Canadian Lawyer

CLASS ACTIONS awyers and firms specializing in class action law have shown that you don't need to be a Bay Street lawyer to rake it in. But there's great risk along with the possibility of great reward. When the Canada Revenue Agency recently handed over anonymized data about the salaries of private practice lawyers to the Department of Justice as part of its process for determining judicial salaries, it showed that Canada's highest-paid lawyer lived outside the country's 10 largest cities. Observers suggested that kind of mammoth payday could only come from high-risk, high-reward contingency-fee litigation, and in fact, many assume the $8-million man is Windsor, Ont. class action legend Harvey Strosberg. L At London, Ont.'s Siskinds LLP, partner Dimitri Lascaris is no stranger to high-stakes action. The former securities law associate with U.S. giant Sullivan & Cromwell LLP took a nine-year sabbatical from the practice of law to join a professional blackjack team that toured the world extracting money from casinos with perfectly legal card-counting tactics. But as the team's notoriety grew, their career spans shortened: "We had experiences where we were barred from premises without having played a hand," says Lascaris. In any case, he says he was ready to go back into a line of work with a little more "social utility." "It wasn't much more than a wealth transfer from casinos, who admittedly deserved to have their money taken, because they're pretty bad in terms of what they do for society," explains Lascaris. So he came up with an idea to launch a class action against casinos for their allegedly intimidating and exploit- ative practices against consumers, and started shopping the idea around Canadian class action firms. Siskinds took a liking to Lascaris, if not his casino idea, and helped him on his pioneering path in securities class actions. The huge sums involved in some class action cases make for potentially massive windfalls for the plaintiff lawyer and law firms that lead them, but Lascaris is careful to hedge his bets. "Professional blackjack players want to get into the long run as quickly as possible, so they try and play as many hands as they can. The parallel to the class actions bar is it's dangerous for someone to embark on this type of practice and put everything into a single case or a small number of cases. You have to have a significant number of cases on the go, and preferably of a diverse nature, so you're not destroyed by one loss." FIRMS bigger piece of the pie. John Ohnjec, an Ottawa- based division director at Robert Half Legal, says a solid, portable book of clients can translate into a profitable lateral move. "Law firms are looking not so much for junior associates, but more the mid- to senior-level individuals. They need to bring in people that are senior enough that they have the capabili- ties, and they can bring business in," he says. That's particularly true in a still uncertain, and at A times volatile, market, says recruiter Carrie Heller. "It's a market that is going up and down quite a bit and I think it's in conjunction with what's going on in Europe with places like Greece and Portugal. Everyone is on the sidelines, waiting to see how this will all play out before they make some major hires," she says. "No matter what market we're in, firms are always looking for talented lawyers, but a solid book is extremely marketable right now. People are looking for a strong portable practice to strengthen their own firm." Following are a few of the fields where firms are keen to bring in new talent. 28 JUNE 2012 www. CANADIAN Lawyermag.com nother way for lawyers to boost their value is to practise in a popular field that has every law firm yearning to get in on the action, or if they're already there, to get a INSOLVENCY/RESTRUCTURING T he yin to M&A lawyers' yang, the current popularity of insolvency law reflects uncertainty in the markets. According to a Robert Half Legal survey released in March, restructuring and insolvency was one of the top three areas in which law firms planned to hire new lawyers. "I'm certainly finding quite a few firms looking for insolvency expertise. And a lot of companies are in the process of restructuring," says Heller. Derrick Tay is one of those in-demand lawyers who recently switched firms. At the turn of the year, he left Norton Rose Canada for Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP, bringing with him the Nortel Networks Corp. file that has occupied much of his last three years. "Gowlings committed to build a practice that would have a significant presence in the type of work that I want to do, which is that top-tier, multi- jurisdictional insolvency," he says. Before Nortel, Tay was debtor's counsel to Quebecor World Inc., the printing subsidiary of the communications heavyweight, and has recently added a role as monitor's counsel in the Sino-Forest case. He started out in banking and built a reputation in the insolvency area after handling a number of cases stemming from bad loans made by his banking clients. Increasingly complex cases came his way, which he says now insulate him from the fluctuations of the market. "In bad times, you find real estate lawyers, general corporate lawyers, everyone is touting themselves as insolvency law- yers. In good times, those dabblers go back to whatever they do, and the key insolvency people still tend to get a good piece of the action, because there's always some insolvency going on." Still, true to type, Tay foresees plenty of business for the dabblers in the near future. "Times are getting harder again, despite what the governments want you to believe. I think there's a lot of systemic problems in North America, and it's only a matter of time before the cracks start to become unsustainable and the work starts to pour through," he says.

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