The Aird & Berlis Website – A Look Back Over the Years

Last year, Aird & Berlis launched its redesigned website, which was a vast improvement over the previous iteration. The redesigned website is much more modern, sleek and user-friendly than past versions.

Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, it’s possible to remind ourselves just how different the past versions of the website looked and how much has changed in the last 18 years.

2000

Here’s a look at the Aird & Berlis website in May 2000.

The home page referenced “Netscape Navigator,” which was discontinued over a decade ago. Brookfield Place was known as BCE Place, and the website had a guest register for guests to provide feedback to the webmaster. Times have changed.

2003

Fast forward to 2003. The website had been updated and was certainly an improvement from the 2000 version. Note the photos in the bottom left corner.

Richard Kimel, Eldon Bennett, Peter Czegledy and Barbara Worndl had just proudly represented a client in purchasing assets from “an industry leader and innovator focused on transforming how the world communicates and exchanges information… that does business in more than 150 countries.”

That business, of course, was Nortel Networks, which would file for bankruptcy just 6 years later. Times have changed.

2006

Move ahead to November 2006, and the website had once again been updated. Sure, it didn’t fill the whole screen, but it was a definite upgrade over the prior version.

Eldon Bennett was featured on the cover of Canadian Lawyer Magazine, our Municipal Group had just launched a student essay competition, and Jane Pepino and Patrick Harrington were successful before the Ontario Municipal Board.

In less than 2 weeks, Patrick Harrington will be hosting a webinar discussing the replacement of the Ontario Municipal Board with the Local Planning Appeal Tribunal. Times have changed.

2018

Our last stop is in 2018 with our current website. New award-winning brand, new design, and the website even fills up the whole screen!

Unlike in 2006, we’re advising on blockchain transactions, sponsoring an elite tennis player (Dennis Shapovalov) who was born in 1999, and are active on social media (including Twitter, which launched in July 2006).

In 2006, who would have guessed that many of our lawyers would have budding cannabis practices, we’d be advising on ICOs, and that more of our clients would be mining bitcoin than coal? Times have changed.