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Kuppek was dismissed as executive director of the CCCA as part of the Jan. 17 shakeup, leaving behind a track record of successful events and membership growth for the organization, former board mem- bers say. The CCCA's own four-member staff was essentially decimated as well. Since Kuppek's dismissal, all the other staff have announced they are moving to other jobs. Paul Ouellette, director of professional development, and Kendra Keaney Finnessy, marketing and com- munications manager, have left for other jobs. Ouellette has landed at Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP. Executive assistant Alyce O'Brien also left at the end of March. (The CBA says the employees left voluntarily.) Reached by Canadian Lawyer, Kuppek was reluctant to speak publicly because she is still negotiating her severance pack- age. But she says she sees the last several years as having offered a great opportu- nity to be part of the developments in the Canadian in-house community. "From a personal perspective, I believe that right now there are great opportunities for the advancement of the corporate counsel community in this country. While I am saddened and disappointed not to be part of this continuing evolution, I do wish the corporate counsel community the very best on its exciting journey," Kuppek says in a statement to Canadian Lawyer. Horn says Kuppek's leadership of the CCCA was driven by a real passion for serving the needs of in-house counsel. "She developed a number of important relationships both nationally and interna- tionally that have been carefully fostered," says Horn. "She was the person those relationships were with, and she is gone, they dismissed her." AN ONGOING TENSION founded as an independent organization. Its in-house lawyer founders decided it should be under the CBA umbrella. "My understanding is that since they made that decision, there has been an ongoing tension," says Foy. "The issues were what kind of autonomy does the CCCA have in T regards to corporate counsel? The issues we faced as a board didn't change through the years." She adds other problems involved sponsorship agreements, which bring in quite a bit of funding to the CCCA. "We were bound by CBA sponsorship agreements, so, in other words, we were restricted from approaching certain spon- sors but did not receive any share of the financial support," says Foy. And, she adds, the CBA notion that CCCA wanted to split into an independ- ent organization is not what the former board wanted. "I had, and I think the board too had, a vision that saw the CCCA inside the CBA. Where we differed is the amount of independence," says Foy. "I spoke to the CBA board, I appealed to them to understand that we are the only organization in the world, as far as we were aware, where the private bar and the in-house bar are part of the same organi- zation." In essence, at the governance level, the CBA-CCCA conflict was a question of primary affiliation. The CBA's perspec- tive is that the primary affiliation was to the CBA, the former board's was that the CCCA was the primary association. In dismissing the board, the CBA has put that question to rest. CBA LOOKS FORWARD o understand the CBA-CCCA con- flict one needs to look back to the mid-1980s, when the CCCA was aftermath of the failed negotiations and the dismissal of the CCCA board. The general counsel at Scotia Investments Ltd. is no stranger to the CCCA, having served as its president back in 2007. He was brought in as president of the transitional executive committee to keep things going until a new board could be constituted, something he says will happen in August. Patzelt supports the CBA position and E is the spokesman for the CBA. He says the association's actions have acted as a cata- lyst to implement changes to ensure the CCCA continues to be the most impor- tant force for Canadian in-house counsel. Some changes are already in place. After it dismissed the board, the CBA went ahead and gave the CCCA a funding increase. It means there will be $675,000 per year allo- cated for the CCCA activities and opera- tions, which does not include sponsorship revenue for CCCA events. That's a 69-per- cent increase over the previous funding level. In addition, in the transition period, the CBA has also taken a strong, support- ive role through its own staff to make sure CCCA members are provided all of the services they have come to expect. "We've got the biggest budget from the CBA that we've ever had in history, so we now have the capital and human resources to deliver out programs throughout the country," says Patzelt. "The CBA took a very delib- erate review of what had transpired and decided that it needed to make some changes to ensure that Canadian in-house continued to enjoy the services that they were going to get." Patzelt says the CBA's main goal is to ensure the CCCA is a strong, independ- ent group within the CBA family, enjoy- ing the benefits and strengths of both organizations. It is now searching for a new executive director, and implementing a new strategic plan, which includes keep- ing up all events the organization has held in the past. Patzelt says he doesn't predict any problems with future programming. "I'm more than confident, we have all the resources that the CBA can provide us. This hasn't slowed us down at all," he says. "It's business as usual, plus, plus, plus." nergetic and optimistic, Robert Patzelt is the man the CBA has put in charge of the CCCA in the THOSE LEFT BEHIND supporters in the past feel left behind. Leanne Andree, another former volun- teer board member who was dismissed in January, says she is done with both the CBA and CCCA. The Waterloo, Ont.,-based assistant vice president and senior counsel of Sun Life Assurance Co. of Canada didn't take the news of the board's dismissal much better than Foy and Horn. "I was floored. Absolutely floored. My reaction to it was frustration and disappointment," says Andree, add- ing that like other volunteers, she felt betrayed for the time away from family E www.CANADIAN Lawyermag.com M AY 2011 29 ven though the corporate coun- sel association appears to be mov- ing forward, some of its strongest