Canadian Lawyer InHouse

He's been at Aecon 16 years, joining in 1997 when he was the only lawyer in the department. "I get excited about every construction project — we're working on the TTC expansion to York University right now — it's something I would have liked to have had in place when I was attending York," he says. Aecon is also at the heart of the work going on with Metrolinx to create the Union Pearson Express at Pearson International airport in Toronto constructing the rail link which will provide travellers train service to and from the airport with a goal of completion in time for the 2015 Pan/Parapan Am Games. The work includes building a station at 60-Second Snapshot The law ye r: Brian Swartz The com pan y: Aecon Group Inc. • ember of the board of the Canadian M Construction Association, on the board of the Canadian Employers Counsel. • ast chairman of the Construction Law P Executive at Ontario Bar Association. • requent speaker at industry forums F on board governance and construction risk management. • Graduated Osgoode Law School. • Led the 407 ETR legal team. We've combined a number of legal and commercial roles within my group and we're able to give sound legal and commercial advice across the operation. Brian Swartz, Aecon Group Inc. Terminal 1 and constructing a three-kilometre rail line that will connect the new station at Terminal 1 to Union Station. "Everything we do is exciting," says Swartz. "I get energized by the industry and the projects and the people — it's just so much fun and very rewarding," he says. Before he arrived at Aecon the legal department was primarily focused on looking after the legal aspects of managing the public company. "There really wasn't any legal presence in the business units. That surprised me because my background was as a business lawyer and being engaged in business activities," says Swartz. He realized his challenge was to build the internal department's expertise and broaden its reach, and because the business of construction is largely about identifying and mitigating risk that became his focus. "If you don't have someone reviewing 40 • o c t ob er 2013 your contracts who understands the law and the contract itself then there is a big gap in that whole risk management process. It was really about spending a lot of time educating the client group, learning the business, visiting projects and really helping the operational people understand more about the contracts they're responsible for managing and executing," he says. As the company grew Swartz grew the legal department. From the beginning he took a customer service perspective to make sure business objectives were attained. Rather than giving the client a "no" answer he tried to approach it from understanding what their needs were and getting to what they needed to achieve their goal without taking undue risk. "With everyone I have hired over the last 16 years I have tried to select people with common sense and good business INHOUSE judgment with strong legal skills and contracts/public company background. It doesn't matter where they came from but to have that business background sense to connect with the client group is critical. That has enabled us to successfully grow to a much larger department," he says. There are lawyers on the team who are embedded in the operations areas of the company across Aecon. They report up centrally through Swartz and to Yonni Fushman, vice president, legal and business affairs. Recently the legal team at Aecon was named best in-house department in Canada by an international group of its peers. It received the award at the International Legal Alliance Summit & Awards in New York. "When I started eight years ago there were three of us here and the company was about $1 billion in revenue," says Fushman. "We've since tripled to about $3 billion in revenue and tripled our department size to nine lawyers and expanded the admin staff as well." Swartz also serves as chairman of the project risk committee which is made up of the company's executive team. On the commercial side a VP of contracts and risk is an engineer who runs the department for the industrial-focused business. His background as an engineer has been on the industrial side but has been there as long as Swartz has. "I've mentored him over the years — he's not a lawyer but he's on the Canadian Construction Documents Committee and has been there for a number of years as the Aecon representative — he's a contracts guy," says Swartz. "We've combined a number of legal and commercial roles within my group and we're able to give sound legal and commercial advice across the operation." You could say Swartz cut his teeth in construction law on one of Ontario's biggest and most controversial infrastructure projects — Highway 407 Express TollRoute. He was lead counsel for the province on the project from 1992 to 1997. At the time Ontario was looking for ways to get construction workers back to work during the recession and it was a project the Bob Rae NDP government of the day thought they could get built but didn't

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