Harvey Strosberg vowed a year ago that he’d be back.
Known in the courtroom as a bulldog, a force to be reckoned with on multimillion-dollar class-action lawsuits, the high-profile Ontario lawyer was silenced by a stroke that took away his ability to speak.
Now, after intense therapy and with his hallmark doggedness, Mr. Strosberg is poised to fight a big case again. In March, he will return to a Toronto courtroom to steer the trial of a class-action suit for the first time since his stroke in October, 2010, having had to learn how to use language all over again.
“I was a trial lawyer that couldn’t speak,” said Mr. Strosberg, 67, a senior partner of Sutts Strosberg LLP in Windsor, Ont., who also served as head of the Law Society of Upper Canada in the 1990s.
“I could write my name, but I couldn’t write anything else. I couldn’t communicate.”
He now speaks in a slower, more deliberate way, at times pausing for several seconds to find the right phrase.
Mr. Strosberg’s comeback has been the talk of the profession. In September, he was asked to address the ceremonial opening of the province’s courts, making a moving speech. Then, at a gala dinner in October, the Ontario Bar Association gave him an award for excellence in civil litigation. And in November, he was the toast of another gala in his honour, chaired by prominent lawyers Terrence
Close to 500 people, mostly lawyers, came out for the event, said Mr. O’Sullivan, raising $315,000 for the institute and paying tribute to someone he calls a “tenacious bulldog” of a lawyer.
“Most of those people would have been Harvey’s opponents,” he said. “So I thought it was a great tribute to him.”
It was around 8:30 a.m. on Oct. 1, 2010, that Mr. Strosberg realized something was wrong.
“It was a cleaving, like my head was being chopped into bits,” Mr. Strosberg said in an interview in his downtown Toronto condominium. “I wanted to get into bed.”
His wife Cathy, a retired nurse, asked him his name and his birth date, and he couldn’t answer. After undergoing tests in hospital, he says his full-on stroke set in, numbing the right side of his body. He soon regained some of his physical strength, but was left with a vocabulary of just a handful of random words.
After a few weeks at Toronto Western, he was transferred to the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, where doctors and speech therapists would help spur his recovery. It began with song lyrics, which somehow remained unharmed in his stroke-ravaged brain. And it continued with more than a year of intense therapy. It was during this time that Mr. Strosberg gave himself a challenge: Not only did he vow to learn to speak all over again and get back into court – he hoped he could be an example to other stroke victims.
“I said to myself, I’ll be back. That’s my job,” Mr. Strosberg said. “My job was to learn the language all over again.”
Soon his condo was covered in sticky notes, labelling every household item, no matter how mundane: Lamp, TV, fork, spoon, fridge, stove. Abstract concepts, such as behind, between, up and down, were more difficult. So were most verbs. Every day, he read a newspaper article, studying and practising, until he understood it. Even a simple sentence could take him five minutes to blurt out.
In addition to the therapy provided by the health system, and supportive family and friends, Mr. Strosberg, whose decades of practising law have made him wealthy, had other help. He says he spent about $5,000 a month in extra therapy, and he still does a session each day with a speech therapist.
