Until last month, Maxine Ethier had spent her entire legal career — almost nine years — at Heenan Blaikie LLP. She joined the firm in 2005 as a summer student and, since then, had been working towards partnership. When the firm announced its dissolution in February, Ethier had to find a new job.
“I have a mortgage and kids,” says Ethier, “so for a moment, I panicked.”
Within two weeks, though, she migrated to Baker & McKenzie with 13 other lawyers. Ethier is an infrastructure and energy lawyer, but most of the lawyers who made the switch came from Heenan Blaikie’s securities group.
Ethier says that settling into a new firm is a long process that, in many ways, is similar to life as a first-year associate.
“When you start at a new place, you have to prove yourself all over again,” she explains. “You have to market yourself internally to build new relationships with new partners. That takes a lot of effort, on top of having to bill and meet your clients’ expectations.”
And, despite already working on a number of busy files, she continues to take on new work: “I don’t want to pass up the opportunity to work for someone else from the firm.”
Meanwhile, the transition has been slightly easier for members of the securities group — in part, because they moved as a team.
“On a daily basis, I work with most of the same people,” says David Palumbo, a former Heenan Blaikie securities associate now at Baker & McKenzie. “I still miss everyone else at Heenan, but there hasn’t been a feeling of going somewhere totally new, because we’ve had a great welcome here from our new colleagues at Baker.”
Even the work is the same, says Charlie MacCready, a securities partner at Baker & McKenzie who also moved from Heenan Blaikie. “We’ve transitioned very quickly and continued to work on the deals we were working on before, but on behalf of Baker & McKenzie.”
Indeed, this is what makes practice groups so attractive for firms looking to beef up their ranks, says Kevin Coon, managing partner of Baker & McKenzie’s Toronto office. Lawyers from strong groups, he says, often arrive at new firms as “already functioning units.”
Coon also says Baker & McKenzie “had identified [the securities group] a year ago as a potential group we could bring into our firm. So we’d already done a lot of due diligence on them.”
He says that the prior research made it easier to add 14 new lawyers on such short notice.
Despite how fast Heenan Blaikie lawyers have moved, they still carry the emotional baggage of having lost their workplace.
“I don’t think I’m a very emotional person, and I was surprised at how emotional I was about it,” says Ethier. “I was just really sad to know I wasn’t going to be working with people who were my mentors who had been so great at helping me through my career. Or peers that just made my day so much better . . . The people [at Baker & McKenzie] have been really nice and welcoming, but I haven’t known them for nine years.”