Born on St. Patrick’s Day into a large Irish family in the working-class Montreal suburb of Point St. Charles, you might say Neil was blessed from the get-go. Every birthday the whole neighborhood seemed to be celebrating as only the Irish can celebrate on March 17th!! By the ripe old age of five, Neil was singing in the Church choir, starring in the Kindergarten School Play (The Jolly Old Bagman in Waltzing Mathilda!) and telling everyone who asked that he aspired to be a CRIMINAL lawyer—not just any old kind of lawyer but a CRIMINAL lawyer. A scant decade and a half later he was conducting criminal trials in the Montreal’s Municipal Courts as a McGill law student employed full-time at the respected criminal law firm of Silver, Lamarche et Braun. He hasn’t looked back.

A dedicated student athlete, Neil lettered in four sports and served as Student’s Council President at Verdun High School. Offered a full-ride U.S. University hockey scholarship following his second year of hockey at Montreal’s Dawson College, he had to pass—too young for the driver’s license needed to drive back and forth from Upstate New York to Montreal.

As the other sports fell by the wayside, Neil continued to play his beloved hockey through tier-two junior and until he left McGill University, and his hometown, in 1984.

Dismayed at the number of his childhood friends and acquaintances who seemed to view his law degree as their license to get into all sorts of difficulties with the law, Neil opted to travel all the way to Vancouver to hone his defence lawyer skills at the Department of Justice Canada. He left the DOJ the next year just as the Brian Mulroney-led Tories swept to power ending sixteen years of Liberal government nationally. Neil declined the offer to continue prosecuting on the Northern B.C. circuit and opted to open his own law firm in Richmond, B.C. focusing on drug defence work and the cases generated around the Airport. He and Vincent Michaels practiced there together for the better part of a decade, building a thriving practice on hard-work and aggressive defending of all types of criminal charges-but mostly drug cases- from the Provincial Court all the way up to the Supreme Court of Canada. As their reputations grew so did the demand for their services—Neil has successfully defended cases all the way from the U.S. border to the Northwest Territories and from the West side of Vancouver Island all the way to Sydney and Glace Bay, Nova Scotia.

For the past decade or so, Neil has practiced out of Vancouver’s fabled Gastown area—the home to some of Western Canada’s best criminal defence lawyers past and present. Blessed with two of the brightest and hardest-working partners any criminal lawyer could want in David St. Pierre and Elizabeth Lewis, Neil has continued to build his practice such that the seven or eight members of Cobb, St. Pierre, Lewis are almost always hopping. And while the major drug conspiracies and overturned murder convictions-including three in the B.C. Court of Appeal and Supreme Court of Canada in a five-year span- garner most of the headlines, Neil has never forgotten his roots in poor, working-class Point St. Charles. No case is too small and no client too poor to deserve his $350/hour attention even if they can’t pay a dime. And you needn’t ask to see the boxes full of thank-you cards and gifts accumulated over the past two decades to verify this fact: just ask the receptionist for a free consultation and confirm the matter for yourself. You will be glad that you did.

When not battling it out in the courts for his clients Neil can usually be found spending time with his family, enjoying a nice glass of wine or honing his golf, skiing or diminishing hockey skills. He also loves to garden, read and cook—pursuits instilled in him from a very young age by his parents.