You have a somewhat unique position at a Canadian law firm being the managing partner and COO. Can you describe what you do in your position?

It is kind of unique in the sense that Stikeman Elliott is a decentralized firm. Each office and each office managing partner has a high degree of autonomy. We want each office to react to their local market conditions. Each of our markets is very different. Montreal is a very different market than Calgary and different from Toronto and so on. One, we give our individual offices, as I say, a high degree of autonomy. But having said that we are a firm and we are one firm, so we’ve got to have some form of co-ordination. So a large part of my role as chief operating officer is to ensure that there is communication and co-ordination among the offices. I work with Pierre Raymond, the chair, he is the CEO, if you like, of the firm. He has firm-wide responsibilities. He does not have any particular local responsibilities. He and I work together and I do whatever it is he wants me to do to make his job as chair easier. Fundamentally, it’s co-ordination and communication.

What does that involve?

It involves making sure that people talk to each other when we’re looking at taking on a significant mandate so what happens in one office doesn’t potentially conflict us out of another potentially interesting situation in another office. It involves such relatively basic things as making sure that people are using similar assumptions when they are making their budget preparations every year. And if the assumptions are different, we understand why they are different. Making sure the tests we apply to people on their entry to partnership are relatively the same across the firm. It’s delicate though, because we try not to have too heavy-handed an approach from a centralized point of view. But at the same time, as I say, we are one firm so we’ve got to have some degree between the plans and the operations of all the offices.

How does your position fit in with the management structure of the firm?

About 10 years ago we moved to what is close to a corporate model, although we are far from being a corporate structure. We have a partnership board that is made up of 12 partners, four from Montreal, four from Toronto, and four from the other offices. The partnership board meets essentially quarterly although we have more meetings as required. The partnership board functions like a corporate board. It’s responsible for focusing on strategy, for focusing on big-picture items, and giving direction to “management.� Then there’s an executive committee of the partnership board. The executive committee meets every week for about an hour and a half. It’s made up of the managing partner from Montreal, that’s me, the managing partner from Toronto, that’s Rod Barrett, one other representative from Toronto, one other representative from Montreal, plus the chair. So the five of us meet every week to talk about firm-wide issues. Then each office has a managing partner and typically a management committee that runs the local office. So the partnership board and the executive committee deal with firm-wide issues and try to ensure there’s some coherence across the firm. But we devolve a whole lot of individual responsibility and individual initiative to the local offices.