Wow! Has it really been a year since Procido LLP opened its doors? Time really does fly by. When Procido opened, our goal was to grow to 25 people in 5 years. Now, just one year in, our team is already 25 people, including 2 articling students for 2024, lawyers in Calgary and Winnipeg, legal professionals in Regina and an increasingly famous 25th canine member of the firm, Aurra Sing.
What has contributed to this unprecedented growth? Aside from client demand, we believe it goes back to our adherence to our core values and supporting our people by allowing (and encouraging) remote work, among other things. We don’t believe “remote work” is a negative expression. Our profession’s historic adherence to the idea people can only be productive “in the office” is outdated. Everyone’s lives are different, and we recognize this. The traditional work model of being “in the office” 100% of the time to “show face” doesn’t work for everyone. This is reflected by our Calgary and Winnipeg lawyers who work 100% remotely. Life throws all sorts of challenges at us, and if the profession cannot adapt to these and the changing times, then the profession as we know it is not going to survive.
To support remote work, we provide our team members with the technology they need to work remotely. This includes providing an “in office” set-up, as well as the hardware and technology for a “home office”. People shouldn’t have to pay out of pocket for technology and hardware to do their jobs. If firms want people to work remotely, we should, and do, provide the necessary tools. We also employ firm-wide secure cloud-based technology that allows our team to log in and work from anywhere in the world without having to go through numerous VPNs to get into a static physical server system. We are not fans of paper, so we encourage a paperless office and paperless practice. As a long time adherent to using paper, this has been a challenging transition for me. But I have embraced it and can honestly say it is liberating. No paper means my office, my practice, and my life are less cluttered. This makes it easier to run my practice as I am not constantly hauling bankers’ boxes of documents back and forth. This also makes work/life balance simpler to achieve.
We truly promote work/life balance. Work is not life – work should support one’s life, not dominate it, as the professional has historically viewed itself. There will be many people and firms who may not like this suggestion, but the idea that someone can only be successful if they work 15 – 18 hours a day and bill 1700 – 1800 (or more) hours a year is not true. Some people may want to grind, and we welcome that and offer generous bonus structures to accommodate that. However, we also recognize that for many smart and ambitious people the grind isn’t for them, and we are equally happy to accommodate this working and lifestyle. People have families, friends, and other outside interests and those should be celebrated and given the attention they deserve. This is why we not only encourage but require people to take their vacation time.
We envision time away from the office in two ways: vacation and working remotely. We encourage our team not to say things like: “I am going on vacation to the cabin for the next week, but I am going to be working the whole time.” That is not a vacation – that is simply working remotely. These are two different things, and we need to envision them and refer to them as different things. If you want to work remotely from the cabin for a week, great we say - go for it. But if you are on vacation, exercise the discipline to truly unplug and be on vacation. The collaborative nature of our firm is such that the team will make sure everything continues to run smoothly while people are out of the office. If you want to work remotely for a week, whether that is from home, the cabin, or Mexico, that is encouraged if that is where you want to be and are most productive. All we ask of our team is they get their work done to the high Procido standard of excellence, ensure our clients are fully supported and their work is done in a timely and responsive manner that our clients have come to expect.
At the end of the day, a law firm will only be as successful as the team it builds. We aren’t looking for workhorses whose only purpose is to make profits for the partners. We want our people to enjoy their lives, both in and away from the office. I truly believe it is this philosophy that has contributed to our growth over the past year. I look forward to seeing what the next year, and those beyond, bring to us.
Troy Baril (he/him) is the Managing Partner/Founder of Procido LLP.