In his new book, Heenan Blaikie, Adam Dodek offers a detailed and lively account of a still uncommon historical topic: how a prominent law firm can dissolve into non-existence. Dodek, a law professor in Ottawa, delves into the collapse in 2014 of Heenan Blaikie, a law firm that grew from small beginnings in Montreal in 1973 to a five-hundred lawyer business with offices across the country, blue-chip corporate clients, and names like Jean Chretien, Pierre Trudeau, and hockey tycoon Marcel Aubut on the letterhead. Dodek interviewed scores of the talkative lawyers who were left to rebuild their careers while still burdened with the dead firm’s enormous debts, and he is able to enliven his story with first-person quotation throughout.
Heenan Blaikie was a law partnership that believed that having great “culture” and being a fun place to work would guarantee success. Its leaders recruited starry new partners -- hired mostly on instinct – with income guarantees that could not be renegotiated when the partner failed to bring in business. They considered management and administration to be work that smart guys like them could handle in their spare time without professional advice. The firm spent more time debating what street its new Toronto office should face than what lines of work it should focus on. It invested fortunes in vanity-project foreign offices and glossy consultants long after competing firms had proved that such sidelines were costly diversions. Talented and savvy lawyers at Heenan Blaikie continued to bring in enormous fees from well-heeled clients, and yet the firm managed to spiral into collapse. It was, in fact, the firm that did everything wrong.
It’s a great story. Dodek lavishes time and attention on all the ethical lapses and failures, all the nasty headlines that decorated its fall. and generally the decline of Heenan Blaikie’s vaunted “culture” into a toxic stew. I enjoyed reading it and learned lots.
If there’s a weakness, it is focussing too much on the toxic culture
and the lurid misbehaviours. Dodek shows many things that Heenan Blaikie did badly.
But the book doesn’t much reflect on what they should have been doing well: what kind
of management had become essential for big law firms with the aspiration to greatness that Heenan Blaikie certainly had.
Heenan Blaikie emerged in the late 20th century moment when leading
law firms in Canada (and around the world) were suddenly changing from local
enterprises of a few dozen lawyers at most, to become large, geographically-dispersed operations with multi-million dollar annual revenues.
During the last fifty years, the victors in this fight for growth developed a
consensus on how big law firms could and must organize themselves. They managed
to turn legal practice, long idolized by many lawyers as single-combat warfare for heroic
individuals, into a corporate enterprise, driven by empowered leadership,
carefully strategized goals, targeted marketing, and a ruthless attention to overall
profit and loss.
Dodek makes clear that Heenan Blaikie was clueless and dismissive about all the new ground rules of the corporate law business – which is why its competitors ate its lunch.
But Dodek is hardly more interested in law-business fundamentals that the firms leaders were.
His book sometimes gives the impression that Heenan Blaikie failed because it did a lot of things badly. It did, and he describes them all. But the book would be stronger with some attention to all the things it never really considered doing – the things successful big-law firms learned to do in order to thrive and survive.
It is still a terrific book, but it occurred to me while
reading that Adam Dodek is a law professor. University departments are among the few places that can still
attempt to run by the kind of non-management management that doomed Heenan Blaikie to
extinction.
(Despite these quibbles, I should note gratefully that in the book Adam Dodek generously cites my writings on law-firm history and an interview we did during his research. Thanks also to UBC Press for an advance reading copy.)
