Canadian Lawyer InHouse

19 CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM/INHOUSE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2018 cloud-based sharing environment were ob- vious for the organization as a whole. The question was how would a small legal team of seven lawyers and two paralegals take ad- vantage of the new tools? As part of a company-wide assessment by McKinsey & Company, the legal team was already benchmarked as "highly effective." "We were eager to demonstrate our ag - ile forward-thinking nature," said Aaron The second project was to start to move the legal team's knowledge-sharing content from the SharePoint-based intranet to a Google+ community page. The G+ site has ATB's internal legal de - partment content and information sharing and provides updates for internal users. It has become a more manageable and user- friendly way to share knowledge. The team took the opportunity to con - solidate legal opinions, memos and forms from various fragmented places to unified team drives. Legal services can control ac- cess to those team drives by user, by editing permissions and by a period of time they have access to a document. "It's really revolutionized how and when we can provide documents inside and out - side the organization," says Cooper. The last project undertaken was to stream- line the department's inquiry process. All legal departments receive general inquiries from the organization on more or less ran- dom legal issues that they face. After running the project through a reimagination exercise, the committee assessed that using a Google form and eliminating the general email ad- dress would provide the best benefit. The Google form redirects team members to the right place the first time, reducing em- ployee time and involvement. It also collects data about the type of inquiry, which depart- ment or location the user comes from and requests a risk assessment about the inquiry. Based upon the Google form, legal is quickly able to assess whether the inquiry is truly a legal issue that it should engage on or wheth - er there are other resources in the organiza- tion to which to redirect the team member. Despite external benchmarking showing that the legal department is already lean and proactively engaged with the business, Coo - per and the team were able to realize addi- tional efficiencies both through leveraging larger organizational changes and through reimagining legal's own processes. IH CATEGORY: Law Department Management DEPARTMENT SIZE: Small COMPANY: ATB Financial Friedenthal, assistant general counsel, legal services, in ATB's In- novatio nomination submission. [Friedenthal is currently on a nine-month secondment to the internal audit department.] The initiative was spearheaded by project leader Stephen Cooper, senior counsel with ATB Financial, who supports the bank's commercial lending group and innovative technology and fintech group. The legal team set up a committee of three to look at some of its operations and review opportunities to be early adopters. The committee landed on undertaking three initial projects. The first was to de - velop a non-disclosure agreement bot us- ing Google tools that would automatically generate a standardized NDA based upon completing a Google form. Previously, ATB had supplied editable Microsoft Word non-disclosure templates to its business partners. Those templates weren't always intuitively obvious to the business partners and took some hunting around to find on the internal intranet. The team decided to reimagine the process as part of the company's migration to the Google G suite. With the help of an internal Google product manager, the NDA bot was coded and, within 30 seconds of clicking 'submit', it sends an email with a completed NDA in PDF format to the requestor. It can then be sent off to the potential vendor via email or DocuSign. That reduced the turnaround time from what was several days to about 30 seconds. Boundary conditions for the NDA terms were developed in consultation with ATB's risk department and with a view to balanc - ing the organization's overall risk appetite with its focus on innovation. "Deployment of the NDA bot has al- lowed ATB legal's business partners to en- gage with their external clients on their own time frames using reliable documents. This has freed up our legal department to focus on higher-value work and provide more stra - tegic contributions to the business rather than cookie-cutter, day-by-day contractual work," says Cooper, who is based in Calgary. saves legal and business valuable time of NDA bot PHOTO: BRIAN HARDER Deployment of the NDA bot has allowed ATB legal's business partners to engage with their external clients on their own time frames using reliable documents.

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