Junior lawyer by day, army commander by night (and some weekends)

financialpost.com:

Adam West is a junior lawyer at Aird & Berlis LLP, a blue-chip, button-down Toronto law firm that’s been operating since 1919. His office within the firm denotes his status as a legal grunt, tucked as it is near a bank of filing cabinets, where administrative staff do administrative things while he beavers away on briefs, motions and whatever else the firm’s partners have him working on.

His law degree, from York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School three years ago, is framed on the wall of his smallish office space, which used to have an unfettered view of Lake Ontario to the south, but now overlooks a construction site. Several spiral-bound case files are arranged on a bookshelf beneath it.

But it is the photographs atop the shelf that really catch the eye, and provide visual testimony that West isn’t just another legal whiz kid gunning to make partner by 40.

Indeed, he isn’t a kid at all. He is 41 and has two kids of his own. But what really sets him apart is a picture showing him in military uniform meeting Queen Elizabeth II, a face-to-face meeting he was so nervous about that he doesn’t recall what she said to him, or what, if anything, he may have said back.

Next to that photo is one of the armoured car that Captain Adam West, as he was once known, was nearly blown up in by a Taliban suicide bomber in Kandahar City, circa 2007. The bomber was incinerated. The soldier and four other Canadians from his platoon walked away unscathed.

“My biggest concern in Afghanistan was losing one of my soldiers,” he said. “But we all made it home in one piece.”

West’s former comrades became teachers, police officers, mechanics, heavy machine operators, supply chain managers and more. Their one-time captain became a junior lawyer,