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CCCA_V6No4_Spotlight-FIN_CCCA_V6No4 11/26/12 5:28 PM Page 46 Spotlight on… The CCCA story Celebrating 25 years of in-house excellence By Bev Cline n the mid-1980s, a group of lawyers — primari- Ily senior in-house counsel — met regularly after work in downtown Toronto to share resources and best practices. In those days, “most of the resource material being developed dealt with technical issues of the law. It didn’t reflect the in-house structure or provide insight into the types of situations we were encountering in our business organizations,” remembers Robert V.A. Jones, Q.C., at the time general counsel at Eaton’s and later, the first executive director of CCCA. When Jones left private practice in 1961 to go in-house at Eaton’s, he knew his peers saw the move as “question- able.”At the time, says Jones,“corporate counsel were not seen as an active part of the profession.” However, he was “intrigued by the prospect of practising proactively, con- tributing to matters by constructively anticipating legal requirements rather than reacting in a more costly and more negative sense. “The traditional practice of law was very formal, with structured ways of dealing with legal issues,” continues Jones, who received his call to the bar in 1955, having graduated from Osgoode Hall Law School, which at that time was located on Queen Street West. His opportunity to move into industry came with the legal department at Eaton’s, where the scope and magni- tude of legal work during his 27 years with the company, the greater part as general counsel, made for a challenging and rewarding career. “To put it into perspective, we were at the forefront of challenging new dynamics in the retail industry. From a career point of view, apart from meeting routine legal requirements which in many cases offered unique chal- lenges, I had the opportunity to work within a group of Robert V.A. Jones corporate executives committed to creative development First executive director of CCCA of the new shopping centre industry in Canada, where the company was already a leading player with its then- ALENA GEDEONOVA conventional large department stores,” he says. “Added to those creative experiences of course,” says 46 CCCA Canadian Corporate Counsel Association WINTER 2012