About

Editor’s note: This interview was conducted prior to March 2020.

What are the most important transactions and litigations that you have been involved in during the last two years?

I am leading the settlement of a series of Canadian class actions, in five separate provinces, seeking in excess of C$5bn in damages. The claims were settled for less than C$20m. The settlements have now been approved by five separate Canadian Superior Courts and by four of five Courts of Appeal (with one appeal pending at the time of submission).

Our team was heavily involved in the launch of Mastercard’s new Intelligence and Cyber Centre in Vancouver. The centre, which will expand Mastercard’s Canadian presence and accelerate innovation in digital and cyber security, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things, is being launched in partnership with the Government of Canada through its Strategic Innovation Fund, providing a contribution of C$49m, and an additional C$510m investment by Mastercard.

I also lead legal and regulatory reviews of Mastercard’s ever expanding portfolio of cutting edge products and solutions in Canada. It’s a notoriously fast paced and competitive environment with significant regulatory considerations and rapidly evolving legal needs.

How do you feel in-house legal leaders can successfully introduce and implement a culture within a legal department?

Culture is crucially important both to legal departments and to the company as a whole. I think of culture in terms of the “how”, such as, how were colleagues engaged?, Was there collaboration? Was there coaching across teams? Involving the entire team, so everyone is invested in the end product, is crucially important. You can do this this through surveys or simple interviews, with the support of consultants or your human resource partners. Once you understand the desired culture of the team, you can build on that to establish the normative behaviours. The tone from the top is important as is reinforcing the message in team conversations and individual coaching.

If you had to give advice to an aspiring in-house lawyer or general counsel what would it be and why?

My advice is to be open and flexible to anything new. Whether you are being asked to take on new areas of law, engage new business processes or teams, change where or how you work – just be open to it. I have found that being adaptable to what you do and how you do it demonstrates that you are practical and a team player. Also, anything that adds to your tool kit only helps you. As an example, I had started a prior role without any knowledge about marketing laws. I invested heavily in learning this new area, and it helped me tremendously when I started my current role. In this role, I started learning employment law, which turned out to be really important with Mastercard’s recent acquisitions in Canada and continued commitment to grow in Canada.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners within their company?

The best way to build great relationships with business partners is to invest the time. Like any great relationship, it takes time to build trust with business partners. Take the time to learn their business and/or product, ask to be invited to their team meetings, invite them to yours, have workshop sessions so each of you understand the other’s most pressing priorities. This is easier when you are located in the same office. If you are in different offices, or even in a different country or time zone, my advice is the same – take the time to invest in that relationship and build that trust.

What techniques do you use to provide commercially-focused advice to your company, and how do you communicate these to more junior lawyers in the team?

Commercially-focussed advice is rooted in a deep understanding of the business. As I analyse issues, I want to understand both legal and business risks and rewards, the probabilities and the consequences. What I communicate to junior lawyers is to try and be systematic about the analysis, and in addition to articulating the legal risks, help our business partners articulate the rewards (or forgone rewards). Sometimes it is impossible to address the risks using legal solutions such as allocating liability in a contract. In those cases, I look for alternative methods to get comfortable with the risk environment, perhaps through additional conversations with the counter-party or establishing additional business processes to provide early warnings. Ultimately, our business partners own the risk, but our role as in-house advisors is to ensure that they understand both the risks they are ready to assume and the consequences of accepting those risks – and the right person is making the decision. This is thoughtful risk-taking.

Focus on: Predictions for In-House Lawyers in 2030

At a time when many industries are experiencing disruption, I wonder what the skill set of the lawyer will be in 2030. The demands on legal departments are increasing and resources are decreasing, so we will learn how to do even more with less. In order to avoid the highest risk events that distract and drain our resources, legal departments will need to have a deep understanding of the business, be able to proactively flag risk areas, and educate our business partners to do the same. What is new is that we will spend more time on proactive risk management than ever before. Another outcome of the efficiency expectation will be the strategic allocation of legal work within and outside the legal department. In addition to external counsel use for highly complex files, departments will increasing direct high volume, low risk work to self-service, insourcing and outsourcing models. In order to establish and manage these service models, we will need to flex our business management skills. The remaining work of the legal department will be more nuanced, complex and carry higher levels of risk, and we will be required to “upskill” to meet the increasing demands of this work. Finally, new technologies will assist in department management and providing the legal advice, so lawyers will need to become specialists in new platforms and be open to innovation and new technologies. As lawyers, we already have the transferable skills to make this happen, so, no – I do not expect to be replaced by robots just yet.