Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/50890
ONE ON ONE This month, J. Leanne Andree, assistant vice president and senior counsel at Sun Life Assurance Co. of Canada, is taking over the wheel as president of the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association. Andree, who became in-house coun- sel in 2000 after a career as a Toronto family lawyer, "loves it and never looked back since." During her year as president, which kickstarts at the CCCA annual conference, Aug. 17-19 in Quebec City, Andree's goal "over my year as presi- dent is to hit the 10,000-member mark." Andree talks to InHouse about some of the CCCA's plans over the next 12 months. Q A Going global with the CCCA Q A By Kirsten McMahon You been quite involved with the profession. First with the Canadian Bar Association and the Young Lawyers Division and now the CCCA board. What drives you to stay so involved in the profession? I think that it's really important in our profession to network with others and share ideas and learn from each other. As an in-house lawyer, I consider myself lucky in that I work in a large in-house legal department, so I have colleagues all around me that I can speak to, bounce ideas off of, but I'm the exception with respect to in- house lawyers. Many in-house lawyers are on their own within a corporation or they're in very small in-house depart- ments, and I think that associations like ours allows those lawyers to network with others who the same or similar roles across Canada. They have these fundamental similarities and they can network and learn from each other and share ideas, share experiences. Q Quite apart from private practice where formal mentoring pro- grams are in place at most large firms, new in-house counsel are often limited in finding a mentor. Tell me about the newly launched CCCA mentoring pro- gram. A We just launched our mentor- ing program, which was about a year in development. At our national conference in April in Toronto, we were really pleased to be able to announce that to our members. We've learned the Australian Corporate Counsel Association has a very successful men- toring program and what we've done is taken advantage of our deep, interna- tional connections to learn from them. What we're doing is collecting names of mentors and mentees who are interested in participating in the program and matching mentors to mentees. Matching may not necessarily be an industry match, but in an appropriate way so that we do have more junior lawyers able to meet with and learn from a more senior lawyer. Q A 26 A UGUST 2008 C ANADIAN Lawyer INHOUSE Are you getting an even amount of mentors and mentees participating? We are, and interestingly we've had an abundance of mentors, which is great. People are interested in giving back. I know that initiative has devel- oped over time. Are there any new or continuing initiatives that will be launched during your presidency? We're working on a member- centric web site and it's going to be a Facebook-style network. A social networking web site. We're really excited about that and we anticipate that that will be of signifi cant interest to our members. Q A I've been hearing a bit about a world summit. Could you tell me a bit about what lead to that initiative? The role of corporate counsel has become increasingly globalized, and so what our CCCA members are asking for is more information about the role of corporate counsel worldwide and what the differing approaches are to in-house legal practice worldwide. We've been asked to provide strategic legal and business programming that refl ects that growing international glo- balization of our role. Because of that, and in association with other corporate counsel organization from all over the world, we've developed this conference and it's specifi cally for general counsel