How apartheid's injustices helped shape the legal career of BMO's Simon A. Fish (2024)

Simon A. Fish’s legal baptism by fire took place when he was a young litigator in Johannesburg, South Africa, during apartheid. In a case heavy with racial overtones, Fish represented one of four black men charged with murdering a white farming couple. The men faced the death penalty if convicted.

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The 26-year-old lawyer mounted a defence based on facts that were more favourable to his client than to his co-accused; while his client was acquitted in a trial before a judge, the other three were found guilty and later hanged.

“The responsibility I had as a young lawyer to my client was enormous,” Fish recalled in an interview last month. “Anything I faced afterward was not that significant.”

The case put the pressures of practising law into perspective for Fish, who soon after shifted into the world of international law, where he carved out a remarkable career with Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Inco Ltd., Vale and finally the Bank of Montreal, for which he was honoured with the BLG Stephen Sigurdson Lifetime Achievement award at the 2024 Canadian General Counsel Awards at a ceremony this month.

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Growing up in a segregated country had a lasting effect, shaping Fish’s moral compass and making him an unshakable advocate for diversity in the legal profession.

“I was raised in a manner in which I was acutely aware of the injustices that were heaped on the majority of the country’s population,” he said.

Though he started his career as a litigator, inspired to study law by the rampant injustice in his home country, he found his calling was to become an international lawyer.

After obtaining an undergraduate degree in business and his LL.B. from the University of Cape Town, he left South Africa in 1988 to obtain a masters of law in international finance from the American University Washington College of Law in Washington, D.C. From there, he joined the international law firm Dechert LLP as a mergers and acquisitions lawyer, where he developed a taste for the dramatic world of dealmaking.

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“It had a huge appeal for me,” Fish said.

In the mid 1990s, an opportunity arose for him to move in-house and join the acquisition team at global energy giant Royal Dutch Shell, and he took the plunge.

“I promised myself that the first dull day I had as a corporate lawyer I would leave and go back to private practice,“ he recalled. But the dull day never came.

Over the next decade, Fish climbed the corporate legal ladder and held a number of positions with at Royal Dutch Shell, working in South Africa, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Canada, eventually becoming corporate secretary to the executive board. His reward? He was appointed general counsel of Shell Canada, prompting a move to Calgary.

Fish and his wife, Isabelle, a lawyer-turned-entrepreneur, found Calgary so inviting that the family decided to put down roots in Canada. In 2005, he jumped at an opportunity to join miner Inco, which was putting itself up for sale and wanted Fish to lead the transaction. A year later, Brazilian giant Vale bought Inco for $19.4 billion, and Fish became executive vice-president and general counsel of Vale Inco Ltd.

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A few years later, BMO came knocking and Fish, who was taken with the bank’s then-chief executive, Bill Downe, signed on as executive vice-president and general counsel in mid-2008, a few months before the financial crisis. He quickly found himself in the “thick of it.” A lack of experience in the financial services sector didn’t matter, he said.

“The playbook was being rewritten,” he explained. “It was a taxing, challenging and demanding time.”

In the early days at BMO, Fish also helped the bank’s U.S. subsidiary integrate Indiana’s First National Bank & Trust, which it had acquired in 2006, and soon thereafter Marshall & Ilsley Corp., which the bank bought for US$4.1 billion — a “terrific acquisition for us,” Fish said.

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Fish’s duties at BMO were broad, from overseeing worldwide legal affairs to serving on the managing committee. The job also gave him a chance to turn his attention to diversity and sustainability issues. At the time, ESG was in it “embryonic stages,” but Fish already knew where he stood.

He would go on to chair BMO’s climate institute and was a founding member of the Legal Leaders for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, a non-profit group launched in 2011, comprising more than 120 like-minded general counsels in Canada who pushed for a more inclusive legal profession.

”We used a little bit of our bullying heft to encourage law firms to think about diversity in the same way we were,” he said. “All we were doing was giving the law firms permission to introduce change that they wanted … but perhaps feared they might not have approval to do so. Law firms responded as we hoped they would. The legal profession in Canada is substantially better off for those efforts.”

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Fish is now retired from BMO after 15 years, but still sits on some corporate and non-profit boards. Looking back at his career, he says one of the things he is most proud of is his growing network of workplace alumni. He now counts at least a dozen lawyers who once worked for him and have since been appointed general counsel at other organizations. Two more have gone on to become CEOs.

“What gives me a great deal of pleasure is seeing some of the young lawyers with whom I have worked go on to succeed and often excel well past anything that I might have achieved,” he said.

His key to surviving almost 40 years in the cutthroat corporate world has been to “see purpose and meaning in everything.”

“I have never encountered a situation for which there was no solution,” he said. “It’s always been a matter of applying oneself and working through it.”

His advice to young lawyers looking to make their mark in the legal profession is to be the first to show up for work and the last to leave.

“See everything as an opportunity and say yes to it, and then knock it out of the park,” he said.

While the practice of law has changed immensely since he was first called to the bar, Fish believes the law remains a noble profession.

The goal, he said, is simple: “Leave this place in a better condition than we found it.”

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