The Commerce Times

Innovation and opportunities

On February 26, Ryerson business students discovered a different field of the future practice: law. Although it sounds unrelated, there are plenty of opportunities within Fasken Martineau for people coming from virtually any educational background. Fasken Martineau DuMoilin LLP is an international litigation and law firm with more than 650 lawyers and locations in Toronto, Ottawa, Montréal, Québec City, Vancouver, Calgary, London, Paris and Johannesburg.

The Ryerson Commerce Society organized a trip to the third largest business and law firm’s offices, which included a panel discussion with executive speakers and law associates, and a lunch. The panel included Clint Macham, Director of marketing and business development, Tony Pierro, general manager, and Beatriz Reano, director of finance.

Working in a law firm in marketing department deals with wide range of responsibilities, running things like cocktail receptions.

Marcham, a Ryerson University alumnus with a marketing major and a law minor, described his job. “Working in a law firm in marketing department deals with a wide range of responsibilities, running things like cocktail receptions… and also to promote services.” Since Clint graduated in 1998, he has worked at several other law firms, but says that he truly found himself at Fasken.

“I was interested in law, and at the same time was willing to continue with marketing. Terminology used in law classes is certainly useful if you decide to pursue a career in a law firm,” he said. Some other benefits of working for Fasken, said Clint, are that at a big firm you can get a broad range of career opportunities, hence, creating more chances to move up to different levels.Having multiple departments at a workplace makes it easier to find your true calling instead of being stuck with one particular job that you might not enjoy as much, he expanded.

“If you are not a lawyer, you work on a coast side,” said Tony Pierro, general manager for the Ontario region, about his work experience. It’s evident that he enjoys his work- ing environment as he openly jokes about it. One of Tony’s main responsibilities is coordinating services, mostly acting as an invisible liaison between clients and lawyers.

“Part of my job is to make the assembly line, we actually have lawyers that don’t know how to use technology efficiently, so part of the job is to make sure that services are presented properly,” he said.

Pierro is one of the team members responsible for change at the firm and one of the major questions he faces is “How do you make your work environment more efficient?” It is impossible to suit everybody, said Pierro, but staying amenable to change will make the process smoother. “No matter how we design it, it’s going to be wrong. The key is flexibility,” he said.

Fasken Martineau’s corporate philosophy is all about improvement. For instance, recently they implemented a voice recognition system in their offices that has a 95 per cent accuracy rate, so now lawyers do not have to continuously “exercise” their fingers on the keyboard. Instead, they can dictate to the system and it converts the speakers’ words into a document format.

Also, in July 2010 they plan to move to a location at the Bay and Adelaide streets intersection, with more than 166,000 square feet of office space. “Working at a law firm, I confirmed an idea that accounting is an art indeed,” said    Beatriz    Reano, the closing speaker at the discussion panel and an accounting graduate. Reano believes that accounting can be fun. “We have nine offices, we have offices outside the country and inside the country. In my team we also do accounting for the Johannesburg office,” she said.

The broad spectrum of responsibilities clearly allows Reano little downtime. As a director of finance, she is responsible for management and financial reporting, tax plan- ning, exchange, making estimates and adjustments as well as overall control of flow of finance.

It is not an easy job to be a director of finance of a large law and litigation firm such as Fasken Martineau, but it is possible. Accounting is a very transferable designation, says Reano. Having an accounting major can lead to a wide variety of corporations, especially with finances becoming more and more standardized. For students and aspiring business professionals, this makes it even easier to enter a non-financial sector.

Ranked among the best law firms in the world, Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP is a growing and prospering business with professionals who thoroughly understand their product. The law firm continues to improve and rise to new heights, and looks to be a strong place to work regardless of educational background.