father never expected him to return to Sudbury after he left home for U of T and the big city, he says today. "Father knew I was a big-town boy, and that I had big ambitions," says Donegan.
And there's no way he could have done what he did in Sudbury, or without the University of Toronto, he says. "Engineering and law is a terrific combination, [and] U of T is still the top law school in Canada."
