Temins succeeds Raymond Slattery who served as managing partner for over 20 years
Past chair of Minden Gross Business Law Group Brian Temins began his new role as the firm’s managing partner, September 1, 2021.
Temins succeeds outgoing partner Raymond Slattery who served as managing partner for over 20 years.
“Brian is a superb choice for this role. He has a strategic business mind and exemplifies the firm’s core values of commitment to professional excellence, mutual respect, collegiality, and collaboration,” said Slattery.
Temins joined Minden Gross in 2007 as a senior associate. His practice focuses on business law matters, including private company mergers and acquisitions supplemented with corporate commercial work, he says.
After working as a senior associate for three years, he chaired the firm’s business law group, which he did for “10 years until this summer.” Temins also served on the executive committee for five years.
Temins jokes that he was an “accidental lawyer” and his determination to go business school made him write the LSAT as a substitute for his GMAT exam. “The GMAT was only available at a time that I was out of the country and wasn't able to write it. So, I applied to Law School. I did actually from law school apply to business school and got my MBA and LLB, but I was in many ways totally an accidental lawyer,” he says.
“I was debating whether to article or not, and my father actually encouraged me to article because I had an opportunity in business at the time and I think he secretly wanted to be a lawyer. So go figure, for someone who law was never their first choice and looked to get out a couple of times, here I am 20 plus years later, now the managing partner.”
Minden Gross LLP is a business law firm in Toronto that provides representation and assistance in real estate, corporate and commercial transactions, financial services, litigation, securities and capital markets, corporate tax planning, and employment and labour law. The firm was one of the Top 10 Ontario Regional Firms announced by Canadian Lawyer this year.
“It’s an exciting time to be at Minden Gross,” Temins says. He says the firm is currently acting on a series of initiatives that will unfold in the next couple of months.
“They’re not necessarily new initiatives of me becoming managing partner,” he says. “This is part of the evolution of the firm, and part of that evolution included a transition from Ray [Slattery] who’s done a fantastic job for quite a long time to me as managing partner.”
With law firms working towards a safer environment post-pandemic, Temins says that all employees are required to be fully vaccinated to enter the office. Minden announced a vaccination policy a couple of weeks ago, which mandates “everyone to be fully vaccinated to attend the office,” he says.
“I thought was an important first step so folks that are attending the office know that we [management] are always taking precautions and doing everything we can to ensure that we’ve got a healthy and safe environment.”
He says that letting everyone know that those in their vicinity are vaccinated is a significant step.
Temins says the firm will move to have some required attendance at some point, but “it’s going to be flexible and allow hybrid roles and work from home environment.”
