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MANAGING PARTNER Going from strength to strength BY GAIL J . COHEN Emond Harnden. Since the firm's incep- tion in 1987, it has grown from three to 24 lawyers. He talks to Canadian Lawyer about how the largest boutique of its kind in the nation's capital goes from strength to strength. A Q Do you still practise? I spend about half my time prac- tising and half my time manag- ing the firm. It's about a 50-50 split. I balance it with difficulty but it seems to have steady, regular things that re- quire my attention all the time, then there are things that are cyclical. It just means I have to be very careful in terms of planning. But it's not much different from when I started my fam- ily 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. Q Do you see growth ahead for your firm? I do. I see the same, steady growth that we've experienced. We've been through several downturns, recessions, boom-bust cycles, whatever you want to call them. And we've always emerged stronger with as many or more people than we entered those cycles with. I think that's partly the nature of this niche. But I also think it's partly the nature of our presence in this market, our being very well respected and established in this market for what we do. ndrew Tremayne is the manag- ing partner of Ottawa labour and employment law boutique Q Some areas of practice don't do well in a recession, how does labour and employ- ment law usually fare? It usually fares very well because you have organizations going through downsizings or restructurings. Most organizations need advice on their employment and labour law obligations when they do those kinds of exercises. We often see an increase in labour arbi- tration. So there could be an increase in the number of grievances in unionized employers because [when] people are not getting robust salary increases, they will be looking to advance themselves in other ways. There'll be job competition grievances because the stakes are higher. The nature of the work changes. The other thing we [have] seen an increase in is unionization, union organizing cam- paigns. Employees are nervous about their job security, so they often go and seek a union. Q Do you have a system for business devel- opment for your lawyers? We have regular quarterly meet- ings of all the lawyers. We review trends, locally, trends among our clients. We examine business development op- portunities that are out there in our market. And we provide employees, on an ongoing basis, advice in the form of a toolkit on key business development skills that you need. We are a young firm, we are an entrepreneurial firm so I make sure that all of the lawyers have the tools that they need in terms of how they de- velop a plan, what are the effective strat- egies for developing your own network and your own client base, those kinds of things. It's a mix of group and working with everyone together and then work- ing with individuals in terms of their particular skills needs. Some people are 12 FEBRU AR Y 2009 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com ANDREW TREMAyNE naturals in terms of networking and coming up with a business development plan. Some people need more guidance in terms of how do you do it and how do you stay on top of it. Everybody is a little bit different and we try and give people the resources that they need to be as suc- cessful as they can. Q Your firm conducts a lot of seminars. How did that come about and what are their benefits for your firm? We have a very robust breakfast seminar program. Those started out, let's say there's a new piece of legis- lation, an amendment to the Labour Relations Act for example, and we're all fielding calls from clients about what do these changes mean. So you gradually realize that if we pooled all our resourc- es and invited all our clients into a room at once, we can develop a really good presentation and then all the clients would have this great content. Then you realize, well not only can you invite your current clients but get the word out and invite prospective clients who might like to come and take a look and see what you might have to offer. You can [also] do an update on a quickly developing area of the law like the duty to accom- modate. It gradually just sort of devel- oped a structure where we do five of these a year over breakfast for free for the clients. To read more of ANDREW TREMAYNE'S interview with Canadian Lawyer, visit us online at canadianlawyermag.com