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CCCA_V7No3_UpholdingBrand-FIN_CCCA 13-09-23 4:16 PM Page 26 Feature Upholding the lawyer brand By Kim Covert How in-house counsel can work with law schools and regulators to help shape the future of a changing profession: A report from the CBA Legal Conference in Saskatoon. alk to enough people about the future of the legal profession and you’ll be forgiven for thinking tomorrow’s lawyers will need the entrepreneurial know-how of Jeff Bezos and the Tflexibility of a Cirque du Soleil performer. “We don’t know in advance where our students are going to go, which directions they’re going to go in,” says Nathalie Des Rosiers, dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa. “We pre- pare them for all possibilities and the possibility is probably, in this context, that they will have to rein- vent themselves every four or five years or will have multiple careers.” And regulators are going to have to keep up, says Tim McGee, CEO and Executive Director of the Law Society of British Columbia. Think of a big Scottish castle with high stone walls surrounded by a moat and you’ll have the traditional image of a regulator – “not accessible, no ability to change, not a fixer-upper,” says McGee. But the practice of law is changing all the time, beset from all directions by, among others, new demands from clients, an increasing need to work in different regulatory environments and fast-paced technological changes that could make life easier or harder, depending on what you do, where you’re doing it and whether you can keep up. 26 CCCA Canadian Corporate Counsel Association FALL 2013