Lawyer Monthly Magazine - March 2019 Edition

13 SPECIAL FEATURE MAR 2019 www. lawyer-monthly .com A little bit about Angelo How do you ensure companies successfully growwith your counsel? I approach every business client relationship with a sense of “ownership” about my work, best expressed in the line “I do what I do best in order to allow you to do what you do best.” Caring about the client’s needs and understanding the nexus between issues and the “bottom line” allows for advice and counsel to be pragmatic and the consequences of various business and legal issues to be analyzed in the context best suited to the client’s needs. To establish this level of communication and trust, I follow a general ‘multi-step’ process. The first step is gaining an understanding of the industry/sector in which the client does business; knowing the market and the client’s place in that market provides invaluable context. The second step is gaining an understanding of the client’s own organization (structure, management styles, personalities, workflow, infrastructure, etc.); without knowing how a client operates, it is difficult to provide the level of understanding required to competently analyze issues in relation to the impact on the affairs and operation of the business overall. The third step is to develop a rapport with all levels of management and (where feasible) the workforce. By ‘humanizing’ the relationship (albeit with the appropriate boundaries) the people working for a client understand my purpose is to play a supporting role and act as a resource so they can do their best work. This often creates a level of candour and also an element of accountability; knowing the company attorney is stalking the corridors can stimulate a greater amount of care and diligence in work-product! Fortunately, this approach has led to most of my business clientele valuing my participation and input when dealing with business- oriented problems as much as legal questions. In this sense, I become approachable, trusted, and often accepted with a collegiality that allows for better communication as I carry out my work alongside those I am called upon to serve. From risk-management to project development, you have a wide skill set; which aspect of your work poses the most legal challenges? Project development is often the most challenging work, but by the same token, it is the most rewarding. The predominant legal challenge has less to do with the individual components as it does the process of coordinating multiple issues toward a timely and fully integrated conclusion. Most projects involve multiple areas of work, including corporate compliance, development team coordination, environmental and other regulatory concerns, land use/permitting, and of course financial modelling as well as the financing itself. Assembling these components and working with a large-cap finance entity (usually a bank of international distinction) demands competence and accountability, backed up (again) by resolving the multiple legal issues in a coordinated and interlocking manner. How have you overcome these challenges? Organization and clear communication are essential. Without both, a project is doomed. Building and refining an action plan, delegating responsibilities and following up on essential items is a balancing act that cannot be approached casually. The source of most conflict between parties and the most common reason for deals failing is, in my experience, a failure to clearly, coherently and proactively address challenges before they evolve into barriers or problems. ------------ How have you seen the legal sector progress from when you first qualified? Technology has become more sophisticated in terms of efficiently communicating and managing high volumes of information quickly and easily. More can be accomplished with efficient planning and organizing matters (whether litigation- or transaction-oriented) allowing the client’s needs to be better served, if those tools are properly utilized to enhance the abilities of counsel, rather than as a substitute for diligence and knowledge. It is also gratifying to see an evolution in legal education from a primarily theory-based curriculum to the growth of opportunities for future attorneys to actually learn and apply practical skills, through clinical programmes, practical legal writing courses, and with a greater number of adjunct professors who are practitioners first and academics second. During my final year of law school, I was privileged to have taken one of the first commercial drafting courses offered anywhere. It was an invaluable insight and “bridge” between theory and practice. ------------ Why did you choose the commercial legal sector? Commercial work provides a wide scope of opportunities to understand and promote economic growth in various degrees, to facilitate a more responsible sense of business practices (through strategic planning, compliance, risk management, etc.) and— perhaps best of all—it allows one to participate in a creative process involving a wide variety of people and professions. ------------ How does your commercial litigation experience help when advising clients? By the time you are reading this, I will have published a (much- needed) treatise on pre-trial civil procedure in one of the jurisdictions where I am licensed. When preparing the manuscript, I was reminded of how invaluable and, in my opinion, essential it is for transactional counsel to understand the mechanics and substance of commercial litigation, because in nearly every dispute there are lessons and cautionary tales to benefit from. In this profession, it is very possible to learn from the mistakes that others make. If you understand how business relationships break down, you have an enhanced frame of reference for putting new relationships together and, hopefully, minimizing the potential for disputes over certain issues.