Canadian Lawyer InHouse

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019 20 INHOUSE biguity around who to call. When one of us is unavailable due to vacation or other reason, we seamlessly pick up each other's work," says Fraser, who has also held three different roles outside the legal department in the Xerox business in operations and strategy, roles she held from 2010 to 2016. INHOUSE: What are the main projects you are going to be focused on this year for the business? BOURQUE: We are moving to more of an integrated model in terms of the way we provide shared services and that requires a lot of legal input. I think if you look at the IT industry, a lot of people are looking at organizations that are younger than we are — such as Apple, Amazon and Facebook, — and at more established IT companies and looking at what the best practices are. There are pressures in terms of delivering services and products more quickly in a simpler, user-friendly way and that applies to business-to-business relationships. We want to instill a startup mentality to the way we do business and we have very lofty aspirations — we want to be a tech powerhouse and dominate the market we're in and also expand with new offerings. Most of our business is not in a growth segment, so we really want to make sure that we explore untapped potential in the market when it comes to documents. We have a research centre in Palo Alto and one here in Canada with the National Reserach Council in Mississauga. It's an incubator — we're trying to come up with the next greatest thing that will simplify the way people do business. FRASER: I handle counselling all of our litigation, commercial and labour and em- ployment disputes and operations, whether it is a delivery group/purchasing and part- ner organization, as well as non-dispute counselling for the HR organizations. Dan supports the fi eld group and I support op- erations and disputes. We're uniquely posi- tioned in that we see all the moving parts and that's where we can be a really valued business partner because we can issue spot, connect dots and in some cases provide in- stitutional knowledge. Some major issues we have tried to help the business units with include those that, as the company changes we have been try- ing to make repeatable tools and templates and ask the clients to start thinking about measuring the success of their business ini- tiatives that contain legal risk. As a business partner, we assist the client in looking at fl exible or alternative business models and give them the tools to allow us to handle the volume of work that may come from transformation. We then meet regularly to debrief and understand the success of the change and approach and measure whether the risk balancing was worth it. It's about looking at change collaboratively and pro- viding input to the client in terms of the relative risk and what ultimately transpired in terms of the risk they thought a transfor- mation project was going to entail and what ultimately ended up happening. Xerox is also continuing to expand its in- direct channel, where our route to market is through partners; so legal is involved at the ground fl oor of these growth initiatives where we are building out new or expanded programs for our sales and delivery partners. INHOUSE: What regulatory challenges do you have to deal with? BOURQUE: Like everyone else, we have privacy challenges we have to deal with. We also have to make sure, on an ongoing ba- sis, that we are compliant with competition law. We do have the luxury of not being in a business that is not overly regulated. I would say regulation really comes into play when we are doing business with clients that are heavily regulated, such as the fi - nancial institutions because they will want to make sure we are following the same reg- ulations, especially if they outsource work to us. That's when it becomes more front of the line for us. The client will give you a set of regulatory requirements to follow, indi- cating where we have to comply in addition to the service-level agreements. INHOUSE: Are you doing any major projects within the legal group next year? BOURQUE: Yes. We are using a solution called Apttus in the U.S., which we are go- ing to try to roll out to other parts of the world including Canada. It's used in con- nection with Salesforce and it is fabulous for searching for contracts. Right now, we have made incredible progress in terms of data retrieving, so the next step is drafting. The tool is going to help us negotiate our contracts; it's going to give us empower- ment options when confronted with certain client demands, so that's the next step in the evolution. I'm becoming a convert — these solutions are quite useful and save so much time. Everyone reacts to technology differ- ently, but this just makes my life so much simpler. The next step is contract analysis. INHOUSE: What's your approach to managing external counsel in Canada? BOURQUE: Xerox has several legal pro- viders. There is no real magic to it; often- times, you will establish what can be very personal relationships. We have had a lot of repeatable work as of late that requires out- side counsel and Sacha has been looking for counsel that can provide economies of scale in terms of how they bill. We also look for service providers who want to invest time in terms of getting to know us and service providers that provide practical advice. If someone is not doing work we consider to be at a certain standard, we have no hesita- tion to change or seek services elsewhere. Just because it's a long-standing relation- ship doesn't mean we will accept sub-stan- dard work. General counsel can be a tough crowd. I think law fi rms are making a valiant effort in terms of reaching out to clients and offering solutions that are better tailored to what they want and offering consulting services. We're seeing it from large fi rms — having a consult- ing arm in addition to traditional legal ser- vices. I think that's all good. We personally haven't benefi ted from that, but I think cer- tain fi rms are trying to be more in tune with their clients' requirements and they should be doing that if they want to stay relevant and keep evolving in this marketplace. It's true that sometimes it is more marketing than anything. If I look at some of the service pro- viders out there, I think there is something to be said for what law fi rms call the consulting model; I think it makes a whole lot of sense. VIEW presented by 2019

• Cover