profile
Growing a career
and a team
General counsel for Morneau Shepell
believes career growth can come from
helping a company grow as well.
By Jennifer Brown
Lynn Korbak has always
had a guiding principle when it comes
to taking the next step in her career. The
work has to be challenging and it has to
be a fit with her entrepreneurial spirit
— sometimes that means walking away
from an opportunity as she did once
when caught in the middle of a major
takeover. "For me, the idea has been that
whatever I was going to do I wanted to
make sure it was going to be a building
block in my career," says Korbak, general
counsel and corporate secretary with human resources giant Morneau Shepell
where she has been the head of the legal
department since 2003. "The best thing I
can do is fully understand our business
and our strategy and our objectives and
how we operate, what's important to us,
and interpret and translate the legal issues in that light because external counsel
don't know your company intimately and
they can't do that for you."
Over the years her career goals have
increasingly been skewed towards playing a larger role in the business of the organization she's working for and not just
looking at her job as legal risk mitigation.
At the time I didn't have any burning desire to have kids at all, but
the one thing that bothered me was seeing senior lawyers in the office
late at night with two nannies — the day nanny and the night nanny.
That was something I was just not going to do.
Lynn Korbak, Morneau Shepell
w w w. c a n a d i a n law y er m a g . c o m / i n h o u s E
april 2013
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