Canadian Lawyer InHouse

Dec/Jan 2012

Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives

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CLOSING • A roundup of legal department news and trends ACC looking for Is your in-house team doing something innovative to bring greater value to the company or have you cre- ated an innovative partnership with your outside law firm? If so, the Association of Corpo- rate Counsel wants to know. The ACC launched its Value Champions program in November and nominations will be open until March 15. The ACC Value Champions will be an annual recognition program designed to showcase successful law department efforts and firm and client collaborations under the banner of the ACC Value Chal- lenge. The ACC Value Champions will highlight individuals in departments and law firms that are making a difference for their organizations through creativity and value-based legal management skills. "We want to celebrate people who are doing great things and this is the whole concept of the Value Champions," said Veta Richardson, president and CEO of the ACC, during the organization's recent annual meeting in Denver. "We're looking to identify people who have achieved great things in terms of their relationships, efficiencies, commu- nications, predictability of results, low- ered costs, and identifying those that are really ahead of the pack. We'll hold those up as role models and drill down into the practical steps they took to get to that wonderful status." Richardson said those selected as value champions will be examples of how to put best practices into action. "People look at someone at the top in terms of achieving great results and they want to know, 'How can I do the same?' We want to be able to say here are the things you can do to move your company and your relationships in the same positive direction." There will be two categories of win- ners: a law department that has achieved great results for its division and a partner- ship between in-house and outside coun- sel that can describe how the two have worked together to achieve results. "We're looking for collaborative stars law department stars," and individual said Richardson, who sees the Value 44 • DECEMBER 2011/JANUARY 2012 INHOUSE Champions program as a natural exten- sion of the Value Challenge which was launched in 2008 in an effort to examine in-house and outside counsel relation- ships more expansively than just on the hourly billing model. It considers alterna- tive-fee or value-based billing and looks for ways to identify greater efficiencies and improving the way information is exchanged. Nominees will define the scope and duration of the project being high- lighted, and provide metrics on spend, predictability and/or legal outcomes, and a description of how the results were achieved. Emphasis should be on fee structures, efficiency, staffing/train- ing, relationship/collaboration, and other practices. All sizes of law departments and law firms are encouraged to apply. More details and nomination forms are available online at: acc.com/valuechampions. Cities restraining legal budgets even as external counsel costs rise Toronto and Windsor, Ont., are the biggest legal spenders among municipalities even as cities across that province have shown considerable restraint in their legal budgets, a new report shows. The report for 2010 by the Ontario Municipal Benchmarking Initiative analyzes several major municipalities' track records in a number of areas, including legal services. The survey of 12 municipalities shows that the median legal cost per $1,000 in municipal operating and capital expenditures decreased to $2.79 in 2010 from $3.05 in 2008. Toronto, however, was regularly above its counterparts with a cost of $7.24 per $1,000 in 2008, a number that dropped to $4.21 in 2010. Windsor, meanwhile, spent $4.83 in 2008 but towered over all of the other municipalities measured in 2009 at $8.29. The number fell back to $4.90 in 2010. Barrie, Ont., Durham Region, Niagara Region, and Waterloo Region all came in well under the median. Cities' legal budgets have been in the news a fair bit lately. In Cornwall, Ont., for example, attention has focused on a whistleblowing case in which the city pleaded guilty to retaliating against an employee who complained about an incident of nursing home abuse. The employee eventually got her job back, but the charges against the city cost thousands of dollars in legal fees, according to the Cornwall Standard Freeholder. It also faced legal fees of $67,518 in relation to a human rights case over discrimi- nation against an employee on the basis of disability. A report in the National Post, meanwhile, noted the City of Toronto spends more than 1,400 lawyer days a year at or preparing for Ontario Municipal Board cases. The benchmarking report notes cities have restrained their in-house legal budgets since 2008. It found that the legal operating costs per in-house lawyer hour fell to $127 last year from $141 in 2008. Toronto, in general, had the high- est costs at $222 in 2008 and $146 in 2009, although data for 2010 for that city wasn't available. As for external legal budgets, cities weren't able to cut costs. The study put the median external legal cost per external lawyer hour at $370 in 2010. That's up from $346 in 2008. Toronto topped the list at $556 in 2008, a number that rose to $615 in 2009. (That city didn't have data for 2010.) Despite being one of the province's biggest cities, Ottawa came out lowest on that score at $247. –Glenn Kauth value champions

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