It was said that at Roy’s firm you had a job for life. Almost nobody was ever fired. That was noble and romantic, but it was bad business.
It’s hard to leave the big stage. Joe Biden clearly needed help and a lot of pressure to reach his decision. A lot of Canadians — including many Liberals — think Justin Trudeau has passed his best-before date and should resign as prime minister and leader of the federal Liberal party.
Trudeau is not alone in overstaying in the top job. The problem is common in business, especially amongst founders and especially in family businesses.
It was one of the factors that led to the demise of the storied Canadian law firm Heenan Blaikie a decade ago. Heenan Blaikie was home to former prime ministers Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien, future and former cabinet ministers and Supreme Court justices and future Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole.
Justin Trudeau was not a member of the firm, but he was a client. Heenan Blaikie had offices in Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Quebec City, Trois Rivières, Sherbrooke and Paris.
Heenan Blaikie was a great Canadian law firm.
It was founded by three young men on a handshake in Montreal in 1973: Don Johnston, Peter Blaikie and Roy Heenan. These names are familiar to political aficionados because the trio were deeply engaged in Canadian politics.
Don left the firm he founded in 1978 to run in a byelection for his friend Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal party. He became a cabinet minister when Trudeau was re-elected in 1980 and a fixture in the party.
Roy was a dreamer, an idealist and a visionary. Peter was a pragmatist, a numbers guy, and a details person. Peter was the managing partner of the firm and Roy was the chairman.
That partnership worked for the first two decades of Heenan Blaikie’s existence. It ended abruptly when Peter left in 1993 to pursue a short but successful business career. From then on, it was Roy’s firm. He had no equal and there were no challengers for his crown.
I interviewed more than 180 lawyers who worked at Heenan Blaikie between 1973 and 2014. Over and over again, they told me that “it was like a family.” It was a firm where you could be yourself, leave at 5 p.m. to go watch your child play soccer or perform in a recital. You could dress how you wanted, even swear.
Roy was the patriarch of the firm and he considered all of the lawyers as his children. Roy treated the firm as an extension of his home. He was a noted Canadian art collector and the walls of Heenan Blaikie’s offices in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver were adorned with his art.
Heenan Blaikie was run like a family business. It was said that at Roy’s firm you had a job for life. Almost nobody was ever fired. That was noble and romantic, but it was bad business.
As in many families, there were dark sides to Heenan Blaikie: bullying; the treatment women and people of colour; and sexual harassment.
Running the firm like a family business was the biggest contributor to Heenan Blaikie’s collapse. It never adapted its management structures to the $250-million annual business that it had become. And it had no succession planning.
The firm’s leader was Roy. For as long as he wanted. There was no one at Heenan Blaikie with the stature of Nancy Pelosi to be able to lean on Roy the way that Pelosi leaned on Joe Biden.
Consequently, Roy stayed as chair of Heenan Blaikie until 2012 when he stepped down at age 77 due to ill health. The firm was never able to replace him as chair and it collapsed two years later. Roy died of cancer in 2017.
No leader should make themselves bigger than the firm or the party that they lead.
