Jillian Swartz, pictured at left, moved her practice to Allen McDonald Swartz LLP (AMS), in late August, after spending more than two decades at Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP. She joined fellow corporate law practitioners Fraser McDonald and Jennifer Allen in forming the boutique, which offers a wide variety of services in business law, including general counsel services.
The philosophy of AMS is collaborative. The three partners don’t compete for work, instead they created a compensation system that rewards teamwork, and each have complementary areas within corporate practice. The firm was created to address the gap between the top-tier firms, which focus on the biggest most complex transactions, and a whole other segment of the market which needs sophisticated corporate counsel for a different kind of transaction – not multibillion-dollar deals – but complex in its own way.
Swartz, a self-described “social worker at heart,” who received a Lexpert Zenith award in 2011 for her mentoring work, is enjoying the freedom of being able to implement certain ideas, such as flat fees, quickly and without a lot of red tape.
“I’m always one of those people that have ‘pops’ of ideas here and there, and some of those ideas got implemented even at Blakes – I left a little legacy of branded binders and CD-ROMs and a few other things on the professional development side – but there are other things that in a large law firm you just can’t implement so easily,” She says. “While the firms are trying to be innovative, absolutely they are, when you only have three people at the table to make decisions, you can really jump on ideas much more quickly.”
Swartz is confident that AMS partners have the background to truly understand the client’s business. She also believes that since joining AMS she is now in a better position to have frank discussions with her clients about innovative, cost-effective solutions.
“It’s pretty exciting, it’s something we think is different and unique, and allows us to really practice law the way we want, and the way our clients want us to deliver service to them,” she says, “We think it’s going to resonate with clients … and I guess time will tell.”