Profiles: David ’82 and Karen Skinner

Alumni PROFILES

DAVID ’82 AND KAREN SKINNER: Building the LEAN law practice

David and Karen Skinner with their daughter,Rowan

By Richard Wills, publications editor

The practice of law, as we know it, is in a state of crisis, says David Skinner ’82. Some people predict that the traditional law firm won’t exist in ten years.

But crisis can lead to opportunity. David and his wife, Karen, both experienced lawyers, have hit upon a way to yoke their legal experience to cutting-edge business practices to avert this crisis and give new life to the legal profession.

They have established their own business, Gimbal Canada, to guide their colleagues in ways of surviving—even profiting from—this new dynamic.

Law is “a business steeped in tradition,” David points out. Lawyers tend to be conservative rather than innovative in their business practices. But the global economic picture is changing, and the legal profession must adapt quickly or pay the cost.

“There’s a revolution underway,” David says. Clients balk at hourly rates they’ve paid in the past. Corporations rely more on in-house counsel and outsource legal needs to an increasing array of lower-cost alternatives. They’re hiring paralegals or legal secretaries, using online document assembly and computerized research technologies. The result: the old way of practicing law is becoming outmoded. “Law firms are being pressured by their clients to find alternatives,” says David.

David began his legal career doing corporate-commercial work in Montreal for Stikeman Elliott until they asked him to go to Budapest for six weeks to help open an office for Central and Eastern Europe. After the initial six weeks, Karen was invited to join him. She left her job at Heenan Blaikie and moved to Stikeman’s Budapest office. “Six weeks became two years,” David recalls.

While Stikeman’s principal mandate was to privatize the Hungarian electricity industry, David and Karen worked on transactions and business development throughout the region. “It was very intense—an incredible experience for two young lawyers,” David says.

In 1996, David moved to Stikeman’s London office when Karen began working toward a PhD in law at the London School of Economics. In 1998, David joined the Private M&A/Private Equity group at Freshfields, one of the UK’s top law firms. He says he feels privileged to have worked with some superb lawyers on some very significant international transactions during his time there.

“But, after nine years as a qualified attorney, I knew I didn’t want to be a partner in a law firm,” David says. So he left Freshfields and joined Antfactory, a London venture capital company tapping into the dot-com boom. Everyone knows how that turned out. “The bubble burst,” says David. He stayed until 2002, when Antfactory wound up.

After almost 10 years overseas, they decided to return to Canada. “We weren’t ready to leave Europe,” Karen recalls, “but we were looking at a further eight-to-ten-year commitment if we stayed.” So, with five-year-old son Sam 2014 in tow, they returned to Montreal.

Karen developed a private practice advising European and Canadian clients. In 2005, she began a niche practice advising schools, including Selwyn House, on education law and risk management.

In 2003, David had become the head of the legal department at Neurochem Inc. (renamed BELLUS Health), a Montreal-based biopharmaceutical company researching and developing therapeutics to treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s. After eight years with the company, and a major restructuring that reduced BELLUS Health’s ranks from 240 people to just seven, David was laid off from his job as VP, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary.

Then a new idea began to emerge. David had long been interested in the management side of the practice of law. In the UK, he had witnessed the English legal profession’s implementation of client-relationship-management strategies adopted from business. After BELLUS, he began to look again at law firm management issues. At the same time, David and Karen hit upon ideas that had reshaped the manufacturing sector, and wondered how these might apply to the legal profession.

Six Sigma is a business management strategy developed by Motorola in 1986 and refined by General Electric in 1995, now widely used in many industries. It includes techniques for identifying and eliminating defects in manufacturing. By 2006, two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies employed Six Sigma.

Lean Manufacturing is a method of boosting quality and

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