Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/50160
READY FOR annual corporate counsel survey shows the workload for in-house counsel promises to be heavier next year as companies brace for continued market turmoil. By Jennifer Brown in-house in 2012 even as they expect to see an increase in the amount they will be challenged to do in the coming year, according to the annual Canadian Law- yer corporate counsel survey. In fact, even if the economy continues A on a downward trend, 64 per cent of the 137 respondents who came from lead- ing Canadian corporate and government legal departments say they will bring more work into their own department. Even if there is an improvement in the economic outlook, 61 per cent said they will not send more work outside their organizations, and 57.4 per cent said they will be implementing new cost-cutting measures with the firms they currently deal with. In fact, awareness of and concern over costs was the No. 1 area corporate counsel identified as something firms can do to improve their working relationships with in-house legal departments. Of those responding to the survey, 83 per cent say any perceived improvement in the economic climate in 2011 had no effect on their legal department spend. In terms of external legal spend, 53.3 per cent said their budgets did not change over last year while 38.3 per cent said it was higher. When it came to their depart- ment's budget, 45.1 per cent said they saw no change while 34.5 per cent saw it increase and 20.4 per cent saw a reduction over last year. For the 38.3 per cent who did see an increase in external legal spend, s uncertainty about the economy lingers, corpo- rate counsel are prepar- ing for the worst with plans to bring more work 45.7 per cent said they attribute changes to their spending to more work being sent outside the organization. But on the internal staffing front, 48.5 per cent said there was no change in the size of their legal department over last year, while 31.3 per cent said their department grew as there was more work to be done; however 17.2 per cent said their legal department actually shrank. Keeping work in-house is a trend also noted by recruiters such as Robert Half International Canada, which recently issued its hiring index specific to the legal community. "We have heard from corpo- rate GCs that they would look to bring work in-house rather than farm it out," says John Ohnjec, division director with Robert Half Legal in Canada. "They're still being very cautious — nobody is really making those full-fledged dives into bringing on two or three counsel in-house either — they are taking a mea- sured approach and looking specifically to the type of work that needs to be done." Responses to the survey came from a cross section of departments with 15.7 per cent from legal departments that had $10 million or more in legal spending in the last fiscal year, 17.9 per cent spent less than $1 million, and 23.9 per cent were from departments that had between $1 million and $3 million in legal costs. Almost half of the respondents were from small legal departments with fewer than five lawyers. There was a fairly even distribution of responses from the various sectors: 19 per cent coming from financial institutions and another 19 per cent from the service sector while government, industry/manufacturing/resource-based industries and technology companies fall WHAT SECTOR IS YOUR COMPANY/ORGANIZATION IN? Non-profit 7.5% Technology 12.7% Financial 18.7% Service 18.7% Resource- based 13.4% 38 • DECEMBER 2011/JANUARY 2012 INHOUSE 12.9% No Industry/ manufacturing 14.2% Government (municipal, regional, provincial, federal, and First Nations — including boards and tribunals) 14.9% IS THE VOLUME OF LEGAL WORK LIKELY TO GROW FOR YOUR COMPANY IN 2012? Yes Stay the same 30.7% 56.4% UNCER Canadian Lawyer' s T AINTY