No, that picturesque harbour is not actually Halifax — but it’s pretty close. It’s Peggy’s Cove, a 45-minute drive from the city, and just one example of how accessible the slow life is from the hustle of the big law firms in downtown Halifax.

“You’re within a 30-minute drive of some of the best fishing,” says Michael Blades, a fifth-year associate at McInnes Cooper originally from Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia. “One of the great things about Halifax is that it’s a city, but it’s not sprawling.”

“The cottages here are less than an hour away,” says Michelle Chai, an associate at Stewart McKelvey who fell in love with the province when she moved from Kingston, Ontario, for law school at Dalhousie University. “There really is a more laid-back attitude here, and a relaxed pace.”

And yet both of these young lawyers agree that, despite the slower pace of life, the calibre of legal work — at least at the city’s largest firms — seems to be on par with that of Bay Street.

“We represent some of the biggest companies in Canada — national and international companies based out of the Maritimes,” says Chai, a 2013 call. And the same can be said for McInnes Cooper, as well as Cox & Palmer. Together, along with Stewart McKelvey, these three firms dominate the legal universe in Atlantic Canada. They might lack star status west of the Laurentians, but each firm employs more than 200 lawyers.

Both Chai and Blades pull the kind of hours typical of lawyers in any urban centre, but they say there’s a congeniality in the legal community that makes work feel more like play.

“Halifax is such a great place to work because it’s a smaller bar where lawyers know each other,” says Blades, who exceeded his billable hour target last year and still made time for a fishing trip to Labrador. “In a sense, we’re all colleagues — the tightknit feel of Halifax as a whole exists within our legal community as well.”