About

Editor’s note: This interview was conducted prior to March 2020.

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last two years?

In 2018, I provided legal and strategic advice in connection with Boat Rocker Media’s strategic investment into Insight. I also provided legal support in connection with some of Canada’s top television programs such as The Amazing Race Canada, Big Brother Canada, Battle of the Blades, Top Chef Canada, Intervention Canada, and The Tragically Hip: A National Celebration. In addition, I structured the financing arrangements and negotiated the agreements for the feature documentary film Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind, which received an audience award nomination for the best documentary at the 2019 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.

How do you feel in-house legal leaders can successfully introduce and implement a culture within a legal department?

It is important to have buy-in from all members of the department. As people tend to buy-in to things they help create, it can be incredibly useful to solicit the thoughts and ideas of all department personnel when determining the department’s culture.

In terms of the cultural design, the key is to focus on just a few key principles at first as it can be difficult to try to introduce an all-encompassing culture from scratch since people can become easily discouraged when they face the inevitable setbacks of a full cultural shift. Instead, the goal should be to translate the key principles themselves into action items. For instance, if one of the cultural principles is responsiveness, institute a policy whereby all members of the legal department will respond to emails within 24 hours.

If you had to give advice to an aspiring in-house lawyer or general counsel what would it be and why?

Become a problem solver, not just a legal adviser. As in-house lawyers are often viewed as cost centres as opposed to revenue generators, it is crucial to find ways to add value wherever possible. In-house lawyers must be comfortable collaborating with business partners to solve problems whether that is by offering legal advice, business advice or, more often than not, a combination of the two.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners within their company?

Strong relationships with business partners are built through trust and trust takes time to build. By adopting a solution-oriented mentality, business partners will see you as a facilitator to achieving their goals as opposed to a gate-keeper or a “no person”. If you successfully adopt this mentality, business partners will begin to seek your counsel on all kinds of issues as the trust level grows.

What techniques do you use to provide commercially-focused advice to your company, and how do you communicate these to more junior lawyers in the team?

In order to provide commercially-focused advice, you must first truly understand the business mechanics of your company. Personally, I was able to do so by volunteering to attend as many meetings as possible with senior business executives, asking lots of questions to receptive business partners, and reading any applicable trade publications or other relevant materials. Once you possess the requisite knowledge of the business, you are in a better position to understand the business objectives behind any legal inquiries and then offer advice that meets both the legal and business objectives.

In light of the above, I strongly encourage junior in-house lawyers to seek out any avenue possible to learn more about their company’s business operations, to always understand the business objectives behind the legal issue, and then craft an appropriate solution to meet the business needs and interests.

FOCUS ON: TIME

Over the years, the pressure for in-house counsel to provide sound legal and business advice quickly has only intensified given the increasingly on-demand culture we live in. For aspiring and junior in-house lawyers who are often given discrete tasks, facilitating these requests under tight timelines may be challenging, yet not insurmountable. However, for senior in-house lawyers and general counsel, who increasingly encounter complex and nuanced issues, the pressure to deliver sound advice under truncated timelines can be problematic.

What many of us fail to realise is that when we let our minds rest and stop actively trying to solve a specific problem or issue, our minds will non-consciously continue to process information and make connections. It has been shown that the problem-solving resources of the non-conscious mind are millions, or possibly billions, of times larger than that of the conscious mind.

Personally, I believe this was one of the most important learnings I had when transitioning from in-house counsel to general counsel. As a young lawyer, I always wanted to impress my superiors by providing accurate information and advice as quickly as possible. While I was mostly able to do so as the issues I encountered weren’t usually incredibly complex (the complex issues usually were reserved for the more senior lawyers), as I began to take on more senior roles, I stated to realise that I needed to adjust my approach to ensure that I was accounting for all of the complex issues and variables. I realised that the more time I gave myself to ruminate on a given issue, regardless of whether I was actively thinking about it or not, the better the solution was that I came up with.

As in-house lawyers are often judged by both their speed and quality of advice, they don’t always have the benefit of time to really consider an issue and potentially access the problem-solving power of their nonconscious minds. In-house lawyers need to find the optimum balance between expediency and finding the absolute best solution to a given issue. Once that balance is found, in-house lawyers need to have the self-confidence to occasionally ask their business partners for more time to solve the more complex problems in order to ensure they are recommending the best possible solution. As one of my bosses told me when I was younger, it is better to be known as being slow and right than wrong and on-time as business partners will easily forget that you occasionally take extra time to craft quality solutions, but are less likely to forget the times you were wrong or recommended inadequate solutions.