Canadian Lawyer

COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE AND INFRASTRUCTURE J eff Merrick could hardly have timed his 1991 call to the bar worse. Having completed his articles at the Toronto office of Blake Cassels & Graydon LLP, and settled on the firm's real estate practice group, Canada's real estate market, and particularly Ontario's, tanked. "O&Y [Olympia and York], one of the big developers, went bankrupt and all the Canadian developers went through some really tough times," he says. Within a year, Merrick had jumped ship to Vancouver, where Blakes had a newly established office, and has never left. "I snapped up the opportunity. I was able to join a growing office and help establish a real estate practice in a market that was not nearly as depressed as Toronto's," says Merrick. According to Heller, the field's fluctuating fortunes have resulted in a shortage of qualified lawyers in commercial real estate. "There's this gap for the mid-level real estate lawyer. It's an ongoing issue, that there just weren't enough people getting into it at some point, so the firms are missing that mid-level real estate type of lawyer," she says. And things are looking up again for those few lawyers who fit the bill, says ZSA's Kennedy. "Commercial real estate is crazy busy for me right now," she says. "Everyone is trying to find associates, because most of the law firms are very thinly staffed there." Merrick's timing was better in 2002 when he stumbled into one of the earliest public-private partnerships in Canada, through a client shortlisted for the construction of the Vancouver General Hospital's Academic Ambulatory Care Centre. "They came and asked me did I know anything about P3 development. I said no, which was the answer they'd been getting from all the lawyers they talked to. So I started reading up and got involved," Merrick says. Now P3s account for about 60 per cent of his work. After a blip during the financial crisis, when the high-profile Port Mann Bridge project was pulled from the P3 process, the pro- vincial government-owned Partnerships B.C. re-established itself as a Canadian P3 powerhouse alongside Infrastructure Ontario, and foreign banks increasingly entered the market with financing. Dal Bhathal, CEO of The Counsel Network, a legal recruiting firm with offices in Vancouver, Calgary, and Toronto, says she's been struck by the level of activity in the area. "P3 has always been quite busy over the last five or six years, particularly in Vancouver, but we've really seen it pick up over the last two years," she says. "Engineering and construction companies have been growing their legal departments and law firms have been hiring a lot in the area, too." MINING doing well and developing business, which is good for everyone. It's impor- tant because of the transaction value of the industry and its importance to the Canadian economy as a whole." He sees mining as a key factor in the Norton Rose Group's arrival in Canada. "A At the same time as its merger with Ogilvy Renault LLP in 2011, the firm also tied up a deal with Deneys Reitz in South Africa, another mining hotspot. Mining is a global business with a strong Canadian flavour, says Brian Abraham, the national co-chairman of Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP's mining group. He estimates more than 50 per cent of the world's junior mining com- panies are based in Vancouver, where he has his office. Very few of them have their assets in Canada though, which means that 75 per cent of his work is international. "Right now, I'm doing deals in every continent except Antarctica, which is off limits to mining, so I don't think I'll ever do a deal there," he says. Abraham studied geology at university and keeps up his membership in the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of B.C. He says the technical knowledge has given him a leg-up in the field during a long career, and welcomes the recent influx of fresh talent after periods in the doldrums. "For years nobody did any mining work. It was considered a sunset industry, which I never believed. Long term, the industry is looking good, because we can't do without metals," he says. Bhathal says recent demand for lawyers in the area has sustained a high level. "Over the last couple of years, mining has been very active, and that has continued so far this year," she says. "When you look at the top deals, there's a lot of mining transactions. It's still a very busy area and I haven't seen any signs that it's going by the wayside," says Kennedy. number of law firms are waking up to mining," says Jay Kellerman, a partner at Stikeman Elliott LLP with more than 20 years experience in the area who leads the firm's global min- ing group. "Some have been a little late to the game, but they're www.CANADIAN Lawyermag.com JUNE 2012 29

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