Canadian Lawyer InHouse

21 CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM/INHOUSE JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019 VIEW 2019 Canada's leading in-house counsel discuss their top priorities and challenges for 2019 TUNE IN canadianlawyermag.com/inhouse/videos Pr P esente t d by Untitled-7 1 2019-01-03 3:28 PM If you look at areas such as privacy, to have a consultancy model for that, it is better suited to smaller companies. I think law fi rms are making a conscious effort to come up with solutions, because with hourly rates the way they are, con- sulting with a law fi rm is becoming a very costly proposition. Even with large, public- ly traded companies, effi ciency has to come into play. We are a service provider as well and we're seeing this pressure from the market- place, just like a law fi rm, so we have to ad- just the way we do business as well. We have to adhere to budgets. We need advice that is pragmatic and quick. Service-level agree- ments are imporant, too. We are expecting our counsel to respond to us quickly — typ- ically within an hour and hour and a half. FRASER: We are working with all of our outside counsel providers to look at alterna- tive fee arrangements and to look at ways we can approach different types of fi les in a more creative way that works for both cli- ent and outside counsel. I'm embarking on some cap and collar arrangements in differ- ent provinces for different types of fi les. I think they have a lot of merit because out- side counsel and internal counsel can main- tain a focus on the fi le in a way that we're aligned and that we share risk together and neither client nor supplier is dis-incented by the arrangement. I also appreciate my outside counsel partner's willingness to at least, in the fi rst few engagements, constantly track the suc- cess of the model and to debrief just as I do with my internal clients whether a strategy is working. We have a very experienced paralegal and other internal resources. We are asking outside counsel about ways we can assume some of the work internally to keep some of the costs down. The other new area we're getting into is artifi cial intelligence — using predictive databases more in terms of informing ar- eas of the law such as employment law. In certain cases, we will do the AI database search internally instead of paying outside lawyers to do it and then I will discuss it with them. Part of what's been interesting for me is looking at the trends; when you have a lot of employment cases — stepping back to see what cases are capable of settle- ment versus those that tend to settle much later in the litigation phase. We are also asking outside counsel who are newer to Xerox to invest in some edu- cation. We ask that they bring their new proposed team to come into our offi ces to understand our culture better, learn about our business and do it on their cost as it's an investment on their part to learn more about the client. I've also been working on privilege — it's a constant issue that as in-house counsel we have to be vigilant about and conducting lessons learned with our clients. IH

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