Joyce Mitchell sits on the firm's executive committee with two other senior partners
In her role on McLennan Ross’ executive committee, Joyce Mitchell has an overall picture of the firm’s three offices in Calgary, Edmonton and Yellowknife.
However, her labour and employment practice at the firm’s Calgary office also provides her with a broad perspective on client service. Her group has offered cutting-edge advice to clients throughout the pandemic and has helped ensure the entire firm has been busy the last two years.
“I've always liked employment and labour because it is a real mix of the corporate side of things and the advocacy side,” Mitchell says.
“My practice is pretty diverse, from small employers engaged in different types of industries, all the way up to large federally regulated employers.” For example, Mitchell recently represented Westjet in a model class action that they were able to get dismissed in British Columbia. The case is before the B.C. Court of Appeal.
Her work also involves appearing before the Alberta Labour Relations Board, the B.C. Labour Relations Board, and the Canada Industrial Relations Board. She also represents employers in grievance arbitrations and collective bargaining negotiations.
Mitchell is also an experienced workplace investigator, providing independent advice to clients that she does not work with regularly.
“We tend to do those for clients who are not necessarily ongoing clients, because if there is litigation flowing out of it, it is hard to be the investigator and the advocate for the client. So, it tends to be referrals where some other law firm is normally their employment counsel, but they need or want an experienced labour lawyer to do the workplace investigation.”
In addition to the variety of clients and mandates, Mitchell says the pandemic has pushed client service to new levels for the firm and her labour and employment group.
“When things really came to a head at the beginning of the pandemic, we pulled together a committee in our labour and employment group. And we were meeting daily in order to say ‘you know, what advice should we be giving?’”
Mitchell says her group's advice went through several distinct phases, and all required posting up-to-date information and following up with more customized advice.
“We would bring that group together literally daily to say, ‘OK, what happened yesterday? What are we telling people? What should we be telling people? Let's have a bit of a Q&A.’
“We had a lot of clients who said, ‘wow, your COVID related section on your website was super helpful to us.’”
When the pandemic first hit, for clients “it was deciding, should you be shutting down? Should you be having everybody working from home? Should you have some people in the office, all of those types of questions. And then, at the other end of the spectrum, how do you set people up to work from home in a reasonable fashion, making sure that that can work in a safe way as well because even setting up a home office has potential Workers' Compensation Board issues attached to it.
“Then we shifted into vaccination and dealing with is it reasonable to expect everyone to be vaccinated. Now, I think the pendulum is probably coming back in the other direction. And we're now giving advice to employers about whether their policies on vaccination are necessary or reasonable.”
Finally, Mitchell says worker shortages are now top of mind for employers.
During the pandemic, Mitchell says there were dips in demand for other practice areas, but labour and employment remained constant. Longer-term litigation, for example, was often put on the back burner.
“Some clients who were worried about how the pandemic was going to affect them really put a hold on many types of litigation.”
However, Mitchell says clients are revisiting these longer-term priorities, which means McLennan Ross’ litigation group is busier. “Now that we're coming out of that, we're seeing those cases that had been put on hold, starting to bubble up to the top again.”
The firm’s corporate, commercial, and securities group operates in the Edmonton in Yellowknife offices, and the Calgary office is focused only on advocacy.
The other members of the firm’s executive committee are managing partner and insolvency and restructuring lawyer Steve Livingston and litigator David Risling, who both practise in the Edmonton office. All three members work with the Chief Operating Officer Jennifer Forsyth to manage the firm.
At the pandemic’s beginning, Mitchell says the firm relied heavily on their IT department to get lawyers working remotely.
“Our IT department did an absolutely fantastic job at being able to mobilize that very quickly so that we really did not miss a beat in terms of getting people set up and able to continue to work in the way that they were.”
The executive committee is now focusing on the return to the office. “We're dealing with this question of, now that things are easing up, and it looks like we can go back to work in a safer way, what does that look like?
“We really want to make sure that we are back focusing on what we value, our culture. And so, we want to make sure that we haven't lost anything over the last couple of years given the challenges that being away from each other has posed.”
Along with easing that transition, Mitchell says the firm is very focused on recruitment. The firm is committed to maintaining some of the flexibility that new lawyers now expect.
“If people want to be able to work two or three days a week in the office and a couple of days a week at home and we're not prepared to offer that, but other employers are, we're going to struggle with that. And our clients are facing the same things. So, we're all working through that. I think that's going to be our biggest priority for 2022.”