Page 39 - ACTL Journal_Sum24

RYAN HILLIER
It is truly an honour, first, to appear before a community of advocates that, as a litigator myself, I have long esteemed and admired. Second, it is an honour to receive an award bearing the name of the Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I am honoured to be standing on the same stage as a partner, a colleague, and a friend with whom I was lucky enough to embark on such a special professional adventure some seven and a half years ago in founding Novalex.
I think those odds are heightened against you when you commit to creating a venture that will be equal parts business law firm and pro bono legal clinic. This was Sophie’s and my ambition: to create an organization that would equally service both business clients at a fee, but also social entrepreneurs, non-profits, and low-income individuals for free.
Take your topline revenue potential, cut it in half, and start from there. Sounds like a recipe for absolute disaster, right?
But Sophie and I were convinced that this was the wrong way of looking at things; we were betting that a meaningful pro bono mission would help us grow our commercial business. To our great satisfaction, our instincts were right.
From a small rented office in beautiful Old Montreal, where our conference room doubled as a makeshift kitchen and our windowless photocopy room also served as the desk for our first associate, we grew over the years to a team of over forty people, including twenty-something lawyers, including three former Supreme Court of Canada clerks, a number of Big Law con- verts and one colleague, the Honourable Azim Hussain, who has since been appointed judge to the Superior Court of Quebec.
From a pro bono perspective, our commercial growth and success translated into over 35,000 hours of free advice and representation given to thousands of people and organizations who,
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When you start something that you think matters, but that no one has ever done before, you really have no idea what to expect. Some would argue that the chances of it being a complete flop are probably greater than succeeding.