Taking Charge, Introversion, and Career Pivots with Norman Bacal

Welcome to Studying Law Around the World. I'm Claudio Claus. In each episode, I talk with lawyers, law students, and professors from different parts of the world to talk about legal education, careers, and what the profession looks like in real life. We talk about the hard parts, the surprises, and the decisions that shaped their paths. Whether you're planning to study abroad, thinking about working in another legal system, or just curious about how law works around the world, this podcast is for you. Today I have the opportunity to have here as one of the guests in the show, Norman Bacow. He has an incredible story. He's now an author, a motivational speaker, a leader and mentor, and he has had quite the career, you know, all the way going to building and leading one of Canada's prestigious law firms, working in incredible Hollywood companies and studios, and now sharing all of his knowledge and this incredible career that he put together. Thank you so much for making the time to be here this evening, Norman. Thank you, Claudio. It's my honor to be here. Absolutely. And to start us off, I'd love for you to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more. about all this incredible story that you've built. Thank you. I always start my lectures, particularly for, for law school students the same way. And it, and it goes something like this. I used to be a student in law at McGill University with a forest green knapsack on my back, a long socialist beard, long hair, and no idea what it, what I wanted to do when I grew up. And I've never lost sight of the fact that we all kind of start at the same place without any idea of where the legal career is going to bring us. And if you had told me at the time that I would go on to represent in my career major Hollywood studios, that I would work with former government leaders of Canada, that I would basically run a firm that had at its height about 600 lawyers and 1,100 staff, I would have had a good laugh and said, you've got to be kidding. And because I, all I could tell you was that at the beginning of second year law school, I was probably the only student sitting in my tax class saying, okay, I know what I want to do as a lawyer. I want to be a tax lawyer. I didn't even know what tax lawyers did at the time when I was So, so I have a pretty good sense of how frightening the world looks from the inside of law school, how much law school prepares you in part intellectually to think about the law, but pretty much gives you no other skills to succeed when you leave. And I made it my mission during close to the end of my practice to actually sit down and go back and reflect on what I did wrong, what I did right. The things that happened to me and the commonalities of people who have succeeded, not only in law, but in business, and write them all down in a book. The book's called Take Charge, and we'll get to that later. But it's really a book of how you go from knowing nothing about what the world looks like on the outside of law school to thriving, whether it's in the business community or in the legal community, and getting your feet underneath you and taking the steps. along the way of building a career. So, but I was not at all conscious of that. And, you know, part of it is luck. Part of it is following some passions that I had. The short story is when I was a 4th year lawyer, I was undistinguished, unknown, and going nowhere. In fact, that's what the review from my boss really was. He said, there's something lacking. And I don't know what it was. At that point in time, I was allowing my career to happen to me. And I was out there, I was working. And I thought if I just do good work and, and if I, you know, do what the boss has asked me to do, I should be okay. And I wasn't. And I woke up one morning and she was the one who said, you need to take charge. You need to show some initiative about what your life is going to be and what you want to do. And something in me changed that night. And I walked into work the next day, literally a changed man. I know it might be hard to believe, but literally I could feel a change taking over me. And we'll come back to this later, but over the course of the next few years, I, I, my passion was tax. I applied it to the Canadian film industry. It happened to be at a time when the industry was growing. I came up with an idea or two that turned out to revolutionize the film and television industry in Canada. And then it was just a question of stepping stones. I left Toronto. I left my hometown of Montreal in 1989 to open a 4-lawyer office in Toronto. Again, I had no idea what that would involve. I had at that point 4 children. The youngest was 10 days old and the oldest was 6. And we threw them in the car, moved to Toronto and started what I called just an experiment. And over the course of the next 25 years, I built that office. I learned how to lead, ultimately became the leader of the firm, a position that I grew into over the course of 16 years. In law school, would I have ever thought I could run a business? No. In fact, I went into law thinking I'm in law because I don't think I have any business skills. I might be a good advisor, but business, forget it. And I discovered, guess what? I had business skills. So it was a course of building, building skills, stepping stones, trying new things, never being afraid to fail. And over the course of time, I ended up Following my leads into Hollywood, I worked with a number of major Hollywood studios, including MGM and Warner Brothers and Sony Pictures and, and ultimately Lionsgate. I ended up on the board of Lionsgate for almost 10 years. And again, that's an interesting story on its own. And in fact, I was sitting in the boardroom on the day the decision to produce The Hunger Games was made. So, you know, could I have ever imagined that in law school? No. Could I have ever imagined this as the 4th-year lawyer going nowhere? Of course not. But could I begin to imagine it once I started taking on all these things and started learning, developing the skills I would need to get me there? Yeah, I suppose so. That's incredible. Well, I think it's very encouraging for our listeners here who are, you know, law students, early career professionals. And I really appreciate you starting this interview with that introduction. I really, really do. And I see your career has gone through very different chapters. I think it really sets the stage. You did mention this incredible experience with what your wife said and, you know, coming into work. It was probably number one. And, and again, when you're going through it, you don't realize you're going through it. It's only when you look back at it after when you say, okay, that was a turning point moment in my life. Why? Because I went to work the next day angry for the first time ever. And I said, you know what, from now on, every time I walk into a meeting, I am going to be in charge. I'm going to take charge of it. Every, every encounter I have, I'm going to be responsible for. I'm not going to wait for a piece of work to land on my desk. I'm going to go start searching it out. I'm not going to wait for my phone to ring. I'm going to start calling people and seeing what I can develop. And then, then I started to get lucky is all I can say. And, and the things that the experts say about, you know, luck is, is hard work combined with unexpected opportunity. And. That's what, and that's what I discovered. What I wish I knew about luck, but that's, but that's it. It's you, you create the opportunities by opening your mind. There was another piece of advice from my wife that changed my life. When I went for interviews while I was in law school, nobody hired me. Like I was the last guy anybody wanted to hire. I consider myself now looking back, I was introverted. I was shy. I knew I was smart enough. I knew I was capable. And everybody used to say, just be yourself. That's, you know, that should do it. And of course, just being myself got me nowhere. Got me hired nowhere. And what I discovered over time were a few tricks that allow the introvert to convert him or herself into that bubbly personality that everybody wants to hire. But I started learning tricks and I'll flash forward to a dinner that I sat at just a couple of years ago. They had, there was a guest speaker in, he was a university professor and I went because I was going to be the keynote speaker the following month. So they invited me to To to come in and just listen, and this guy probably one of the great extroverts I've ever met in my life. He sat down at that table, and he interviewed one by one everybody sitting at that table, and just asked some questions about themselves. And this was a trick I had learned earlier on. If you were sitting beside me at a table, after about two minutes you'd have had enough of me, and you'd turn the other way. You know those those people at dinners? You always hope it's not you, but I was that person. And and I'm sitting there because like after two minutes of small talk, I've got nothing to say. And it was my wife who said, "I've learned a lot from her over the years," but she said, "Listen, instead." Instead of falling into that trap, pretend you're an interviewer on a television show and the person sitting next to you is your guest. What are you going to do? Well, you're, you're going to start asking them questions about themselves. And every time they give you an answer, that's an opportunity to ask them another question about themselves. And she said, and I'm going to guarantee you one thing, because I've, I've lived it in my experience. She was the one who went for 10 interviews and got 11 offers. That's how good she was at making impressions. She said, but I'll guarantee you one thing. You will leave that encounter and that person will go tell everybody they know. 2, first, in terms of background, you'll know everything about their life. They'll know nothing about you, but they'll leave that encounter and say, you're the most interesting person they've ever met because you're interested in the most important person in their life. So I take it back now to this extroverted speaker and I watched him work the table and he's using every one of those techniques and he's doing it naturally. And I am overwhelmed. By how good he is at it. And I said, okay, you know what? That's another skill I can add to my introverted skill bag. All I have to do is act like— I don't have to be an extrovert because I'm not one. I just have to act like one. And I've just seen the master. I've showed them I care about their lives. And that's in terms of skillset. If I had to say what's the most important skill your listeners can learn from tonight, it's the care you show, the interest you show in other people. is your, believe it or not, will be one of your greatest skills to develop. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate it. I feel like something you've said now, but also through your work and things that you've posted and shared is that careers are not linear. And I love that you really gave a great example of that in the beginning of this episode. And there's something that you take charge and you steer over time. And I'm, and I'm curious to know, you know, how, how did Learning that changed the way you approach your work. You curate your career and you never know what's around the next bend. That's, that's the other thing. And in terms of career development, there's no way you can predict what you're going to be doing a year from now, or what's going to walk in the door next week, or what complete disaster you are going to encounter a month from now that is going to change your career for the better. What person is going to walk into your life that you can't begin to imagine that will create an opportunity for you that will change everything. And in my experience, that happened to me every few years. So as I was beginning to develop a reputation for myself in the film industry, and part of developing my reputation was I volunteered for industry committees. I happened to be the only tax lawyer in the country that actually cared about film and television at the time. Now it's quite fashionable, but at the time, if you went off in that direction, You know, my peers thought I was crazy, but I volunteered for, for, for industry committees that helped me develop a reputation that was bigger than even I knew. Like people began to hear about me from coast to coast in the country and all because I was just doing volunteer work. So I wasn't actually billing a cent. I wasn't creating any value for my firm, but I was creating reputational value for myself in an area that I came to care about. And then one day it was 1988, one of my clients who was a new client in Toronto about my age, the funny story is he, he was the first time we met. I'd been dealing with him over the phone for a number of years. And every time there's a tax issue, the entertainment partner in my firm would say, I have to go consult Norm Bacall on this point. And he was getting frustrated. So he finally walks into my office and he's expecting to see this 60-year-old tax lawyer. And he walks into my office and he sees this 31-year-old, which is all I was at the time. So I was still, I was still pretty young. He does a double take. He said, you can't possibly be Norm Bacall. And So we laughed and he was actually 6 months younger than I was. He was running the finance department at what was about to become Canada's largest film production company. So it was like we were both sort of in the early stages of careers that were about to blossom, but he introduced me to somebody he was thinking of hiring. We had lunch together and that lunch changed the trajectory of my entire career because the person we had lunch with turned out to be the greatest salesperson I'd ever met in my life. And I write a lot about service and sales in Take Charge. And a lot of those lessons I learned from this one connection who was the master. So this is 1989. I'm, I've just moved to Toronto and I'm in my 8th year of practice. And I'm doing things with the greatest salesperson I've ever met that I, again, that I, in a million years, I never would have imagined. And that was like jet fuel for my career that again, I never could have anticipated. But what's important is that when these opportunities come by, you have to recognize them. And instead of being afraid of them and worrying, can I do it or can I not do it? You look at it and say, I'm going to do it. I'm going to figure it out. Those tax-structured financings that I created and that he sold, there was a point in time where we were doing hundreds of millions of dollars of this a year. Like literally for my first, first year doing it was 1985. I did one $2 million deal. And over the course, but 11 or 12 years later, we were doing hundreds of millions of dollars and it kept evolving. So again, I was doing, I was doing transactions I never could have dreamed of, but it was only by doing the first one that I could figure out the second one. And, and then hopscotch to the third and then to the seventh and then to the 25th. Each one was different. Each generation was different as, as my experience evolved, as my contacts evolved. And with it, my brain had to evolve. And that's the thing. The experience you are going to get moving from law student to practitioner is going to be based on experiences. And what I find interesting, and I've interviewed a lot of lawyers over the course of the years, not only for the purpose of hiring them when I was running the firm, but for the purposes of writing some of my books to find out what makes everybody tick and what What are the commonalities? And the ones who succeeded weren't afraid. And the thing that they weren't afraid of was failing. They saw failure instead of being the thing you needed to avoid, like failure in law school means you're taking the course over. You may not be graduating. It's a disaster in your life. Failure in practice means you go back to the drawing board. You figure out, okay, what, what can I learn from what didn't work? And how do I apply it to make myself better? Which is very easy at the beginning of your career. Because at the start of your career, you don't know how to do anything. So everything has to be learned. And the more things you learn, you have to be aware, the more you become naturally afraid of trying things you don't know how to do. At the point where I was running the firm, I had a very nice practice and it was, I knew it was getting close to the time that I had to make a career pivot. And I made a lot of them. A client walked into my office and, and, and this is a client for whom I'd been doing these deals for, for a number of years. And he said, Norm, He said, a major Canadian broadcaster wants to invest $50 million in my production company. Do you think that's a deal you could do for me? And I looked at him straight in the eye and what went through my head was, of course not. I don't know how to do— I've never done a deal like this in my life. And I looked at him, I smiled, and I said, Bob, of course I can do that. Because I figured I'll figure it out. And they all said the same thing. And that was, they were faced with moments where they had to take on something they didn't know how to do. So they learn how to do it. Amazing. Oh, I really appreciate that. And Norm, asking here, you've been now, you know, part of multiple organizations of different sizes, the structure of a law firm. I'm thinking about now, you know, some lawyers will come out of law school and will be planning on building their own practice. And you had that experience in a way. So looking back, considering all these experiences, what are some of the things that really make an organization work beyond just having know, strong legal talent beyond just having, you know, willing people? What are some of the things that actually move the needle? If you're, if you're going to build an organization, uh, and I had the opportunity to build, basically to build it from scratch. Like I came out on my own and I walked into the managing partner's office and said, you know, if you want to open an office in Toronto, I'm happy to do it and not knowing, having a clue what that meant. But I, I came to Toronto having begun to experience career success and I decided I was going to do a social experiment, simple as that. And I will eventually be competing with firms that are much bigger, that are much stronger, that are far better connected. And, and are going to be able to recruit 100 times easier than I can recruit being a, being a tiny office. And I said, okay, so here's my social environment. I'm going to create a firm where the paramount value is waking up excited to come to work in the morning, right? That's, that's my goal. Our prime goal is to have fun. And if we have fun, everything else will follow. All right. So that's within the context of doing excellent work. So I'm only going to hire lawyers who I believe are of excellent quality. I'm not going to compromise on that. But when I go to them and when I'm recruiting, and this was just a, just a thought experiment, I had no idea whether it was going to work. I'd say the only way I can recruit not just students, but I have to recruit senior lawyers too. So when I'm, and when I'm meeting with them, the first thing I'd say is, okay, let's be honest here. You wouldn't be taking this meeting with me if you were having happy where you were, because if you were perfectly happy at your law firm, you wouldn't be taking any meetings, but you're, you came because you're curious. So here's what I'm going to offer you. You had this vision of what practicing law was going to be when you left law school. You had this ideal and it hasn't worked out for you. So what I'm going to allow you to do is create that ideal. All right. I, we are going, we together are going to build a firm that is going to be exactly the way you dreamed practicing law was going to be. And some, some lawyers would laugh at me. Some lawyers, I could see the fear in their eyes when they said, well, that, that's putting, that's going to put a lot of pressure on me. I can't rely on, I'll have to rely on myself from now on. I've never had to. I could rely on my institution. And what I'd say is we're, we are building something together. If you're not a builder, don't come. So that was the other important thing. I looked for like-minded people, for people who, when I made this speech to them, got excited. So it doesn't equate exactly. But every time you compromise in terms of who you're taking on, you're losing something. Not every business applies that as their, what I call, I call that the cultural value of the firm. So every firm needs a cultural value. And if you don't know what your cultural value is, you're already at a deficit. The other thing that I made sure every lawyer I ever hired could do is give what I call the elevator speech. Sort of what, why do you like working here? If you can't answer that in 30 seconds, and if you can't tell me the exact same story that everybody else is telling you, then I, as a leader, I failed. So my job is to brainwash you, to make it very clear for you what we are creating, what our key values are. And then we will, then I will spend the next X number of years brainwashing you. And part of my brainwashing is I'll tell you stories that make fun of me and make fun of the other founders of the firm. And, but put it in a light that reflects those values. It's all, I hate to say it, it's, it's, it's very tribal going back to ancient times. There's a social historian. Who probably a lot of your listeners have heard about. His name is Yuval Harari. He's one of the leading social anthropologists in the world. He's a historian. He's he wrote the book Sapiens, just among other mega bestsellers that have been translated around the world. And he's the one who taught me this after the fact. I I read his material. I said, "Yeah, we did that." We the ancient tribes created mythologies. They retold their stories, and what it's what distinguished them from the other tribes. And and your organization needs to be tribal. It needs to have stories. It needs a mythology. mythology, and it needs a set of core beliefs that everybody buys into. And it doesn't matter who I ask from the receptionist to the most senior person in the firm, they all have to tell me the exact same story. And if I've done that, I've created a great organization. And you see it in places like Apple. You see it in places like IKEA. It's not just the legal world. The great organizations have their stories. They have their mythologies. They have their practices. And If you, if you're going to work there, you have to, you have to buy into it. And that's what cemented. When I was just a junior lawyer, I looked at the other major firms and one by one, I would tell you why I could never work there. So it's what I learned from, you know, the senior people that started the firm that I worked at, that I then incorporated into what I built. And then, and then we were able to build it to 30 times the size, far more challenges, coast to coast and international. Still everybody believing in the same core values. So that's how you build it. I think you've written extensively about that experience as well, right? Since you just mentioned it. So you've been very open about, in a way, the collapse of the firm as well. For those of us who are maybe joining the legal market right now, the story maybe has settled enough where we don't know much about it. The book was Breakdown. It was a story of— it's really 3 stories, how you build it, Case study on how to build a career, case study on how to build an organization. And then third case study is how to break an organization. And of course, spending 25 years building something and then watching it collapse a year after, you know, you've left the leadership position is huge loss. You know, but in fairness, we all are going to experience loss in our life. Like nobody's exempt. And neither was I. What you can't prepare yourself For is how to deal with the grief of loss. For many people, it's loved ones or children or parents, or like we're none of us immune. That's part of living is losing. And, but for me, I had led a charmed life for 35 years. When you put, take aside the first 4, but for 31 years, I couldn't do anything wrong. Of course, I did a lot of things wrong, but overall the trajectory was upward and upward and upward. And I Couldn't imagine loss until I suffered it. And it was, you know, the press called it the greatest failure in Canadian law firm history, which is a lot to go through. So the real, the bigger question becomes, how do you deal with that? What can you learn from it? When you're approaching a mourner at a funeral, you have, you don't know what to say. And, and you give them these eyes that are showing sympathy. And after a while, you could see into their head saying, I, you know, I can't deal with the way you're treating me. And it got, it got to that point where I was getting funeralized from everybody. And I just wanted to run away. It's like, stop it. I need to go on. You know, as one person said, the loss will make you stronger. And all I was thinking to myself was, I tell you what, you go through the loss instead of me, you be stronger. I liked it the way it was. The loss left me with a lot of anger. If you spend, you know, your adult life building something and then suddenly it's pulled away. And I was a very angry person. And it was my wife who handed me a notebook, like the one I'm keeping on my desk right now. And she said, you need, you can't go on until you process your anger. I didn't know what that meant. But I began to write that night. And the first thing I did was write down what the last day of the firm felt like, because I was like the captain going down with the ship. I went into the office, I closed the door, I made sure I was the last person at the door. And there was, and I wrote about the emptiness, which ended up being the first chapter of the book is that experience. And at, you know, once I'd finished writing it, I said, okay, now what? And I began to write every story I could remember for my entire career, which, which were many numerous and 750 handwritten pages by the time I was finished. But I was developing a writing habit over the course that I would write 2 or 3 hours every single day. And something was coming out of me, but the most important thing, and for your listeners, because we're, you know, everyone is going to experience grief. The most important thing I learned was through the writing, I was able to leave my anger on the written page. And by the time I was finished that experience, the anger was gone. It was on the paper. I could read it. And my angriest pages I couldn't publish because my libel lawyer told me, yeah, I couldn't publish that. And I said, yeah, but it's my favorite. Those, these are my favorite pages. He said the most famous words, all my authors tell me that. But I could, I could feel the anger was gone and I could only go on with my life when the anger had bled out of me and stopped clouding everything I did. So, you know, people talk about journaling and things like this when you're going through difficult periods, and I would say absolutely it helped me, but it also, again, unwittingly, but for that, would I have started a writing career? And the answer is, of course not. And, you know, would I have had reason to be lecturing at university campuses around the country? And I still do it, telling them about all the lessons I learned that were incorporated into these pages. And I lectured about it for 5 years until I could really understand what happened, and not only to me, but to the, to the law firm, what it meant organizationally and what it meant from a leadership perspective. So all these lessons I learned. through the process, but it helped make me a better speaker. It helped organize my thoughts. I, and after lecturing on campuses for about 5 years, I said, okay, it's now time to boil down what are, what are the, all the lessons I learned in my career from the day I left law school that I had to learn by myself without any formal education. What are the things I wish I knew before I went for law firm interviews? And I interviewed I don't know, 25 or 30 professionals and entrepreneurs interviewed among them, some of the leading business people in the country to see what's the commonality. And I was able to boil it down and create them. That's how Take Charge was born. It became sort of the manual of commonality here, the common things that all of us who were nobody at one point in time have anything in common. And what I found to my surprise was we had an awful lot. These are the things students need to learn. These are the things young professionals need to learn. Because they work for not just me, not just Wes, so many of us. And there, there's so many common things, how you deal with adversity, how you get through an interview. It started with, you know, I failed at interviews. Okay. So what did I learn? Not from succeeding in interviews, but I became the boss. So I mean, I'm interviewing lots of people. Who do I like? Who do I not like? What impresses me? What doesn't? What did I learn about how to survive encounters with complete strangers? What did I learn? I talked about that extrovert from The university professor, what, what even in my, my 60s did I learn from him that I, that I'm still applying today? And, and these are the lessons that I'm trying to pass forward. Mm-hmm. My one mission after I left the practice of law, and it's over 10 years now, has been what can I pay forward? How can I change people's lives in ways that I won't even know about? And if I can do that, that's, that's now how I define success in my life, not by how many zeros are, you know, are in my bank account. It's how many lives can I affect positively? What can a listener to this podcast pick up? What, you know, what one piece of information can she pick up that she'll turn around 10 years from now and say, I listened to that podcast and it changed my life and I'll never know about it. That's the best part. Absolutely. So I really appreciate you mentioning all of that and Do invite, you know, listeners to get to know a little bit about the books you published and the work you've been doing in the public sphere. To those who are maybe getting out of law school, starting a career, they're working through their articling or working through their first-year associate positions. The first thing I tell you is you can't do it alone. You need mentors, you need supporters. If you can't find them in your firm, the internet, places like LinkedIn, LinkedIn are filled with people like me who would be very happy if you're stuck or you're at a career crossroads and you're not sure what to do, would be happy to give you half an hour or an hour of our time and just help point you in the right direction. I can't tell you the number of people who said, just said something, not realizing they were giving me a piece of advice when they said it, but based on their wisdom and experience that, that changed, helped change the trajectory of my life. One of them When I published Take Charge, Harvey, I'm sending you a copy of the book. He said, why? I'm in my late 80s already. What am I going to get out of it? I said, well, you're apart from anything else, you're in the book for a piece of advice you gave me. And I recounted the story to him of what he told me and how it— I said, in every key moment of my life, I reflected on that advice and used it to help make my decisions. He said, Norm, I don't remember that dinner. I don't remember even telling you this. And That was, to me, that was the best part of the whole story. Your mission is to find those people who will be your mentors, who will help be your signposts, who can help, you know, at your moments of truth, will give you the advice that will help point you in the right direction. The other thing I would say is don't ever be afraid and understand everything you don't know how to do today, which is a huge amount when you graduate and as a first-year lawyer, don't let that bother you because you only have to do something once to become the expert at it. Surround yourself with people who can give you all kinds of different advice. Because don't expect you can make it by yourself. You can't. That's not completely true. There are still the Steve Jobs of the world. There are still the Elon Musks of the world, but they are exceptions that actually prove the rule. Amazing. Thank you so much for making the time to be in the podcast today. Tune in to today's episode as well, and we'll see you on the next one. Thank you. And for, for your listeners, just before I go, if you'd like to know more, if you want to get in touch with me, feel free to reach out. to me on LinkedIn, or you can Google me and, and check me, check out my website. The hardest part of finding me is spelling my name right. It's B-A-C-A-L. Thank you, Norman. I really appreciate it.