Canadian Lawyer InHouse

By Robert Piasentin Setting expectations can make the job easier When you're a one-person department you have to lay down some ground rules. A s we have likely all experienced recently, legal departments are being tasked with doing more with less. Consequently, how you interact with, give advice to, and influence change among your clients has become even more important — especially when many businesspeople only contact legal as a last resort. This issue is important in my daily practice because of the nature of my role and the size of our organization. Our legal department consists of one lawyer — me. We are a full-service IT consulting firm with offices across Canada and the United States with over 800 employees (and growing) and revenues in excess of $155 million (and rising). Our company is engaged daily in pursuing, negotiating, and delivering on public and private sector deals ranging from $10,000 to more than $10 million. I have advised on corporate reorganizations, mergers and acquisitions, litigation (fortunately not often), and all other general legal issues a company faces. With a necessary focus on the bottom line, we have diligently limited our external legal spend except where absolutely necessary.  I am sure my situation is one that is similar to what many of you are familiar with. I realized early on that to succeed, our business team needed to be educated on working with a lawyer so I could properly set and manage their expectations, especially when many of them are often compensated at least partially on closing deals. Just as we were taught when we first 46 • F eb r u a ry 2013 started dealing with clients, communication is key.  My clients are the business team and to do my job properly, I need to ensure they understand my workload and where their issue fits in my list of priorities. Understandably, their particular issue is the most important thing to them, which is why they have contacted me, and their expectation is that I will answer immediately.  However, it takes some time to review each issue, and the initial review may not commence immediately. Failing to set proper expectations will result in an unhappy client who may begin looking for workarounds to avoid dealing with legal. This makes your job much more difficult as you will begin a cycle of time consuming and complex firefighting, rather than simply preventing the fire in the first place. Legal needs to be seen as a trusted and reliable adviser. To foster that reputation, you need to consistently satisfy your clients' needs, and managing expectations is the first step.  Informing your business clients immediately that their issue is important but is in a queue allows them to, in turn, set expectations with their customers or their bosses.  They can then flag any special circumstances which may require immediate attention be given to the issue.  In conjunction with managing your business team's expectations is educating them on the process and legal issues so that they can make the most efficient use of your time. You are not trying to teach your salespeople to be lawyers, INHOUSE but they must have a basic understanding of the more common legal issues and why legal will hold firm on specific issues.  Moreover, the business teams need to appreciate the timing required for a proper review and that demanding an eleventh hour legal review is not an acceptable practice.  Without training and explaining why certain issues are important (whether from a legal or a joint company policy/legal perspective), your business team will not be properly engaged and you will be fighting a losing battle against both your transactional opponent and your business team. By streamlining the review process, your company can rely less on external counsel thereby satisfying the business objective of reducing unnecessary costs. If your business team can identify key red flags in documents or changes to a document which you may have seen in the past, then that helps save you some time in the legal review process. You will have more time to address other issues which will mean you are not sending as much work to external counsel.  For example our businesspeople have learned to identify unlimited liability provisions in contracts, allowing us to assess immediately whether we can pursue an opportunity or terminate the pursuit if the requirement cannot be changed. Learning how to communicate with your business team in a way that will ensure they are adequately trained on specific issues will contribute significantly to putting you in the best position possible to deal with legal issues within your organization. It is always better to be ahead of the game, and having your business team onside is a fundamental first step. IH Robert C. Piasentin is general counsel for Sierra Systems.

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