Canadian Lawyer

26 M A R C H 2 0 1 7 w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m a napkin. But now you have to be patient. Founders need to be babysat. They're going to call with a lot of questions, because many of them are doing these things for the very first time." Marshall Pawar, the founding partner at Vancouver's MEP Business Counsel, says firms should think long and hard before jumping on the startup bandwagon. "If you're just getting into it because it's the trendy thing to do, it's maybe not something you should be involved in," he says. "There's a big difference between working with businesses in the early stage of their development compared with large established ones. You need to be interested in the area, because it involves a lot of com- promise and can be quite challenging. You need to be more than just a lawyer. You need to be willing to hold people's hands and stretch out a bit to be a business advi- sor to them." In any case, founders can smell a faker a mile off, says Jayesh Parmar, the CEO and co-founder of Picatic, an online ticket- selling platform based in Vancouver. He remembers getting a presentation from a law firm promoting a $5,000 package of free legal services as part of an accelerator program for promising tech startups. "It was like oil mixing with water. They were trying to come into our world with this loss leader to get us onboard. But it came with all these hooks and caveats: 'You can't use this here; you can only use this in that situation,'" Parmar says. Like any good Canadian, Parmar turns to hockey for an analogy that explains the key differences between the two types of lawyer startups will encounter: the coach and the general manager. "The coach is there on the bench, sitting with the players and speaking to them in a way they can understand. The GM comes in, dressed in a suit, and it creates a whole different vibe," he says. "Some law firms just get it and some don't. As entrepreneurs, we're very vulnerable. If you can show that you're in tune with us and that you speak our language, then it builds trust." Parmar says he was seduced by his cur- rent counsel, LaBarge Weinstein LLP, when it delivered a care package that included a Pez dispenser to participants part-way through the same program. "It seems like such a trivial thing, but the timing of it was perfect. Accelerators are hard work, so feeling like you have some- one there with you who gets what you're going through goes a long way," he says. LaBarge Weinstein co-founder Debo- rah Weinstein says the 21-lawyer firm, which has offices in Ottawa, Vancouver and Toronto, has developed a specialty in unorthodox advertising opportunities at incubator and tech events where its target market gathers. "We're tactical with where we spend money. We won't go head to head with the big sponsors, but maybe we will provide the beer at the after-party. People remem- ber that," she says. Rebecca Kacaba is a partner in the startups group at Dentons Canada LLP in Toronto and runs a blog aimed at local entrepreneurs. Despite the high-tech focus of her clientele, she relies on a decidedly old-school source of new business: word of mouth. "People come to me mostly through introductions from others who know what I'm doing or who were happy with my ser- vice," Kacaba says. "Mentors in the startup community know that this is an area I have experience in." While technology startups are one focus for Prairies heavyweight McKercher LLP, Christopher Masich, a lawyer with the firm's entrepreneur law practice group in Saskatoon, says they have spread the net wider to account for the realities of the regional resource-based economy. "We have some biotechnology clients, but we're also dealing with plumbers and skilled tradespeople as well as others who want to approach traditional industries a little differently," he says. "We're applying a suite of services to entrepreneurs that looks more at the attributes of the people involved, rather than focusing on any par- ticular industry." Masich says that government support for entrepreneurism at the provincial and federal level has created numerous "choke points" in the system for new compa- nies, regardless of their line of business, including government resource centres, industry liaison offices at universities aim- ing to commercialize academic research and early-stage financiers. That's where McKercher tries to target the marketing budget for his practice group, he says. "These places tend to have far more exposure to entrepreneurs in the early stag- es. Lawyers are not the first place these peo- ple call typically," Masich says. "We want to break down some of the barriers associated with the legal profession and make us more accessible to these individuals." According to Smith, there is no sub- stitute for direct contact when it comes to startup firms. He pays regular visits to Launch Academy, a Vancouver startup hub, doling out free advice in half-hour sessions to anyone who wanders by. "I love the idea of being in on the ground floor with entrepreneurs as they start to grow their ideas. It's a really cool feeling to talk with someone and see that You can't get into the startup business these days as a get-rich-quick scheme. Back at the height of the dot-com bubble maybe you could, when guys were getting funded for ideas on the back of a napkin. Brock Smith, Whiteboard Law

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