Law Times

Page 4 February 24, 2014 • Law Times www.lawtimesnews.com But as of late last week, some employees had begun receiving information about severance. A source says some of them are looking to challenge their entitlements. Another staff member, who also asked for anonymity, says she attended a town hall meeting in January where Norman Bacal, founding partner of the Toronto office, told staff it was "time Heenan kicks butt again" and urged everyone "to stick with Heenan Blaikie." "It makes it even harder to process what's happening now," she says. "It's incredible. Just disbelief." She adds: "I le a much bigger firm to go to Heenan and I just can't believe this has happened. It's all pretty depressing. Some people have been there a lot longer than I have and I can't even imagine what they're going through. Never in a million years would we have thought this would happen." A third source tells Law Times the firm is asking remaining staff to help pack the files of departed lawyers. "We're being asked to clean aer the bomb aer they've ran out the door," she says. When they moved to other firms, some lawyers took their secretaries with them. But other secretaries, some in their 50s and 60s, remained, the sources say. A team of bilingual commercial litigation lawyers that joined Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP as partners in Ottawa — including Pierre Champagne, who was the associate director of Heenan Blaikie's Ottawa office, civil and commercial litigator Benoit Duchesne, civil litigator Rodrigue Escayola, and Louis-Pierre Grégoire, who focuses on construction law and civil litigation — took six support staff members and two articling students with them. Quebec regional firm BCF took 15 partners, 15 associates, and about the same number of support staff from the Montreal office of Heenan Blaikie. Ralph Lean, who joined Gowlings as counsel, also says he took his secretary with him when he moved. Secretaries also followed the 13 former Heenan Blaikie lawyers who went to Baker & McKenzie LLP's Toronto office. e team, led by partners Kevin Rooney and Sonia Yung, augments Baker & McKenzie's corporate and securities, tax, and banking and finance practices. Gall Legge Grant & Munroe, a new Vancouver law firm that rose from Heenan Blaikie's ashes, also took seven full-time support staff and seven more on contract, according to founding partner Craig Munroe. "We have taken almost all of our assistants with us, as well as some of the general admin staff," he says. "We are also working on identifying opportunities for the few who do not have new jobs to move on to." But taking support workers isn't possible when lawyers join an already-established big firm, says Maurice Poitras, chief operating officer at Borden Ladner Gervais LLP's Montreal office, where several former Heenan Blaikie lawyers have found new homes. "What I would say is that we've hired several secretaries who worked previously with the lawyers," says Poitras. Although he couldn't give an exact number of secretaries hired, he notes there's one for every two or three lawyers. "But that's not the true back office, if you will," he says, adding the firm didn't bring any of the people who staffed Heenan Blaikie's accounting, marketing, and information technology departments. "is is a very small acquisition of lawyers, a small transfer of lawyers to our firm. We're the largest in Canada, so if you think about it in proportion of our full roster of lawyers, it's a very small addition and we're fully staffed already in all our offices," Poitras adds. "As a national firm, adding maybe 15 to 20 lawyers really doesn't require adding backroom staff." Twenty-four more former Heenan Blaikie lawyers from the Toronto and Montreal offices, including former prime minister Jean Chrétien, are now calling Dentons Canada LLP home. e firm is also reportedly taking lawyers thought to have been part of the group that was negotiating the failed deal with DLA Piper. On Feb. 18, Peter Blaikie, co-founder of Heenan Blaikie, sent an e-mail to staff members with the subject line, "Heenan's collapse began overseas." e e-mail included a link to a Feb. 15 article that appeared in e National Post about the law firm's failed business ventures in Africa. In the e-mail, Blaikie said staff should read the article "if you wish to get at least a partial Many Heenan Blaikie support staff left behind NEWS HOW WILL YOU APPROACH YOUR NEXT AGREEMENT? Canadian Labour Reporter, formerly CLV Reports, has kept labour professionals, lawyers and the industrial relations industry up to date since 1956, providing reports from collective bargaining tables across Canada. This premier source of information includes summaries of recent collective agreement ratifications, labour arbitration digests, analysis of new and amended legislation and regulation, statistical tables on unemployment and inflation, as well as news and analysis of new and amended legislation and regulation. START YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AND RECEIVE: • 50 issues of Canadian Labour Reporter • Full access to www.labour-reporter.com • Weekly e-newsletter SUBSCRIBE TODAY FOR ONLY 0SEFS" ORDER TODAY: Call toll free 1-800-387-5164, in Toronto 416-609-3800, online at www.labour-reporter.com/subscribe or email carswell.customerrelations@thomsonreuters.com Untitled-4 1 14-02-18 10:24 AM understanding of why the firm you worked so hard to build was destroyed." Heenan Blaikie also opened a Paris office just as the European economy was tanking. While the firm had reportedly had some "good years" immediately aer the 2008-09 downturn, one source said it's those good years that were perhaps the "worst thing that could have happened to them" as they helped to cover up the impact of the recession. LT Continued from page 1 Strict rules set out Toronto lawyer Garry Wise. "It will facilitate candid and early judicial comment on the likely merits of a proposed sum- mary judgment motion, urge settlement of matters that should be settled, and maintain judicial supervision throughout on the overriding objective of propor- tionality," he says. Brown's approach, "or a varia- tion of it," is already available in commercial list matters, but a similar standard should apply to other civil cases as well, Wise suggests. "None of these promising ap- proaches would appear to be as readily available in the remain- der of the Ontario civil justice system as it now stands. Our rules committees and court ad- ministrators will need to create new processes to implement Justice Brown's model, or a rea- sonable facsimile, in the balance of our civil justice system." For Andrea Burke, a litiga- tion partner with Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP, it ap- pears Brown will require par- ties to address the question of whether summary judgment is appropriate at the outset before scheduling any motion. at requirement is consistent with Brown's general view about the overuse of summary judgment, she says. "Any time you have a sched- ule imposed at the beginning and have someone you can go back to for further directions if you need it, I think it makes the process much more efficient," she adds. If parties can access Skype or GoToMeeting, Brown said he'd hold case conferences online. A day before the conference, he ex- pects "a very short e-mail" from counsel identifying issues they'd like to discuss. If a scheduled motion will involve three or more hours of hearings, "it would be my pref- erence to conduct a 'paperless' hearing," wrote Brown. Parties must prepare electronic copies in accordance with guidelines the court set up for a 2012 pilot project. To help with quick searches, Brown said PDF documents submitted to the court must have character recognition func- tions and suggested imaged cop- ies "are not acceptable." He added: "Ideally, coun- sel should co-operate and file, through the Commercial List Of- fice, one USB key that contains the motion materials for all par- ties at least three (3) days before the hearing of the motion." In another recent endorse- ment in e Bank of Nova Scotia v. David Allin, Brown said it's important to use the case man- agement mechanism available for the Toronto region com- mercial list in order to mini- mize the number of attendanc- es before a judge for a single summary judgment motion. If oral evidence is necessary, par- ties shouldn't have to meet only to decide that and then come back another day, he said. "Accordingly, it makes sense to me to set a schedule for a summary judgment motion which would require the parties to complete the written record, including out-of-court cross- examinations, well in advance of the motion hearing date, so that the judge scheduled to hear the motion could assess the ad- equacy of the written record in advance of the hearing and give directions in advance of the hearing about the calling of oral evidence," he wrote. A streamlined case manage- ment system will now be more important as more litigants, emboldened by a low-cost sum- mary judgment option, bring an increased number of cases to court, says Wise. "If Hryniak does in fact open the floodgates for summary judgment motions, as I believe the Supreme Court intended, our court system may ultimately require a broader reprioritiza- tion and reallocation of judicial resources simply to keep up with the caseload." Personal injury lawyer John McLeish also says Brown's guideline is "absolutely" one that should become the standard. "e Supreme Court of Can- ada has encouraged judges to become more interventionist," he says. "When a judge becomes an interventionist, you just get much more done. You can deal with the everyday stuff admin- istratively rather than through motions scheduled for months from now." Wise says more work lies ahead outside of the commer- cial list system as the courts structure a road map for what he calls "Ontario's new and pos- sibly groundbreaking summary judgment era." He adds: "According to the Supreme Court, this change is no longer merely optional." LT Continued from page 1

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