The Lawyers Weekly - July 1, 2011

BUSINESS
CAREERS

MATT LAFORGE

On a Tuesday morning in
April, Jamie Shulman walked
into a downtown seminar room.
Shulman, a Toronto-based soft-
ware entrepreneur and member
in good standing of both the Law
Society of Upper Canada (LSUC)
and the State Bar of California,
had come to learn more about
the still-burgeoning, often
unruly world of social media,
and the morning’s presentation
promised a discussion of, as the
organizers’ promotional material
had it, “the benefits and risks of
using social media as part of
your business strategy and…the
interaction between social media
and litigation…and tips and
traps for lawyers using social
media themselves.”
It bears clarifying that Shul-
man hadn’t travelled that mor-
ning to the Lucite- and exposed-
brick-laden confines of a tech
startup, nor had he logged on to
watch a webinar beam in from
Silicon Valley to his office com-
puter. He had, rather, taken his
seat in the Toronto offices of Torys
LLP, on the 33rd floor of the
firm’s downtown headquarters.

The session, “Social media: The good, the bad and the ugly,” was the fourth to be presented this year under the banner of UniversiTorys, the firm’s new series of professional-develop-ment presentations designed to help practising lawyers achieve compliance with the LSUC’s recently enacted bylaw 6.1, which compels licensees to log 12 LSUC-eligible hours worth of “continuing professional development” every year.

“I think it’s a good idea to
keep connected to thinking
about legal issues, but to be
completely candid with you, I
was going to the session regard-
less of the law-society-credit
stuff,” Shulman said. “That was a
nice bonus, but, quite frankly,
the quality of Torys’ programs
generally, including this one, are
so high, with such good people,
that I went to it purely out of
interest.

“[i]t’s one thing for a teacher to be conceptual while teaching at a school, but it’s another thing to have attorneys who are actually living and breathing this stuff with their clients.

yers an easily accessible avenue
to striking yet another profes-
sional obligation off their lists,
was part of the plan all along.
“Law firms, particularly larger
firms, have undertaken internal
professional development
initiatives for many years,” said
Diana Miles, director, profes-
sional development and compe-
tence, at the LSUC. “The flex-
ibility of the CPD requirement
permits firms to continue to
focus those initiatives on their
specific needs while providing
eligible CPD hours.”
Shulman, the veteran, con-
curs. “What do the large firms
bring to the table? Just off the
top of my head, the practical
aspect is having lawyers up
there who are speaking from
experience and are advising real
clients in the context of the real
world,” he said. “And I like aca-
demic stuff, so it’s not like I’m
anti-academic. But it’s one
thing for a teacher to be concep-
tual while teaching at a school,
but it’s another thing to have
attorneys who are actually liv-
ing and breathing this stuff with
their clients. I found that
incredibly helpful.”
Kari Abrams is director of
student recruitment at Blakes.
In explaining management’s
rationale for producing the firm’s
CPD-seminar series — which has
been dubbed Business Class, and
which in the months to come
will present such free-of-charge
sessions as “Strategic Lawsuits:
Where Are We Two Years Later?”
and “The Growing Importance
of Diversity in the Legal Profes-
sion”—she points to Blakes’
track record: “We’ve always had
a fantastic robust professional-
development program. We’ve
been lucky enough to have a
name out there already. And
now with our Business Class ser-
vice, clients know to turn to us,
and we offer such a wide array of
topics that Blakes is known as
one of the best firms to go to for
professional development.”
There is, to be sure, a level of
trust that is bound to accumulate
over as many decades as Blakes
and Torys have been in business.
In such a regulatory environ-
ment as now exists in Ontario,
that trust is paying conspicuous
dividends. The firms built it;
and, so far, they have come.

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University of Minnesota, exam-
ined the “results-only work
environment” (ROWE), a
scheduling system developed in
the 1990s by Best Buy, the elec-
tronics retailing giant. Man-
agers and employees in a
ROWE workplace focus on
striving for and measuring
results, while de-emphasizing
when and where work is com-
pleted, and how many hours are
spent doing it. The eight-month
study of 775 employees at Best
Buy’s Minneapolis headquar-
ters found that ROWE reduced
costly employee turnover by 45
per cent compared to company
divisions where ROWE was
implemented later.