Canadian Lawyer

LAW OFFICE MANAGEMENT Winnipeg's Fillmore Riley has a well-oiled system in place to make sure Investing in the future firm has not only given her the exposure to all areas of legal practice as prescribed in law society requirements, it has also helped her establish good working rela- tionships with partners and associates in her chosen field of litigation in employ- ment and insurance law. "They under- stand my skills. They understand the level I'm at," she says. Brimming with confidence and already articling student at C elia Fergusson is hitting the ground running as she embarks on her first year as an associate at Fillmore Riley LLP. Her year as an the Winnipeg law comfortable with her new role as a prac- tising lawyer at a beneficiary of a homegrown articling system that lawyers at Fillmore Riley see as a unique way of managing an articling program while giving students the best possible individualized experience. It is called "the gatekeeper system" and the firm, Fergusson is it was designed a decade ago to provide "consistent co-ordinated feedback on stu- students, and the firm, get the most out of their articles. BY KEVIN MARRON dent performance and a well-balanced manageable workflow for articling stu- dents," according to managing partner Glen Peters. This system, he says, "is quite a bit ahead of where we used to be before and where I presume other firms are. As the legal profession anguishes over " a widely perceived crisis in the articling system, the focus is mainly on the quan- tity of placements that law firms provide and the plight of the 12 per cent or more of graduating students nationally whose legal careers are stalled because they can- not find an articling position. But there is also reason for concern about the quality of the articling experience that law firms provide, according to legal management consultant Jordan Furlong of Stem Legal Web Enterprises Inc. "The purpose of arti- cling is to train new lawyers, not to assist experienced lawyers. But there are firms that view articling students almost as glo- rified temps, whose job is to clean up tasks or fill gaps in lawyers' projects," he says. What Furlong likes about the Fillmore Riley gatekeeper system is that it offers an 22 A U GUST 2012 www.CANADIAN Lawyermag.com alignment of the priorities of a law firm and those of the law societies by manag- ing students' work in a way that benefits them and the firm. Peters describes the gatekeeper system as a hybrid between more conventional models, some of which provide formal rotations whereby students move from one practice area to another according to a rigid pre-arranged sched- ule, while other models may offer little in the way of formal structure beyond assign- ing a lawyer to supervise each student. At Fillmore Riley one of the partners acts as a gatekeeper, taking in requests from colleagues who have a task for which they want a student' determining which student it should be assigned to, on the basis of the student' s assistance, interests and capabilities, while also con- sidering in what practice areas the student needs to gain further experience. The stu- dents meet with the partner in charge of this system once per week to discuss their current workloads. This enables the stu- dents to learn from each other and keeps student workloads at a manageable level. then s Jeff szuc

• Cover