With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/309075
BCBusiness.Ca June 2014 BCBusiness 65 practising corporate law at the New York office of Clif- ford Chance LLP, Pawar was working on the fl oor below. The two didn't meet until Pawar joined Heenan Blaikie in 2011. Together, they grew the corporate practice of the Vancouver offi ce from three lawyers to nine, despite the lean years of the recession. It was a small close-knit group, and when Heenan Blaikie dis- solved, the core business law group of nine lawyers chose to stay together. But in their rapid-fi re dis- cussions about branding and marketing their new firm, Pawar and Patryluk dismissed the term "boutique." Instead, along with off shore suit tailors and custom shoemakers, they landed on the term "bespoke" to describe their legal ser- vices. "Someone said to me at the beginning, 'You guys are going to be a boutique law fi rm,' and it made me cringe a bit," says Pawar. "For me it connotes a fi rm with a very specifi c and focused area. I think where our strength lies is that we actually have a very broad corporate practice." They work on a wide range of corporate and commercial contracts, with clients across industries including mining, tech, con- struction, public-private partnerships, government, sports and entertainment, at every level from startup to multina- tional. "I didn't have one client that left as a result of Heenan Blaikie [going down]," says Pawar. "It's the same expertise, the same people—we're just fl ying under a new banner." "But we're cheaper," adds Patryluk. "We are all entrepreneurial enough to know that it has to work, but we have no problem structuring things diff er- ently, when you see real potential for a new client or maybe giving an existing client a bit of a break." The three part- ners decided that all staff (including one paralegal and three support staff ) would be eligible for a profi t-sharing pool, signalling their resolve to break out from a traditional model. There are also certain bureaucratic issues that they can now avoid, such as turning down work from a new client because of a confl ict of interest. Confl ict searches at Heenan Blaikie would often yield a problem, if a fi rm lawyer in Mon- treal had once represented a party on the other side of a case the Vancouver offi ce wanted to take on. Commentary on Heenan Blaikie's demise has pointed to the dearth of corporate transactions in recent years, a situation that drove up competi- tion for the lucrative contracts. Patry- luk explained that MEP lawyers have always done mergers and acquisition work, but not the multibillion-dollar contracts that require teams of 20 law- yers. "Where we do fi t in quite nicely is in mid-market M&A, often private trans- actions as opposed to [those done by] publicly traded companies." Often MEP lawyers act as B.C. counsel on interna- tional deals run by larger fi rms. Patryluk suggests that the broad focus area of Heenan's Vancouver offi ce, a necessary function of work- ing in a smaller market, was one of the reasons that the group was able to stay together. The Toronto offi ce, by com- parison, had specialty groups such as securities, banking, infrastructure and ener�y. Those groups joined other large international fi rms such as Dentons or Baker & McKenzie, rather than striking out on their own. C raig Munroe is one of six part- ners in GLGM Law, the other firm formed from the rubble of Heenan's Vancouver offi ce. With counsel including former B.C. Attorney General Geoff Plant, former chair of the B.C. Labour Relations Board Don Munroe (Craig's father) and Heenan Blaikie founder Roy Heenan, there is still star power, but Craig Munroe says the smaller size of 20 practicing lawyers is exactly right. The t wo g roup s— GL GM a nd MEP—considered staying together post-Heenan, but decided instead to maintain close ties from separate offi ces. Munroe sees the problems that ended Heenan Blaikie as stemming from the diffi culty of making decisions p62-p66_Law_june.indd 65 2014-05-01 2:10 PM