Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
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PROFILE By Kelly Harris Canadian content International Monetary Fund general counsel Sean Hagan remembers his elementary school, the street where he lived, and the snow, but not so much the cold. Then again forgetting Calgary's sometimes -40 C winters isn't really a bad thing. International Monetary Fund general counsel Sean Hagan remem- bers Calgary with a fondness. His fa- ther was the U.S. consul stationed there in the mid 1960s. He was seven when they arrived and remembers living on Prospect Avenue and attending Sacred Heart Elementary Catholic School. His father's many diplomatic posts helped lead the Dublin, Ireland-born, U.S. citi- zen to the top legal job at the world's largest fi nancial rescue organization. "My father was in the foreign service, so that gave me an interest in interna- tional affairs. When I graduated from law school, I moved to New York for a year and a half before I went to Tokyo." In the late 1980s, Japan and much of Asia was in a boom. Hagan found him- self working for a law fi rm where he was in the rather ironic position of advising Japanese companies on aquiring Ameri- can ones. He returned to Southeast Asia in the 1990s under dramatically differ- ent circumstances as the bust lead him to work in Korea and Indonesia. He recalls a valuable lesson from that We are trained to basically be the fi re department and to respond quickly. You can imagine that we do contin- gency planning when we see potential [crises] brewing, therefore we are in a position to, not necessarily hit the ground running, but we're not completely fl at-footed. — SEAN HAGAN International Monetary Fund time and one that no doubt guides much of his work with the IMF today — a country's laws are only as strong as the institutions that enforce them. "I remem- ber doing work in Indonesia during the Asian crisis and they had a bankruptcy law that was derived from the Dutch bankruptcy law having been a Dutch col- ony. While, however, the Netherlands had a very good bankruptcy system, I think it is fair to say at that time the bankruptcy system in Indonesia was almost non-exis- tent and the problem was not the design of the law but the implementation. INHOUSE FEBRUARY 2009 • 25 PHOTO: MICHAEL SPILOTRO