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CROSS EXAMINED Not your average GC Barbara Kincaid does what a lot of law department heads do everywhere but she also defends the Supremes. BY ANDI BALLA unique practice, but many of the chal- lenges of running an in-house depart- ment are the same." In the typical legal department sense, her general counsel work also involves things like reviewing contracts for the corporate services sector and dealing with disputes when a staff member gets sued over something they've done at work — for example rejecting a docu- ment. But because this is the Supreme Court, there is a lot more to the job. Kincaid heads the operations sector at Canada's top court, which makes her and her staff responsible for all activities related to processing cases that are brought to the SCC, including case management, providing legal and research services, and publication of the court's decisions. That places her in command of about 80 court employees and four operational branches — law, reports, registry, and library and infor- mation management. Intellectual property work also keeps Barbara Kincaid heads what she calls the top court's 'law firm.' the staff busy. Many of the court's pub- lications or records require licensing when they are used for commercial pur- poses, and there are always requests to use court-related videos and images. Kincaid has held the SCC general court ends up on the wrong end of a lawsuit, the duty to defend falls to Barbara Kincaid, general counsel of the Supreme Court of Canada. "It happens, Y ou can't really sue a judge, but people do try. So on the rare occasion when one of the justic- es of Canada's highest but you don't tend to get very far," she says. "The principal of judicial immu- nity [means] you can't sue a judge." Defending the Supremes is only a small part of what Kincaid actually does, but it does point out similarities between her work and that of legal departments everywhere. "We are like the court's law firm," says Kincaid. "I obviously run a 24 FEBRUA R Y 2011 www. CANADIAN Lawyermag.com counsel position since 1999, but has been with the court since 1988, rising through the ranks on the law depart- ment side, first as counsel then as senior counsel. "Like everything in life, it kind of just happened," she says. Called to the Ontario bar in 1981, Kincaid prac- tised in Ottawa with Jennifer Lynch & Associates until 1984. She had two boys in the early 1980s, which made general private practice harder to jug- gle. "I ended up staying home with my two sons until the youngest one was in COLIN ROwE