The name of the firm has changed many times. It began as Bennett, Hannah & Sanford in 1922. But within a dozen years, Percy Sanford was gone, and in his place, three new names appeared in the title, Nolan, Chambers and Might. They became fixtures in the legal world as well as in the title. Harry Nolan ended his career on the Supreme Court of Canada. Everett J. Chambers assumed the role of guiding hand at the firm for three decades. And Orrin Might, specialist in wills and trusts, became the much-beloved keeper of the firm's early history – warts, quirks and all.
The name kept changing by addition and subtraction as new partners asserted themselves and old partners retired from the field. Lawyers of substance and authority all came and all went. They knew their law. Mac Jones was the dean of oil and gas lawyers in Canada. Herb Laycraft was a litigator, so splendid at his specialty that he went from the firm to the bench and eventually to the highest judicial position in the province, becoming Chief Justice of the Alberta Court of Appeal.
By the early 1980s, the firm title had been reduced to an absolute basic: Jones & Company. The partners decided that a new name must be arrived at and institutionalized. So they took the surname of the firm's founder, R.B. Bennett (Prime Minister of Canada 1930-1935), and the surname of the firm's most senior living partner, Mac Jones, and they got Bennett Jones. For a time, Verchere was added – as in Verchere, Noel & Eddy - to ease the transition of the Eastern Canadian tax firm merged with in 1989.
Behind the names – from Bennett through Chambers, Might and Saucier to Black and Jones – there are a thousand stories. These are stories of accomplishment and service, of growth and expansion. Stories about Calgary and Alberta. About all of Canada as the firm became national in scope, as it acquired by hard and intelligent work the status of a preeminent Canadian law firm. Among the firm's lawyers past and present are a Canadian prime minister and deputy prime minister, a provincial premier, federal and provincial cabinet ministers, a Canadian Ambassador to the United States, a deputy minister and deputy attorney general of the Department of Justice, two Supreme Court Justices, a Court of Appeal appointee, several chief justices of federal and provincial courts, numerous appointees to provincial supreme courts and the Queen's Bench, several chairmen of securities commissions and a president of the Canadian Bar Association.