Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/1171384
38 www.canadianlawyermag.com/inhouse High standards part of leadership approach Kikelomo Lawal has led numerous workstreams to establish the organization as a fully integrated share capital corporation IT WAS A watershed event for Kikelomo Lawal, chief legal officer and corporate secretary at Interac Corp., when a restructuring took place that had been years in the making. In January 2018, an amalgamation of Interac Association and Acxsys Corpora- tion took place, establishing a unified company, Interac Corp. "Our department had a huge undertaking when the organization underwent a restructuring and that put tremendous demands on the legal department, not just for the day-to-work work but for the added work that was associated with the restructuring," says Lawal, who joined the company in 2008, after working at Blake Cassels needed to be a change, to make sure that we were connecting more and in a more meaningful way. Definitely leveraging video conferencing technology is important." Developing personal connections also extends towards mentoring. Currently, Westelman is men- toring an IP lawyer in eBay's South Korea division. Despite the different areas of law and despite the differences in countries and legal systems, he believes there is value in the relationship. "I'm not an IP lawyer, so from the substantive legal side of things, there are things I've been able to learn from her, which is pretty cool," says Westelman. "Hopefully, I can share and impart some of my wisdom. It has been pretty interesting because we're not in the same department and not even supporting the same businesses, it's less about substantive legal issues but I have been able to help her on things like executive presence and the things I have done to work on that on my own — becoming part of the management team here, working with senior business people. I've been able to, I hope, help her think about what it means to be an effective, modern, in-house lawyer." Of course, any effective, modern in-house law- yer is constantly on the hunt for ways to improve a legal department's efficiency and Westelman is Kikelomo Lawal, chief legal officer and corporate secretary INNOVATIO no exception. One of the projects he imple- mented was to roll out a SAP-based contract management system, develop a risk matrix for the types of contracts typically used by the business and write some standard templates and then permit low-risk contracts (such as nondisclosure agreements, certain statements of work under previously negotiated master agreements or inser- tion orders with third-party previously vetted publishers) to be handled by the commercial contracts team in a self-service manner, without needing to be overseen by the legal department. Although it took a bit of effort for West- elman to get used to the idea of handing off even limited amounts of legal responsibil- ity to business units that didn't have legal training, the decision was the correct one in the end. "My team and I, we regularly conduct contracts and compliance training, and what I like to think of as legal training for business units. We spend a considerable amount of time educating our businesses in how to negotiate with vendors and how to use our pre-approved templates, and to properly prepare initial drafts of standard form contracts. This way we're really tapping into the potential of our non-legally trained business consumers of legal services, and we're essentially extend- ing the reach of our legal function in putting in the time to train these non-lawyers to do more traditional legal work." He speculates that his experience at Kijiji is similar to that experienced by in-house counsel at other technology companies in that the concept of working with lawyers is foreign to the technology experts and business leaders. Westelman says it's his job, and the job of in-house counsel, to broaden the reach of the legal department, and to educate company employees about how the in-house department is able to assist them in meeting their business goals. "It's really reiterating the same message time and time again. It's really hammer- ing home the point that legal is a partner, certainly working toward the same strategic objectives and we're available. We're avail- able to help." "I hope that that plays a part and paves the way for others on my team to earn their seats with their respective local management teams, because I feel it's absolutely critical to the legal function."