During its 25th anniversary and annual spring conference, the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association announced it had teamed up with the Rotman School of Management to launch a certification program for Canadian in-house counsel that in many ways mirrors an executive MBA — but at a fraction of the cost.

Are you prepared to confront your CEO? Are you prepared to take active measures to stop wrongdoing?  Are you ready to blow the whistle? How about the prospect of losing your job? If you’re in-house counsel, you probably have no choice but to answer yes to all four.

There’s a growing public perception that cities always lose to developers in appeals at the Ontario Municipal Board, but don’t tell that to Brendan O’Callaghan, a lawyer with the City of Toronto. “I win over 80 per cent of my hearings,” says O’Callaghan, who’s usually involved in 20 to 25 hearings a year. “I’m pretty happy with the treatment I get at the board.”

Being one of the world’s top ringette goalies didn’t stop Keely Brown from pursuing a career in law. Fortunately, her career and love of sports aren’t mutually exclusive.
Brown has always been an athlete; she’s played ringette for 30 years and hockey since she was a teenager. But in her third year at the University of Toronto, she ran into injury troubles and decided it might be a good idea to look at alternate careers.

If they didn’t have enough on their plate already general counsel are feeling the pressure to become more concerned about the risk of cyber-security threats to their organizations and they are starting to ask more questions about what they can do to help mitigate that risk.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford’s highly charged fight to save his seat has thrust municipal conflict of interest issues into the spotlight across Canada.

Complex litigation has traditionally been viewed as a team sport, largely waged by one external law firm’s roster of top litigators versus another. The battle was funded by the companies who engaged them and few asked many questions about how the job would get done. In some cases that’s still the way the game is played but over the last few years, especially at the banks and insurance companies, as the pressure has built to bring legal costs under control, corporate legal departments have been asking their external firms to come up with creative ideas to keep the bills more predictable. That means the team now involves the in-house counsel to a far greater degree and they are making more decisions around the rules of engagement and how the firms are ultimately compensated for the work they do and the playbooks they put forward.