Treating an in-house legal team like a business is no longer optional, Natalie Brown says. For the vice-president and chief legal officer at the Fonds de solidarité FTQ, that shift means running legal with the same discipline as any profit-centre – mapping processes, using data to show “every single file, based on complexity, based on priority, who’s working on it,” she says.
Brown’s career has been shaped by asking not just what work lawyers do, but why they do it and who benefits. Early in her career, after winning a case, she still felt unfulfilled. “I did the case. We won. I was very happy about that, but I… quickly realized that that was in conflict with my fundamental values,” she says. That realization pushed her out of private practice and eventually into roles where the mandate felt less about billable hours and more about public purpose.
She found that purpose at Quebec’s financial regulator, the Autorité des marchés financiers, where “we were the regulator,” and she felt her work was “contributing to protecting investors,” she says. Later, Desjardins’ cooperative model appealed because “a lot of the revenues go back to the community.”
That search for alignment eventually led her to the Fonds de solidarité FTQ, a worker-sponsored investment fund with roughly $23 billion under management. Brown describes it as “a typical investment fund, but where it differs is that… our investors, our shareholders, are Quebec workers.” Those workers contribute up to $5,000 a year and benefit from tax credits that make saving for retirement easier, she says. The Fonds’ twin mission is to “provide safe retirement money for workers” while investing mostly in Quebec’s small and medium-sized businesses that might otherwise lack access to patient capital.
That mission does not make the legal work easier. The Fonds is a public company supervised by the Autorité des marchés financiers and subject to an expanding set of rules, ranging from anti-money laundering to modern slavery obligations. Brown’s team handles compliance, investment contracts, litigation and board governance; as corporate secretary, she keeps the Fonds’ governance machinery moving even as new requirements arrive almost every year. “It’s not necessarily the complexity, although it’s very complex,” she says. “It’s the quantity of the work.”
The strain is felt most acutely in resourcing. “We always say we’re the biggest of the small and the smallest of the biggest,” Brown says of the 40-employee department, which she leads with three managers. The mandate keeps expanding, but given her prudent approach with the budget, so she has little patience for legal functions that fail to rethink how they operate.
On digital transformation, budget for shiny legal tech platforms was limited. Instead, Brown and her managers pushed the Microsoft stack, already licensed across the organization, automating large parts of their workflow with tools such as Planner, To Do, and internal dashboards that track matters by complexity, priority, and ownership across the team.
Her bigger experiment is conceptual. After studying Jim Collins’ book Good to Great, Brown and her managers adapted its “flywheel” concept to the realities of an in-house legal team. In Collins’ work, success comes not from one-off bets but from “the cumulative efforts, small efforts of all the team rowing in the same direction,” she says. Brown could not find any serious attempt to apply that model to legal, so her group built its own version.
The result is a flywheel that turns on three linked elements: people, services and reputation. On the services side, Brown is trying to break what she sees as an ingrained habit among many lawyers, especially those trained in big firms, to deliver gold-plated work product on every file, regardless of its importance. “The reality in-house is that you can’t give that level of service all the time,” she says. Instead, her team now aims to adjust its level of service in accordance with the risk and the value added of the file. Low-risk, low-value matters are simplified, automated or pushed back to internal clients with guides; only high-risk, high-value, strategically aligned work gets the full court press.
On the people side of the flywheel, succession planning and development are non-negotiable. Brown recalls advice from a former boss at Desjardins: “Half your job as a GC is making sure that one day nobody needs you.” She has three managers and works to ensure the organization has multiple succession options the day she decides to retire. To get there, she invests heavily in mentoring and coaching and encourages the entire team – including assistants and paralegals – to see themselves as contributors to the same business plan, she says.
Externally, Brown still runs formal RFPs and values long-standing relationships with firms that understand the Fonds’ unusual structure and mandate. But in a climate of “uncertainty” and “turmoil” where leadership is “very prudent about financial resources,” the flywheel is also a hedge against over-reliance on external counsel, she says. By championing her department internally and externally, she aims to attract talent, secure budget and keep as much work in-house as possible without sacrificing quality.
For lawyers eyeing the move in-house, Brown’s message is that technical excellence is only part of the equation. She looks for people who have “said yes to many opportunities” and built diverse backgrounds, whether through different roles, sectors or geography. Exposure to global challenges in “less fortunate countries” can also be “very humbling,” she says, as it gives lawyers a broader view of the social and environmental issues that now shape corporate strategy.