Law Times

Page 4 January 18, 2016 • Law Times www.lawtimesnews.com Firm scraps CEO model McMillan shuffles executive management team BY YAMRI TADDESE AND JIM MIDDLEMISS Law Times A new leadership team under a new manage- ment model will steer McMillan LLP in the direction of greater innovation, says the law firm. The firm is doing away with its 10-year-old CEO/COO model and bringing in a collaborative executive committee leadership scheme. The switch is aimed at bringing diverse views, skills, and expertise to the management table, says McMillan. Litigation partner Teresa Du- fort is the executive director of the four-member executive commit- tee, which includes lawyers David Dunlop, Tim Murphy, and Ste- phen Wortley. Dufort, who is also a co-leader of the firm's product liability defence and regulatory group, says her team has been working together extensively over the past year to develop new ideas for doing business. The firm's longtime CEO An- drew Kent, a restructuring and insolvency partner, will return to full-time practice. "Innovation is a focus of the firm. It's something that we're independently developing," says Dufort. The unique collaborative structure has caught the atten- tion of skeptical law firm man- agement experts. Richard Stock, a partner at Cat- alyst Consulting, said a number of law firms have "corporatized" over the last few years, adopting a CEO-COO model for managing their firms. He calls the McMillan move "an unusual one." "We haven't seen it go in this direction. Dividing up labour among four individuals, that's not usual." He speculates that the move might be a "temporary measure until they decide which way the pendulum will swing," adding that the firm is now na- tional with a number of acquisi- tions over the last five years. He doesn't see the collabora- tive management structure as a new model for for law firms. Robert Hardie, managing di- rector of the Management Coun- sel Group Inc., is equally puzzled by the move. "It seems that Mc- Millan's progressive thinking has less to do with innovation than the unanswerable question of law firm management — the inevita- ble swing of the pendulum from authoritarian but effective man- agement by a CEO to the push- back by the partners demanding a more participative manage- ment style of group-think. "Lawyers resist being treated as an employee but are equally frustrated by the slow-moving processes of seeking compromise. Combining partner harmony with effective management may be [an] unending quest for law firms," he says. Dufort says McMillan is look- ing at various ways it could be in- novative in its service delivery. One of those is using technol- ogy to create a platform where lawyers can collaborate on the different kinds of work they're doing for clients, explains Dufort. Such a platform would also al- low clients to easily manage all of work the firm is doing for them. Another priority is develop- ing a cost-and-margin analysis model that would allow the firm to do a better job of coming up with proposals for alternative fee arrangements. This means Mc- Millan's lawyers would be able to tell their clients they understand what the cost of doing business in a law firm is, "which is some- thing a lot of law firms don't un- derstand, I think," says Dufort. Although McMillan has six offices, the idea is to use "the one- office concept" when it comes to client service, she adds. "Instead of being office-cen- tric, which is the way I think a lot of national firms that have mul- tiple offices can be, our thought was it would give us a lot of abil- ity to draw from a much broader expertise in order [to] serve cli- ents if you could pretend that there was no geography between us," Dufort continues. Murphy says the legal mar- ketplace now demands the kind of creativity and expertise that cannot be restricted by geo- graphic boundaries. "McMillan believes increasing- ly complex legal challenges require innovative and sophisticated legal solutions that are best delivered without regard to geographical or practice area boundaries through a combination of collaboration, strong project management, and technology," he says. Dufort says McMillan's cli- ents have successfully used the collaborative leadership model. "We thought it works for our clients, why wouldn't it work for ourselves?" she says. LT NEWS McMillan's new executive committee (l to r): Tim Murphy, Stephen Wortley, Teresa Dufort, and David Dunlop. SKIMMING THE SURFACE IS FINE UNTIL A DEEPER DIVE IS REQUIRED. Start with Practical Law Canada. Whether you need a surface view or a deeper understanding of a legal issue, Practical Law Canada offers up-to-date, straightforward how-to guides, annotated standard documents, checklists, and more. For more information visit www.practicallaw.ca

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