Canadian Lawyer InHouse

What legislation or regulatory change do you foresee bringing additional challenges to your department this year? C anada's anti-spam legislation is an important issue for us. It's going to impact any business that communicates with customers and prospective customers. Even things like how a business downloads software to end-user devices will be affected. If you think of the nature of our business, we have tens of millions of customer connections all across the country and each of those connections could lead to multiple points of contact. Each and every one of those is subject to the CASL rules and we have to be very mindful of the forms of contacts those contacts take and the nature of the consent we require. The scope of this is huge. On the legal and regulatory affairs team I manage we're going to continue to work with our business units that will be impacted when the rules come into play. We're conducting audits of current commercial electronic messaging practices and software download practices and we're working to put an efficient, effective compliance system in place that is scalable so as the rules change and activities change we can modify our systems in a way that's practical. We will have a scalable enterprise-wide database to track consent and track exceptions and make sure we really know who is unsubscribed all in an effort to be compliant with the rules as we think they're going to come into place. There's no secret sauce to this other than it's painstaking — you have to do a complete audit of how you do things and how things have to change as a function of how you think the rules are going to change. Then you have to implement it in a practical, efficient, and cost-effective way that is minimally disruptive to your relationships with your consumers. There are also other pieces of legislation with similar impact, whether it's CASL or changes to PIPEDA or lawful access legislation — you have to manage all those multiple variables. What kind of transaction activity do you expect in 2013? EVP & Chief legal and regulatory affairs officer BCE Ottawa 20 • F eb r u a ry 2013 INHOUSE Are you looking to drive additional value from your outside law firm next year? What approaches are you taking? One of our strategic imperatives as a company is maintaining a competitive cost structure and that applies to the legal department as well and we expect no less of the outside counsel we use. For a number of years we've been purchasing most of our outside legal work under three-year arrangements. We chunk out our work based on groupings or categories and we tend to choose preferred firms for each category of work and what we've found is overall we've reduced the number of firms we've used and we've reduced the spend. We ask law firms to be creative in terms of billing arrangements whether it's fixed fee, weighted average rates, or matter budgeting where we sit down ahead of a matter and say, 'you can't go over this' and if it's under we figure out how to manage things. We also look at getting access to secondments. If you promise to do the work at $300 an hour what I want to make sure is that the firm doesn't just put articling students on the file. In the next round we may consider how we involve an aspect of diversity in that — to date we haven't with outside counsel. Internally we're very sensitive to diversity. COLIN ROWE Mirko Bibic We're back at it with Astral Media and a proposal we're confident is going to receive regulatory approval this time. This is going to go right into the spring on a transaction we announced last March. You can get a sense of the workload something like that adds. But it's also incredibly interesting and it is the type of work that keeps people particularly motivated and expands your scope and breadth. It's particularly challenging on something like this where it was refused and you have to come back and develop new ways to put the transaction forward.

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