Medicine Hat Office

From our beginnings as a law firm in Medicine Hat in the late 1800s continuously to the present, we have served clients in Medicine Hat and the surrounding area. Our firm has had a number of distinguished lawyers and notable community leaders. Ivan C. Rand was a partner at Laidlaw, Blanchard, Rand and Delf as our firm was once known, from 1912 to 1920.  Ivan Rand was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1943 where he distinguished himself as one of our most important Canadian jurists and legal scholars. James M. Pritchard came to Medicine Hat as a young lawyer in 1954 and joined the firm of Niblock & Stone. This firm then became the firm of Niblock, Stone & Pritchard, then Stone & Pritchard and eventually Pritchard & Company LLP.

James Pritchard had a long and distinguished legal career of more than fifty years in Medicine Hat. James Pritchard also offered leadership to our profession serving as a Bencher of the Law Society of Alberta for a number of years. Donald Medhurst and David Wilkins were members of our firm, appointed as Justices of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta.  Frederick Fisher (Ted) was a member of our firm appointed a Judge of The Provincial Court of Alberta. James Pritchard, Stanley Lerner and William Anhorn were members of our firm appointed as Queen’s Counsel of Alberta.

Brooks Office

At Pritchard and Company we believe that access to high quality legal services is important to our clients.  In recent years we recognized that a significant portion of lawyers in our area were reaching retirement age, and there was a shortage of younger lawyers to fill their place. In some cases, there was a significant gap in knowledge and experience between the younger lawyers and their older counterparts. We heard from lawyers and clients alike that this was an issue in the Brooks area. The shrinking lawyer population in Brooks made it more challenging for clients to access quality legal services.

We began to provide legal services in Brooks in the spring of 2010, to address this need. Our office is located at 917 – 2nd Street West. The initial legal services we offered included estate planning and administration and handling corporate/commercial matters. Les Scholly and Michael Dolan attend our Brooks office on a regular basis for that purpose. In the summer of 2011, we added family law, including collaborative law and mediation services. Janis Pritchard and Catherine Regier also attend our Brooks office on a regular basis to provide these legal services. We want to give the people of Brooks and area several options to access our legal services: through our Brooks office, at our Medicine Hat office or through internet conferencing.

We believe that by expanding our market, our lawyers will be better able to concentrate on the specific areas of law where they have strong a knowledge and experience base, and where they enjoy working in. In this way we hope to exceed our client’s expectations for high quality, professional legal services.

We also believe that it is important for Pritchard and Company to engage in and become part of the Brooks community. It is our goal to build up our practice in Brooks to the stage that we can provide our legal services on a full time basis to the Brooks community. This will allow us the opportunity to give back to the community in terms of volunteer efforts, fundraising and community service in more meaningful ways.