Farah Ismail and Fasken form unique partnership to create in-house department for SE Healthcare

Good general counsel know that “at the beginning” is frequently the best time to call in the troops from their trusted law firms. But “before the beginning” taxes the imagination – unless you happen to be Farah Ismail, senior vice-president and chief legal, privacy and compliance officer at Saint Elizabeth Healthcare, a Toronto-based not-for-profit healthcare provider that offers home, community, long-term, acute and primary care services nationally.

So, when SE’s chief executive officer, John Yip, asked Ismail to establish the organization’s first in-house legal department, she decided that a collaboration with Fasken Martineau Dumoulin’s health group, with whom Yip had enjoyed a longstanding relationship even before he joined SE in early 2022, was essential to the process.

“Although we’ve had a great deal of connection with the legal process over the years, the unique nature and sheer size of our organization has dissipated the centralization of that process,” says Ismail, a lawyer and a nurse. “As part of our goal of bringing this under one umbrella, and because of the complexity and diversity of issues we faced, I felt it important to kindle a deep relationship with the right external firm and make it an integral part of the launch of our department.”

Adaptability, says Ismail, is one of the significant advantages of the “hybrid” legal team she envisages.

“The pandemic taught us how important it was to create dedicated internal teams that can adjust rapidly while working with outside resources. Fasken’s job is to understand us and keep a finger on the external pulse.”

The upshot was that Victoria Mitrova, a Toronto-based associate in Fasken’s health group, has spent the last few months working full time, on-site, and hand-in-hand with Ismail providing legal advice and helping to develop the new team by determining SE’s needs and the expertise required in the legal department.

“Being fully integrated with SE has allowed me to become part of the broader health care team that is involved in managing risk, which has been key to understanding the organization’s culture and needs,” Mitrova says. “And having this kind of internal perspective and contact is fundamental to developing good relationships between SE’s internal team and our lawyers and addressing solutions properly going forward.”

Given that Ismail has been the only in-house lawyer at SE to date and the decentralized nature of legal processes at the organization, the transition to a centralized, in-house department is delicate.

“There’s a lot of sensitive and labour-intensive activity, including – to put it mildly – dealing with internal politics over territory and roles that people have played historically,” Ismail explains. “So, it’s important that we support people, find a gentle way to understand what they’re doing on a day-to-day basis, and handle approachability with care because people are not accustomed to and even reluctant to speak to lawyers.”

The partnership between SE and Fasken comes as SE – founded in 1908 and now one of Canada’s largest social enterprises employing 8,000 staff and providing 7.6 million annual home visits and hours of care to more than 20,000 Canadians daily – works to implement a new strategy and restructuring to cope with its rapidly growing outreach across Canada.

“This is a pivotal time for the healthcare industry, one that has the potential to expose it to significant risk never felt before in the industry – as the pandemic certainly illustrated,” Mitrova says.

A time, indeed, when Fasken’s national reach and broad expertise in healthcare plays a significant role.

“For example, many provinces have their own framework around privacy and electronic health records,” Ismail says.

Mitrova remains at SE until summer’s end. Exactly how the partnership with Fasken will proceed after that has yet to be determined.

“Going forward, we’re considering things like another secondment, a summer student, or perhaps an articling student,” Ismail says. “But we will continue to work together at ground level.”