Legal move

Recasting the role she plays, Lerners LLP veteran Alysia Christiaen aims to make business development and culture a more strategic and collaborative process

ALYSIA CHRISTIAEN AND Lerners LLP have the kind of long-term ­relationship that plenty of employers and employees dream of. “I’ve been at Lerners since 2009, when I was called to the bar,” says Christiaen. “Actually, I started here as a summer student and articled at Lerners and then came back as an associate.”

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Since then, she’s been a shapeshifter of a lawyer to a certain degree, doing personal injury law for 12 years, then a bit of class action and healthcare work before pivoting to privacy law practice in 2019.

It would not be her last pivot. “I started to do corporate law, transactional work,” she explains. And then she had a realization. “I discovered that I love the business of law, and I liked the practice of law.”

So, when the role of the firm’s chief brand and strategy officer came up early this year, she took it on an interim basis — and then put her name forward to fill the role permanently.

For plenty of other lawyers, the move might be somewhat sacrilege: giving up the day-to-day of being a lawyer who practices the law in favour of a move into the boardroom. But Christiaen believes the business of law can be led from both sides of the equation.

“Doing corporate law exposed me to a lot of the issues that business owners and entrepreneurs run into, and I really enjoyed that aspect of my practice,” Christiaen says. “I was happier doing the corporate work than I was doing the litigation work, so that’s why I wanted to direct my time to the side of my ­practice that I had grown most interested in, and that made me the happiest.”

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For vocational type jobs like lawyers (or, say, journalists) business education sometimes gets short shrift: ‘Business of XYZ’ isn’t always the sexiest elective, but it’s arguably one of the most important.

“You learn how to be a lawyer actually to practice law, to think like a lawyer, but you really don’t get any exposure to what it’s like to actually have to live in the practice of law,” Christiaen observes. “A law firm is a business, and they don’t really necessarily teach that in school.”

But once you’re there, you have to learn it, and fast. And one area where Christiaen believes she thrives is working with other individual lawyers on their own personal business development. She employs a meet-them-where-they’re-at strategy, something that feels natural for someone who has spent ­considerable time where they’re at.

“It’s really about identifying a lawyer’s strengths in terms of what they’d like to do when it comes to business development,” Christiaen says. Shy lawyers, for example, might not love the glad-handing style of networking, but might thrive writing legal commentary. Bad golfers are not going to close many deals out on the links.

“It’s not going to be effective if they’re trying to do something they’re not ­comfortable with, that will feel more like a chore than something that they might actually enjoy doing. It’s helping them to figure out the best tactics to focus on when it comes to building their book of business.”

In her new role, Christiaen also gets to work a different side of the legal ­profession, helping Lerners set firm-wide cultural and brand direction, an area where her long relationship with the firm comes into play.

“It’s about conveying, both internally and externally, what you stand for. What is your core purpose? What’s your vision? What’s your mission?” she says of how she approaches this work. “I’m speaking with the lawyers, you’re sending a questionnaire, asking questions about why their practice is important to them and building on that information. If they don’t believe in it, it’s going to be hard to convey that message outwardly.”

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For a lawyer who has pivoted a handful of times in her 16-year career, it’s not tough to think there might be a pivot or two more to come. But also, in speaking with Christiaen, it’s not hard to imagine she’s found the spot she wants to be.

She laughs at this question. “I think what I’ve learned over the course of my career, and all the changes that have come out in my career, is that I don’t have a crystal ball,” she says. “I know I’m very much enjoying what I am doing right now. But who knows what the future holds, right?” Kieran Delamont