There are two sides to labour law — management and labour — which side is Emond Harnden on and how did it end up on that side of the equation?

We are on the management or employer side. Simply a function of the practices and backgrounds of the two founding partners [Lynn Harnden and Jacques Emond]. They were both doing the same thing so that’s how the practice evolved. It’s simply proved to be a really great niche, a really great boutique, a really great side of the practice to be on. Some management-side firms, on the employment law side, do both employee and employer side on the basis that it’s just litigation and you can do either plaintiff- or defendant-side litigation. We limit ourselves to just the defendant side, so just the employer side on the employment law side. On the labour side, it’s either always union side or management/employer.

Who would your clients be?

We’ve got public sector, private sector, federally regulated, provincially regulated, Crown corporations large and small, blue chip national organizations and corporations to small local businesses and anything in between.

Tell me a bit of the background of how you got the managing partner role in this firm.

I initially started out with in a co-managing partner role. There had been a managing partner when the firm was founded and he continued for many years and then there was a successor. When the successor had been there for about two years, it became clear that the job was becoming a little too big for one person to do on a part-time basis, which is the model for the managing partner: practising while managing the firm. So I became co-managing partner.

My areas of responsibility were: the firm’s human resources — so all the staffing, articling process, dealing with the associates plus the professional development — and also the marketing and advertising and business development side. My co-partner kept the finance side and the infrastructure, the building, the IT, that kind of thing. Then after two years . . . my co-managing partner decided that he wanted to go back to practising law full time, so I stepped into the other half of the co-job.

Do you still practise?

I spend about half my time practising and half my time managing the firm. It’s about a 50-50 split. I balance it with difficulty but it seems to have steady, regular things that require my attention all the time, then there are things that are cyclical. So those are the times where, on the practice side, I have to pull back a little and spend more time on the management side — during articling, during budget preparation time.

The rest of the time, I do the regular sort of stuff and my practice expands — as it always will — to fill whatever other time you have. It just means I have to be very careful in terms of planning. But it’s not much different from when I started my family with kids. All of a sudden, when you have a working spouse with kids, you have to be much more disciplined in terms of budgeting and managing your time. It’s just like that, only taken to the next level.

What do you feel are some of the greatest challenges and rewards of managing your firm?

Anybody will tell you that the people side is the most challenging, the most time consuming, and it is also the most rewarding. Those are the things that are, by their nature, unpredictable and always challenging to manage. It’s also, a little bit of a gloss on the people thing, is trying to keep everyone moving in the same direction in terms of a common vision, in terms of a common mission, and in terms of how we’re going to carry that out. And trying to keep everybody on the same side and moving in the same direction is quite challenging but at the same time is very rewarding when it happens.

The other challenging thing, I would say, is managing the growth. The firm has grown steadily. Managing that and trying to anticipate that and stay ahead of the curves. When you do that well, it’s very satisfying. When you realize you haven’t done as well as you might, it’s a little hair-raising, but that’s okay!