Welcome to Westhaven Forestry Law, and thanks for checking out my website. While my intent is to use this blog as a forum to provide quick commentary on legal developments and other issues of interest to those in the forest industry, please allow me to use this first entry to introduce myself, and what Westhaven Forestry Law is all about.
My name is Jeff Waatainen. I graduated with my LLB from the UBC Faculty of Law in 1995, and was called to the bar in 1996. Prior to law school I completed the Political Science Honours program in the UBC Faculty of Arts, and subsequently earned an MA in political science from UBC as well. During my "poli-sci days", the primary focus of my studies was the BC forest industry. While at graduate school, I studied under Dr. George Hoberg (now with the Faculty of Forestry at UBC), and my MA thesis was a comparative study of endangered species habitat protection between BC and the American Pacific Northwest.
Long before I ever applied to law school I became familiar with court decisions that were important to the forest industry through my undergraduate and graduate research. From these decisions I began to develop an interest in the valid exercise of legal discretion and the significance of jurisdiction. I began to appreciate how the mere fact that a government official might claim the authority to make a particular decision didn’t necessarily make it so.
I mention all of this only to point out that, unlike most who enter into the legal profession, a career in the law was not an end in itself for me: it was a way for me to work in the forest industry. While I have developed a great appreciation of the law over the years, my initial decision to go to law school served a more practical purpose. My dad, Bernie Waatainen, RPF (ret.), worked in the BC forest industry for close to 30 years, so it was always around me growing up. After I began to study forest industry issues at university I came to the conclusion that this was the field where I wanted to establish my career. The law seemed to provide a natural path for me towards this goal.
I summered, articled and spent my entire legal career prior to this past July with the forestry practice group of Davis & Company in Vancouver. My decision to leave Davis to make a go of it on my own back in Nanaimo was probably one of the hardest of my life. One does not give up a good job with excellent colleagues for the uncertainty of a new future without some amount of anxiety. The reasons for my decision were personal rather than professional, and related almost entirely to a desire on the part of my wife, Paula, and I to return to the Island (where we had both grown up) to raise our kids.
After a busy summer with the move, setting up my office, and client work, I am now ready to formally declare myself open for business, and to respectfully ask that you keep me in mind as an option when it comes to who you call for legal services. For over a decade I worked closely with some of the best in the business: Brian Hiebert on corporate and commercial matters; Peter Voith, QC on stumpage matters and administrative reviews and appeals; and Garry Mancell on logging contracts, tenure issues, regulatory compliance, and all other aspects of what we might loosely refer to as "forestry law". Over this time I have gained a wide variety of legal experience in the forest industry. With this training and experience, I am able to provide personalized, quality legal services that are of value to the forest industry at significant savings.
So, thank you once again for taking the time to visit my website. I hope I get the opportunity to work for you sometime soon.
