Internationalising IP and managing mergers: In conversation with Robert MacDonald

Gordon Harris: Welcome to you all wherever you may be watching or listening to this. I have been interviewing leading figures in the world of IP over the last few months and we have had some wonderful and interesting conversations. Up to now, I have been looking outside my own firm for subjects and I suppose technically the same could be said of my next guest but he has very much been part of the fabric of our firm for the last 40 years until his retirement at the end of 2020. Rob MacDonald is a legend in the IP world, head of the Gowling's IP team for so many years, but also involved to the full extent in the business of IP through Inter Marks and other organisations. To me, of course he is also a great friend and colleague but that not mean that I am going to let him off lightly as we seek to learn more about Rob's remarkable career. So welcome Rob MacDonald.

Robert MacDonald: Thank you Gordon. It is great to be here.

Gordon Harris: Good. OK well that us get started right at the beginning. Rob, where did it all start? Tell us about how you got into law in the first place.

Robert MacDonald: I wish I could say it was very linear and very planned Gordon but of course I cannot. I did an under-grad degree in political science, got interested in constitutional law and decided I would make the jump into law school. I did have as an inspiration, my father was a lawyer in the military for his career so the law was not entirely new to me. I went to law school. I really enjoyed law school but I will tell you this when I graduated from law school Gordon, I had no clue what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to get called to the Bar, I needed that credential but beyond that no clue. So I started articling at Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP 15 June 1981 and basically fell into a career in intellectual property, which I thought this could be fun for a few years and 40 years later, here I am.

Gordon Harris: Well indeed. Yes I know the feeling. I think we are quite parallel in that regard. So Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP, can you remember your first day there and what made the biggest impression on you?

Robert MacDonald: I can remember my first day there. The first day stands out because the first day I sat in the reception on the 14^th floor of 160 Elgin Street with class mates of mine who were all starting to article together, Ron Linnell, Wayne, Terry, myself, Bridy Roach and we were all sitting there anxiously awaiting and having no idea what we were getting into but that first day still stands out in my mind because we were welcomed, we were made to feel entirely at home and part of the fabric of the firm from the very first day and to my mind, and you and I have talked about tis many times Gordon, it was that sort of feeling of belonging, integration right off the bat which defined the firm for me then and it still defines the firm for me now as being just that great place to be a great place to work.

Gordon Harris: It is important is it not that first impression that a firm makes on you. As you said it can stay with you forever.

Robert MacDonald: Exactly.

Gordon Harris: One thing I know your early days at Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP and you talked about sitting in the office. The office you were sitting in was 160 Elgin Street, Ottawa. What this means is that not only have you spent your entire career at one firm, you have actually spent it in one building. Did you ever feel like spreading your wings?

Robert MacDonald: You know what, I think it is truly remarkable in the practice of law today to have spent your entire career with one firm. You and I have done that but you have spent your entire career in the same building just really highlights how boring a person I actually am. I started out on the 14^th floor, I worked on the 12^th floor, I went to the 27^th floor, I went to the 23^rd floor, I went to the 27^th floor again. I was on the west wall, the north wall, the east wall, the south wall and then back to the north wall so I have moved around in the building but one of the great things about my career at Gowlings is from the very first day I was travelling. I was going down to our Toronto office to work there and as we expanded I got to spend time in all of our Canadian offices, Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver and Waterloo and Hamilton and so it never seemed like I was in one place right just sitting at 160 Elgin Street because I was not and for what I wanted to do and as I got into intellectual property, I really enjoyed it and wanted to do, it was the best place to be, the best people to practice with, the best clients so spreading my wings and going somewhere, no I was happy. I still look back and think wow what an amazing opportunity I had.

Gordon Harris: Yes you cannot always tell can you when the door opens for you at the beginning of something like this where it is going to lead…

Robert MacDonald: Well you cannot and I got to tell you Gordon, you will remember David Clarke who was in our firm…

Gordon Harris: Yes very well.

Robert MacDonald: and who unfortunately passed away this past year. David, when I articled, came to me one day. As I said I did not know what I wanted to do with my life and in fact I thought about going up to Halifax to practice in Halifax and David was from Halifax and he came to see me, we had a conversation and he said look you are being foolish. I want you to come with, I want you to meet Graham Maclennan QC and I think the two of you should work together and so I went with him and I met Graham for the first time and I think Graham was just as taken aback by the conversation as I was and we talked and the smartest decision I ever made was when Graham said well do you want to work with me. I said sure and it was great. I had no idea what I was getting into still no idea Gordon but boy oh boy, brilliant decision.

Gordon Harris: It is funny is it not, like you I fell into IP and so grateful that I did? It was just one of those complete happenstance but there it is and then it defines your entire life and then I am in. I want to come back to the great Gordon Henderson later actually in our second session but you mention Graham there and David Clarke. Are there any other big names from Gowlings in those days that had a particular influence on you?

Robert MacDonald: Well I worked very closely with Graham right from the outset and learned a lot of him as a mentor. He was amazing and as somebody who gave me the full opportunity. He would just come into my office and say here is a case. I want you to go argue it. You cannot win but go and have fun. Go cut your teeth on this case so he was excellent from that perspective. There were others and of course Alex Maclean who was one of the senior patent litigators at the time. There was Gordon Henderson, Gordon was an IP litigator amongst many other things. I only got to go to Court with Gordon once and I still remember there was Gordon Henderson on his feet who had turned to Jane Steinburg and asked Jane to provide him with whatever he needed next and Jane would turn to me and I provide Jane with whatever Gordon needed next and it was just so exciting to be there with Gordon Henderson on a very small matter but you are excited to say I was in Court with Gordon. Then of course I got to meet and start to develop relationships with a lot of the next generation people, Scott Joliffe jumps to mind right away, going to Court with Scott back in the days so it was just a great learning opportunity.

Gordon Harris: So you mentioned the fact that you were not really trapped in Ottawa because you were moving around the other cities where Gowlings had offices in Canada but of course quite early on in all of this you started to cast your mind towards Russia. Now what were the drivers behind that idea, what made you think of opening up in Russia?

Robert MacDonald: I wish I could take any credit for our decision to open up in Russia but I cannot. I do remember because I was a partner when we voted to open our office in Moscow but we decided to open the office in Moscow before the fall of the USSR. It was still the USSR and one of our partners at Bela Barbre who is now the Justice of the Ontario Court who was doing a lot of work representing Canadian companies, Canadian joint ventures, going into the USSR to do business at the time during Perestroika and Glasnost and we had been encouraged to open up an office in Moscow and we did, a very small sort of hole in the wall but we did it just in time for the end of the USSR and so we found ourselves with an office in Moscow and the joint venture work lined up quickly but a real need and demand for an intellectual property services because if you had a USSR patent, you had to re-register it through the countries of the former Soviet Union, the same with trademarks and those clients who knew us for IP experience in Canada saw Moscow on our letterhead and would call and say is that Moscow, Ontario or is that Moscow, Russia and so we hired Vladimir Demerdzhive who was patent attorney 001 in the Russian Federation. We hired Tamara Istilmena who was one of the first trademark attorneys in the Russian Federation and we established that office and I will tell you this. I remember Graham Maclellan comes into my office. He had just come out of an executive committee meeting and he passed me the Russian patent back and said you had better read this because you are going to be spending some time in Russia and I thought I do not know what is happening here but OK.

Gordon Harris: What was it like being in Russia? We are in the Gorbachev era now post Perestroika, what was it like?

Robert MacDonald: My first trip was to Russia so the Gorbachev era had ended, Yeltsin was the president of Russia. My first trip was in 1994 and I will tell you that it was a hard place to visit. The years prior to 1994 so 1992/1993 were hard years in Russia, hard for a lot of reasons and even when I was there I came out of Russia, I had lost weight. My wife, Clare, looked at me said what happened to you? There was no food or very hard to get food and so when I left Russia on that visit, I was not keen to go back and then my next visit was in 1996, I had been at the Marx conference in Stockholm and then flew into Russia and I remember landing and thinking why am I here? What am I doing and just blown away by the change that had occurred in the two years and very excited about what we were doing and where we were going so that was the real transmission point for me and then from there on over the next 12 years, I spent a lot of time in Russia and saw that office grow, saw the business grow and got very firmly founded as one of the leading I practices in Russia. So very excited, very excited.

Gordon Harris: Which it still is to this day is it not and goes on growing so it has been a fantastic success story. So we are going to come back to the international merger in the second session but during your earlier years the firm was growing dramatically in Canada so what was it like integrating quite a number of pretty big mergers within Canada?

Robert MacDonald: Well you have gone through this in the UK as well. I was part of the executive committee in the late 90s into the 2000s when we started on a path to expand. We had already set up an office in Vancouver but it had not really met its full potential yet, by that I mean we knew we had to continue to grow it. We were not in Calgary, we were not in Montreal and we knew we needed to grow in Toronto and I will tell you there were a couple of things that I remember very much about those discussions and one was and Scott Joliffe was our chairman at the time. One was the need to have a vision of where you are going and why you are doing it? Right. It is no good saying hey we just want to grow for the sake of growth. You have got to have to have a reason and a rationale and we did. We wanted to be where corporate Canada was growing and that was Calgary, a lot of head offices moving to Alberta, Montreal and Toronto. The second thing is that finding the right merger partner is actually difficult. First of all you have got to find somebody who is interested in doing this and you have got to explain to them and get them on side with what you are trying to do, get them excited about what you are trying to do. But the big thing is making sure that the cultures of the firm click and it is sort of funny to sit here and think about the firm having a culture but you know and I know that a firm does have a culture and if you are going to merge you have got to make sure that there is a cultural fit and you spend a lot of time trying to get to know the firms and make sure that there is a cultural fit and then obviously there is the negotiation of the deal and getting to that ultimate vote and then the big third step is integration and that is massive so I have the privilege of being at the table means as we went down these paths and the end result I think is a fantastic Canadian presence. You know you can go to a Montreal office or a Vancouver office and you will encounter the same Gowling WLG ethos and spirit wherever you go and then obviously Russia and now, we will talk about this in a moment, the expansion internationally. Great challenge.

Gordon Harris: We are going to come back to that a little on probably in our second session but it is very interesting what you said there about culture, it rings a lot of bells and I will talk about that a little but more in the next session so let us go back to your actual working life then. You have been involved in a lot of cases over the years. Is there one that stands out and which is you biggest source of pride? The one that makes you glow a little bit when you think about it, when you look back at your career?

Robert MacDonald: There are actually a couple of cases where I can look back and say that was fund. That was a learning experience. I will give you two very quickly. One was the very first time I went to Court all by myself. It was a case that Graham had given to me and said you are not going to win this so go and have fun with it. I was up against the Attorney General of Canada, I was the appellant, I was gowned and it was all very sort of special and I was going through my argument and I had a throwaway argument. At least I thought it was a throwaway argument and the Judge stopped me and said you made a good point and he turned to counsel for the Attorney General and said what do you think and the counsel for the Attorney General said I think he has made a good point and the Judge said well what do I do and counsel for the Attorney General said I think you have to allow his appeal which he did from the bench and I went back to the office and I went into Graham's office and Graham said well how did it go? I said I won and he said how? I said I am not sure, really not sure how I won and you know what that first case, that first opportunity resonates with me because it was Graham giving me that opportunity. It was the opportunity to go in and engage in a philosophical legal debate with the Judge and the other side and by chance winning it. The other case I will mention was Graham was off, he had been retained a lead counsel on a major patent trial, I think was a five week patent trial and he called me down at the end of the third or fourth week, call med me up and said could you come down for the weekend and help write the submissions for this case and so I went down, I was a kid, I had no idea what the case was about, I had never read a patent and it was a patent trial and I remember just the collegiality of sitting in the office every day I would take what they gave me, I would work it into the draft submissions, the team would come back from Court that night, we would work late into the night on the submissions and they would feed in what had happened that day and by the end of the week we had wonderful submissions and we won that trial. Now we lost on appeal but I took a stay I would say that we lost on appeal because I was not engaged to write the submission. That is my conclusion but there you are. So those cases stand up. There are lots of cases that stand up and actually what stands out in my mind is not so much the case but the people I was there with right and a lot of the cases back in the day, James Buchan and I were litigating together and a lot of the cases I litigated the people on the other side still stand out, some good, some bad but most good actually. It is a very collegial law.

Gordon Harris: It is always people is it not that really stick in your mind after the event. Now I have given you a chance of tell us how wonderful you were which you have duly done. You did a lot of Court work. I cannot believe that you cannot recall of any moments which you wish had gone a little bit differently. I am sure you can tell us now.

Robert MacDonald: I will tell you this, every time I come out of Court and I do not think I am any different than anyone else, you come out of Court and you think I could have done something differently. I could have made my submissions slightly over here or I could have responded to the Judge a little bit better and so I think everything is a learning moment. Can I look back and say well there is one that I just really blew and I wish I had done it differently. I am sure opposing counsel might be able to tell us that but no. I do want to tell you about one of the things I learned that has stuck with me throughout my career is the importance of having a reputation, the importance of knowing your opposing counsel, the ability to call up and say listen we need to talk about something, we need to figure out we are going to do something or we need to talk about settlement or whatever and have the credibility with the other side that they think I can have that sort of conversation with Rob because I have confidence in him. I do remember being handed a case years and years and years ago which was a bit of a disaster and we were behind the right ball and the Associate chief Justice was going to have a conference call with counsel to read us i.e. me, the riot act and I called up opposing counsel and I reminded him of this sine but he does not recall it. I called him up and I said look we have to figure this out here is what I am proposing. He said I like that but I am going to have one more qualifier on it. I said fine I agree to your qualifier. We got on the phone with the Associate Chief Justice. We told him we had agreed on X, Y and X and the Associate Chief Justice kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, you know when is opposing counsel going to ask me to hammer Mr MacDonald and opposing counsel did not. He said no we have resolved everything that needs to be resolved. Let us move forward and it is that sort of collegiality and confidence and trust with your opposing counsel that is critical, it helps you serve your clients' interests best. My first lesion in collegiality though I will tell you. I was in the Court of Appeal for the first time, the Federal Court of Appeal on a case involving pharmaceuticals, those are fairly hard cases and opposing counsel, Malcolm Johnson QC, a Scot, who I do not think I had ever met but certainly I had talked to on the phone before, no I must have met him, I must have met him but Malcolm was the appellant, representing the appellant and he stood up and he argued and he was getting beaten up by the Court and after about 10 or 15 minutes he sat down. He said you have heard my submissions and he sat down and like the eager little kid that I was, I grabbed my books, I jumped up to the podium ready to go and the Judge growled something at me which I assumed meant stay calm, we will get to you when we get to you and he was busy writing, doing whatever and then he looked up at me again and he said I told you Mr MacDonald sit down. I do not need to hear from you and I had no idea what that meant, I know that that is a good thing but then I had no idea. So I sort of slumped back to my chair and sat down. They read out the decision from the bench, I won. Malcolm stood up and he was about 6'5" so when he stood up it was quite the sight and he said thank you my Lord. I just want to say that I feel sorry for Mr MacDonald and the Court looked at him and said why, he won and Malcolm said today was his day in the Federal Court of Appeal and he did not get to say a word and at that Judge smiled, he did smile and said well I am sure he will have another chance. That was a lesson on you know what you can litigate as hard as you want against each other but at the end of the day, you are still colleagues and that lesson has just stayed with me throughout.

Graham Harris: That is a great story. I love it. You are right that is the camaraderie of the Court room is it not and that is certainly how it should be. I have to say I have seen signs of that fraying a little bit in the UK in recent years but that is another story. When the history of the firm sis written which it might be you never know. What would you like it to say about your time as head of the IP team?

Robert MacDonald: It depends on whether you and I are going to write the history of…

Gordon Harris: I think I might...

Robert MacDonald: You know what, I got into management in early 90s. I was elected department head in the IP group in Ottawa in like 92 or 93, must be 92 and again it was engineered by David Clarke who engineered my career in IP and started off at that point as department head and then practice area leader and so on an d so forth. When I look back, I think Gowling WLG in Canada and around the world now but in Canada has, speaking just about Canada at the moment has an amazing group of professionals right. Partners and associates and right across Canada, they are great and I viewed my job as ensuring that they had what they needed to succeed and then get on to their way right so if part of the issue is resources and help with resources if part of the issue is with automation, help with automation but at the end of the day I am fortunate to have worked with an amazing team and my job was to just make sure they had what they needed to succeed and I think, I hope I did that well.

Gordon Harris: They key is what they would say and I talk to them and they do something along those lines so I think it is a success. Right well you have now handed over the reigns of the Canada team leadership role to Shelagh Carnegie who you have worked with for many years. If you have a single piece of advice for her, what would it be?

Robert MacDonald: One of the most important lessons, actually I am going to give you two lessons that I have learnt over the years is first of all, you have got to know your partners, your colleagues, everybody in the IP group and that means before COVID obviously, it meant you do a lot of travel, you go to offices, you sit down, you listen, you understand what the issues are that maybe causing them problems in that local and you help them try and find solutions and there is no substitute for the time spent listening to people talking to people. The second thing that is equally important is you have got to make a decision. At some point in every process you will gather your information, you will assess it but you have got to make a decision and then you have got to move forward based on that decision and so you have got to have the confidence to do that and you want your colleagues to be able to say look I may not agree with the decision but he listened, she listened and heard us out and so the classic I did not vote for this but I will get in line behind it and see it forward and I think that is important.

Gordon Harris: That is great. Well that takes us part of the way through your remarkable story but there is a lot more to come. So thank you or joining for this session. We will returning soon with the second part in which we will look at the long relationship between Gowlings in Canada and the firm originally known as Wragge & Co in the UK and how ultimately that came to fruition in the merger of 2016 but for today thank you Rob, thank you for your time and I look forward to the next time.

Robert MacDonald: Thank you very much Gordon. It has been a pleasure talking with you.

Gordon Harris: Welcome back to the second part of my conversation with Rob MacDonald, former head of IT at Gowling Canada and IP icon around the world. Last time we focused on Rob's career mainly within the Canadian firm and his role in the opening of the Russian office which has gone on to such success and prominence. This time we are going to look at the merger of Gowlings and the firm which by that time was known as Wragge Lawrence Graham in the UK but when Rob and I first met it was just Wragge & Co so Rob, I want to take you back to around 1990 and the existence of a transatlantic friendship arrangement between Gowlings in Canada or Gowling & Henderson as it then was I think in Canada, Smith Gambrell & Russell in Atlanta, Georgia and a group of firms in the UK which Wragge & Co was one which went under the name of the M5 Group. Is that ringing any bells with you?

Robert: Indeed I do remember the M5 Group quite well. I have to correct you on one thing. By then we were Gowling Strathy & Henderson.

Gordon: Ah yes.

Robert: With Strathy Archibald & Seagram I think 89 just before starting to develop a relationship with the M5 Group and with Smith Gambrell in Atlanta. So yes I remember that quite well and because there was a strong IP connection obviously with Smith Gambrell and the M5 Group I got to know a lot of the individuals including yourself way back when.

Gordon: You did.

Gordon: Yes indeed. That is indeed when we first met back then and that was on a trip I made to Ottawa in December 1991 which I remember for a number of reasons, one embarrassing because I took a shower and made this call by error of not properly drying my hair before stepping out into Ottawa's temperatures and my hair froze giving you a good laugh when we went out for dinner in the evening but I think perhaps hopefully more importantly I remember meeting the great Gordon Henderson. He was already at a good age by then but he still was evidently revered and an influential figure in the office. What are your favourite stories? What do you remember of Gordon Henderson, how did he influence you?

Robert: Well I think Gordon, I had the pleasure of meeting Gordon. I recall seeing Mr Gowling, Gordon Gowling. I do not recall ever talking to Gordon Gowling but I did recall seeing him but Gordon Henderson had a great influence for a number of reasons. One was he was an amazing approachable person and I remember particularly when I was a student. 160 Elgin you did not have to leave for lunch, there was a cafeteria in the basement which has now long gone but there was a cafeteria in the basement and it was quite common for Gordon to go down and line up in the cafeteria, get his lunch and then go sit at the table and everyone was welcome to sit with him whether you were a student or a senior partner, it did not matter and he took great interest in who you were and what you were doing and he would always know, I remember getting into the elevator with him one night and he turned to me and said how is such and such a case going and I was a little taken away that he even knew about the case but he did and he was honestly interested in what you were doing and the other thing that I recall about Gordon particularly is his, he had a sense of vision. Right he was the one because again it was an Ottawa based firm up until 1980, it was a big firm but it was Ottawa based and he was the one who sort of started us down this path of growth. He said we needed to be in Toronto because that is where our clients were so let's go and we did and it has been a great success and we continued to grow beyond that. He was an amazing man and his, there are less and less of us obviously in the firm, one less now because I am gone who can say they knew Gordon Henderson or they were remember Gordon Henderson but I think his influence on us remains and has driven the sort of firm that we are today.

Gordon: And his portrait looks down on you still does it not in the office in Ottawa. Yes I remember him. He certainly left an impression on me as a very young IP partner in a small IP team in a regional UK firm, I was a bit star struck by the sheer size and breadth of the work evidently going on in your team, every office was a museum of products which had been the subject of litigation and every well-known brand in the world seemed to be there. Were you conscious within that team of just how impressive the Gowlings set up was at that time?

Robert: Well if you go back to the 80s, go back even earlier, up until the 70s all intellectual property litigation had to take place in Ottawa and so the IP profession was dominated by a couple of firms in Ottawa and Gowlings was one of them going back to actually before the time of Mr Gowling and Mr Henderson. We were involved in IP. With the establishment of the Federal Court in the 70s, you saw much more growth in Montreal and Toronto of the IP practices there but we remained a very dominant force and remained a dominant force because people wanted Gordon Henderson right or Graham Maclennan or Alex Maclean to litigate for them and so you walk around there and you think the clients we were dealing with and this goes back to a point that in our previous discussion I mentioned, I started off in this firm and the client base for the IP group was simply amazing. It got to deal with clients that my colleagues in other areas of the firm would look at me say wow those are amazing international clients and they were. And so yes you walk around the offices and you would see all of the book cases with products and samples and so on and so forth and sort of our badges of honour, it was fun.

Gordon: I looked at that and thought this is what I want and maybe the first seeds of what was to follow was so right there and then I think. Back in those days, we just to work conferences together did we not and particularly Inter, this transatlantic group that we talked about used to get together and organise ourselves, we organised a table for the gala dinner on the last night and all that. My first Inter conference, well actually it was still called USTA at the time was actually in Toronto, I think 1993. Do you remember that one?

Robert: It was 1992 and I remember it very well as my oldest son, Alexander, was born just before INTA he was born in March or just before USTA and that was my first USTA as well. I had never been to one before but because it was in Toronto, because I was the department head I thought well I should go and it was there that we did our very first Gowlings brunch. David Clare said we need to do something to mark the occasion since it is in our backyard, we will do the Gowlings brunch, but for those people listening you said something that is interesting. The Wednesday night sit down gala dinner. It speaks to how big USTA now Inter was then but you could actually reserve a table and have a sit down supper in that case in Toronto it was on the turf of the Skydome. It was quite something.

Gordon: I remember it well. I remember how competitive it was getting the best guests to your table. We all used to fight over, you wanted the big name in-house attorneys at your table but I remember it. Of course not long after that by which time it was INTA the whole event went off to New Orleans and that was possibly the most memorable of those early ones, I say memorable because there are aspects of it I do not think we remember at all are there?

Robert: It was memorable for a lot of reasons Gordon. It was actually at that conference you will recall where they voted to change the name from USTA to Inter.

Gordon: That is right.

Robert: I think it was in New Orleans that was the last time that they had the gala dinner on the Wednesday night if I remember correctly.

Gordon: I certainly remember the dinner. I remember various events on paddle steamers on the Mississippi as well. It was amazing. It really was amazing and we will never know why we were involuntarily removed from a nightclub…

Robert: I thought you were not going to mention that…

Gordon: I could not resist, could not resist.

Robert: We will never know what we did or what happened but yes it was the one time in my life where I was asked to leave and we did and went and found some place else and continued on. It was quite the evening.

Gordon: So I stepped away from Inter for a little while after that and returned. I remember my first one back was Denver 2001 and what happened pretty soon after that was that we started a tradition of co-hosting a dinner, you and I and some of our colleagues for guests around the world, different patent attorneys, clients and whatever so no the big transatlantic association had gone so what was bringing us together then was just our old friendship, the fact that we had got to know each other, the friendship between the firms and that very much remained and between you and I so do you think it ever occurred to you when we were sitting in various restaurants in places like Amsterdam and Berlin and Toronto again that something bigger might be round the corner.

Robert: To be honest with you no. I am going to say no. One of the things that struck me though as I got to know your group and obviously you got to know our group as well was the cultural fit between the two groups and the two firms. You and I were always friends, that is one thing but there was a good fit culturally between us and I remember those days. You were using us in Moscow developing a relationship with our office there and so it should not come as a surprise that we ended up in Washington talking about this but up until that point it had not really been on my radar screen and it had not been on my radar screen because I think our firm, the Canadian side was still trying to figure out what it wanted to do in terms of international growth.

Gordon: Yes the same thing was happening on our side and I was going to mention this in relation to the cultural fit because shortly before the momentous Washington DC Inter which we are going to come back to in a minute I went on the Gowlings website just to have a little look around to see because I had a whimsical idea in the back of my head somewhere and the thing that struck me was on the front page, there were two items, one was about the opposition in the Canadian Great Places to Work survey and another was about a piece of serious pro bono work you were doing for First Nation people and that was exactly the kind of thing I would have expected to see on the front page of our website who were very proud and still are of our position in the Great Places to Work survey and we are very proud of our pro bono and corporate responsibility work and I remember looking at that and thinking umm here are two firms that think alike, they are great successful legal institutions but with a moral compass as well. It is so important to be on that same wavelength. So let us jump into Washington DC 2012, Georgia Brown's restaurant that is not as yet a plaque on the wall but there should be. What do you remember of that night?

Robert: I was just about to install one when no-one was looking Gordon. I remember a very good conversation. We were doing our typical let's get a group of people together and have a nice lunch or nice dinner and we did and I recall you turning to me at one point and saying is Gowlings thinking about international extension and we had a very good conversation by that point we were and I think Wragge was as well and I think you and I had a long discussion about what that would look like, why it would be a good fit with our two firms and then I went back to Canada, you went back to the UK and raised the issue with our leadership and said this looks like an interesting opportunity. We should at least have a discussion to see if there is any legs to it and you were back in Toronto quite soon after.

Gordon: Well I remember really well. It was a Monday evening about two weeks after that we got back from INTA and I was sitting in my living room and I always used to keep my Blackberry as I then had on the chair as obviously you never know what might come in during the evening and there was an email from you and you had said after the dinner in Washington. I am going back to talk to Scott Joliffe about this and it was a very short email which ended with a summary Scott is intrigued, come to Canada and I went back into the office the next day, spoke to our then chief executive Quentin Poole and we did just that, very soon afterwards and the whole thing got rolling and there was a lot of shuffling to and fro over the next few weeks.

Robert: We may have come up with an idea and then we had to sell it. You have to explain it, you had to rationalise it, you had to justify it and then the hard work begins because there is the hard work of getting to know each other. You and I know each other, that was fine but beyond that and keeping in mind that the M5 era had basically petered in the mid-90s?

Gordon: Yes.

Robert: And so there was not a lot of knowledge about who on our side who Wragge is and I suspect the same on your side and so there becomes a long period of time where you are trying to figure out who they are, how it fits from a business perspective or our practice is complementary and then cultural, are we going to work well together, are we going to play well in the sand box and that is a long process particularly when it is transatlantic and particularly when there is so much riding on this and yes so there was a lot of travel back and forth. Before the days of Zoom, a lot of conference calls, a lot of video calls to get to know each other and then the hard part, really hard part is negotiating and creating the combination that we have today.

Gordon: I mean it was interesting how it evolved wasn't it because I remember coming out in 2013 to Toronto. I think you did a number one me actually because I just thought I was coming out for a chat with a few people and then you walked me into a room and there was the entire Ottawa IP partnership team sitting round ready to grill me which they did, which they did. I remember it very well but going forward a year or even two and we had that famous meeting in London with the dinner when we all agreed between ourselves that we had the combined objective to create what we hope would become the best IP practice in the world and we were not joking were we? That was the plan and it had moved forward in that time so. There we go and of course when it finally came to complete and went live in February 2016 literally about five years before we are making this recording. You and I were somewhere else completely. Do you remember where we were?

Robert: We were, like I had never been to Guangzhou in China before February of 2016 but I met you in Guangzhou. I was there to meet the China team and you and I walked into the office of Gowling WLG on Monday 22 February and there was the Gowling WLG sign both in the elevator, lobby and in our offices. It was impressive. I mean you and I basically had sort of tried to say we were going to see the sunrise on Gowling WLG and that was…

Gordon: Well it was the first office to open on the morning of the merger, because obviously eight hours ahead of Europe and even the other offices in slightly west of there in Moscow, sorry east of there in Moscow rather but yes it was a bit of a sunrise effectively on that, actually it still makes my spine tringle a little bit talking about it now when we walked into the office that morning. There we are.

Robert: You will not be able to see this but on the shelf just behind me here is a picture of you and me standing in front of the Gowling WLG sign in the reception area in the Guangzhou office.

Gordon: If you remember you presented me with a copy of that picture which is still in my flat in London so and there are such happy memories of such a great time for us all and of course you talked earlier on about the importance of things in my first session about the importance of vision and we were talking about some of the great guys and of course you and I had a plan. We wanted to not just be in the offices we were currently in but we had this idea of the what we called the arc of challenge and jurisdiction is a difficult basis to do business where we could help and that is, we have spent a lot of time since putting that into the base so there we go. Now…

Robert: I just want to say that there were two aspects. There is the firm vision of what we wanted to accomplish as a firm but you and I had our IP vision which fits in obviously with the firm vision, the overall firm vision but within IP it was important to articulate our vision which was much of what you just said and then work hard over the last five years to try and move forward with that vision.

Gordon: So over the last few months you and I have both handed over the reins of team leadership to others, you to Shelagh and me to Kate Swaine and I am still around and you have obviously retired. If you had another 10 years as head of IP, what changes do you think you would have been pushing for to build the global team?

Robert: It is an interesting question and first of all let me know say this, you and I did an I think an amazing job and it has been fantastic working with you over the past years as closely as we have. I mean you and I talk every day and email back and forth and what have you. I am excited by what comes next and I think Kate and Shelagh are exactly the right people to move us to the next level. If I was still in a leadership position it basically comes down to over the next 10 years what do, I think the challenges are that we would need to address and I think what I would do, there are two things I would do. One is I think you need to continue to strengthen and re-enforce the platform and that is very important in places like Russia and China and the Middle East. I mean you need to continue to grow those platforms and solidify them which we will do but I think over the next five years the practice of law is evolving and I think the big challenge for leadership is to adapt to the way in which the service is delivered. Our relationship with clients has changed. I mean I started in 1981 when basically everything was done by letter. You got a letter that came in the mail for goodness sakes. Now you get a text at 10.00pm and the client wants an answer. Every time a client comes to me and says look we need to talk about price costing, I need to save money, you are going to have to help me do it, my response has always been great let us talk about how we work together so that we can find a better model to help you meet your needs and so there is the international side but there is also the internal side of getting ready to be ahead of the changes that are going to come in the legal profession and that to my mind, that business side of what we do, that is going to be fascinating.

Gordon: We have seen enough changes have we not over the last year and I think some of the changes that have been instituted to deal with the COVID crisis are never going to go away. I think the world will not be quite the same going forward, sometimes for the worst, sometimes for the better but there we are. What would you say and I thin know from what we have been talking about in these two sessions where this is going to go but what would you say your happiest memories. You have been very nearly 40 years in the world of IP, it would have been 40 years in June this year, what are your happiest memories?

Robert: I was in a wonderful position as I think you were of being able to maintain a practice, a very busy practice while at the same time maintaining a management position of both full-time jobs in a way but getting to balance them both. That was fun but what I have enjoyed the most about what I have done is the people I have got to work with both internally and externally. So a fantastic team at Gowling WLG now. When I joined it was just in Ottawa and Toronto. Now it is around the world and it is a fantastic team wherever you go in this firm. But I have also enjoyed working with people outside of the firm both clients and my colleagues in the profession and I think sometimes we overlook the value of working with your colleagues. I have enjoyed tremendously over the last, I was trying to figure out two decades doing a trademark hear and review. You do the patent you are reviewing in London, I do the trademark hear and review or did. I did it for the Law Society of Upper Canada. I did it for the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada. In fact most recently in the fall while I was getting busy to retire, I organised an eight series webinar on trademark law for the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada. I enjoy that. I enjoy the profession and that if I go back to starting over here in IP and not really knowing what I was getting into one of the things that I value most is the Bar that I got to work. Truly amazing.

Gordon: Yes I knew you were going to say it was the people and it always is it not. It is always the people that stand out in your mind and the great friends that you make along the way. So what are you doing with all your free time now then?

Robert: Well Gordon it is February in Ottawa. I am getting most of my free time shovelling snow and when this conversation is over, I am going out to shuffle more snow. It is -6 degrees. We had a fairly large dump of snow last night. I have no idea where I am going to put the snow but I am going to put it somewhere. Beyond that I am just sort of getting settled in an ordinary world I would have taken some time off, gone off on a holiday, done something exciting. Of course that has not happening so my routine is pretty much the same and one of the things that I am starting to do, you have I am sure as many people have these projects that they set aside and say I will get to that, I will get to that. Well one of those projects is I'm busy typing away and writing stuff up that I have always wanted to write up and so there will come a day when I will have my vaccine, you will have your vaccine. I will head off to London or wherever I want to go and see people. I am looking forward to travelling because I have offered of dinner and drinks from around the world and by gosh I am going to bring every one of those offers home. I really am.

Gordon: Yes there are a few cities around the world where we are hoping to meet up and put the world to rights.

Robert: Exactly.

Gordon: It has been a great pleasure talking with you as it has always been a great pleasure working with you. As you said as soon as the current problems are behind us, I am very much looking forward to us meeting up again but for now thank you very much indeed for taking the time out of your snow sweeping to have this chat and can I give you every best wish for a long and very happy retirement. Thank you very much indeed.

Robert: Thank you. Thank you Gordon. It has been an absolute pleasure chatting with you today and an absolute pleasure just working with the last gosh five years intensely but even before that as we were working on setting up the IP group.

Gordon: Thanks very much.

Robert: Thank you.