Law360 Canada (July 2, 2026, 10:54 AM EDT) --

Norm Bowley

Well, not exactly a lesson in the language or culture, although a tip of the hat is due to a host of Ukrainian-Canadian lawyers, not the least of whom were my former partner Ron Tomosk and the brilliant jurist John Sopinka.

What I’m talking about is the lesson that Ukraine is teaching the world about military technology and tactics, particularly in the area of unmanned delivery systems. One might ask exactly what might be the connection between a long-range drone smashing into a Russian refinery and what’s going on in your office, but there is a direct and important analogy.

Since the 1930s, Russia’s military doctrine has centred on mass, overwhelming mass, in both men and material. The meat grinder in the Donbas is nothing new. More critically, though, has been the approach to hardware — a little on the crude side, but tough as nails, easy to repair in the field and mostly producible at huge scale by unskilled workers. MiG 21s with their rivets showing and T-72s that may have been clunky, but in each case hard to kill and produced at a fraction of the cost of Western hardware.

In commerce, we call that commoditization. Make stuff fast, cheap and “good enough,” and do it at volumes where the unit cost becomes insignificant. Think of sliced bread and Bic pens. And that’s exactly what many law practices have become.

What Russia has run up against is a Ukraine that couldn’t do stuff that way, and learned almost too late you can’t count on your friends to do it for you. Perhaps just in time, they learned to innovate.

Fortunately Ukraine had several things going for it. First, hordes of tech-savvy innovators who had grown up in a post-Soviet world and experienced the freedom to think for themselves and be creative without penalty. Second, they had fully embraced modernity with AI, information integration, CNC industrial capacity and all the surrounding culture. And perhaps third, they were in a “do or die” situation.

Ukraine’s emergence as an unmanned warfare superpower is not just about the technology, it’s about the mindset. Innovation is actively rewarded, with the military literally gaming the system by awarding credits or points for kills, points allowing you to get more of the latest technology. Whatever you think of the morality of that, you can’t argue that it is innovative motivation taken to its logical conclusion.

What has happened to Ukraine’s war production is that it has shifted all the way from commodity (which it can’t afford and is too exposed) to a bespoke or tailor-made solution. Not only easier to carry out in basements and remote locations, but much nimbler and more responsive.

And this is where lawyers enter the picture. For many of us, commodity work is just fine. We can bang out boilerplate, complete real estate transactions by the thousands or even take on “we get paid when you get paid” litigation based on mass volume and mostly repetitive procedures. And if you can make a buck, why not?

But many of us can’t, or don’t want to, work that way, and for many of us, our fields of expertise don’t lend themselves to mass production. We’d prefer to be Michelin rather than McDonald’s. Which means that if we are to survive and thrive, we need to be more like the Ukrainian kid in the basement than the Russian factory in Nizhny Tagil.

It means we need to be really, really good at what we do. It means we need to be nimble, adaptive and smart about the tech we use. But mostly, it means we need to sharpen ourselves as problem solvers and innovators.

The practice of law at its most fun, and usually most lucrative, occurs where the practitioner is situated precisely in the centre of their giftings, maintains leading-edge capabilities (both technical and intellectual), and understands precisely what their unique clients need.

This doesn’t just happen. It calls the lawyer (and the paralegal) to think deeply about who they are as an individual, what moves them, how they approach problems, what unique instincts and aptitudes they possess, and how to focus all that onto solving the unique issues of unique clients. Kind of like the Ukrainian kid in a basement using his natural aptitudes and knowledge to create a drone that can safely trundle his grandmother out of a war zone.

All of us have certificates, all of us can fill in the boilerplate blanks, but not all of us can love what we do and practise profitably. To do that, we need to practise where our giftings are perfectly aligned with the unique needs of unique clients.

Let me close with John Sopinka, and a personal request.

Years ago an article was written about Sopinka’s voluntary labours to help Ukraine rebuild its post-Soviet justice system. The story was told of his humbly placing candles in the windows of a castle where a state dinner was to be held in his honour. I’ve lost my copy and can’t find it anywhere online or elsewhere.

Can you help me locate it? norm@purposeful.ca

In Norm Bowley’s third career, he speaks, writes and consults on matters of professional success and happiness. norm@purposeful.ca.

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