Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/50160
LAW DEPARTMENT MANAGEMENT ONLINE TAKING CLAIMS MANAGEMENT Portal provides tool to manage litigation portfolios. By Helen Burnett-Nichols Traditionally, managing a large portfolio of litigation can involve e-mails and reams of paper travelling back and forth between a company and its law firm, waiting for phone calls to be returned and workflow grinding to a halt if any of the above fails to happen on schedule. But in an effort to align litigation management with their broader business and technology goals, in-house counsel at several Canadian companies are making moves to bring their portfolios of claims online, through a portal run by their external law firm. Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP's XClaim portal went live earlier this year, and is a response to some of the inefficiencies and expense associated with tradition- al claims management, explains one of XClaim's found- ers, Louis Frapporti, a commercial litigator in Gowlings' Hamilton, Ont., office. "One of the things that was immediately apparent to me was that we needed to change the way in which we did the work, we needed to use technology much more effectively," he says. Considering technological innovations and how in- house legal departments address cost issues, Frapporti says he began to piece together a business model that would leverage technology in a way that clients already do internally and give them greater value. The portal, currently used by several of the firm's insurance and non-insurance clients, works by allowing staff and lawyers designated by the in-house legal department to log in and view a high-level snapshot and the status of all of their files. Clients can then go into each individual file, find out who the players are 36 • DECEMBER 2011/JANUARY 2012 on the external legal team and all of the steps that have been taken in the file as it progresses through the vari- ous stages. For example, clients can see any digital notations that have been made in the file, the history of offers exchanged between the parties over the course of the litigation, a history of all of the motions, the parties involved, when a hearing took place, and whether the result was granted or not by the court. Clients will also be able to generate their own reports from the system, rather than having to ask the external legal team for information. Gowlings also provides many of the XClaim-related services for a fixed, rather than hourly, rate. "The goal here is to attempt to do everything — every aspect of a file, from the documentary production and corres- pondence to what would normally be memos to file is all digitized," says Frapporti. For many in-house legal departments, moving away from older forms of claims management in the digital age is also in line with their broader business goals. "I think it's a highly innovative tool and being the general counsel for ArcelorMittal in Canada, we're being con- stantly pressed by our company to be innovative and to find better ways of doing the things we do. In the legal world, the challenge is quite difficult because the legal culture is by its nature very traditional and slow mov- ing," explains Robert Soccio, general counsel, corporate secretary and compliance officer with ArcelorMittal Dofasco, which started using XClaim in late 2011. Before the technology came along, managing a INHOUSE