Canadian Lawyer InHouse

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019 40 INHOUSE L a w D e p a r t m e n t M a n a g e m e n t WHEN ANIZ ALANI arrived at the City of Abbotsford in early 2017 as the municipality's fi rst in-house counsel, he quickly identifi ed one area in particular he knew he needed to get some control over — managing the bills coming in from external law fi rms. As director of property, risk management and legal services at the city — the largest in British Columbia outside Metro Vancouver — he was facing the challenge of creating a department from scratch. "When I joined, it was necessary to build the corporate legal department from the ground up and I was looking at all of our systems," says Alani, who had come to the municipality from B.C. Hydro. "Before my arrival, the city was exclusively using exter- nal counsel, but had billing arrangements in place. What was painfully obvious to me was how slow and tedious the paper-based invoice process worked." Alani decided it was a good time to re- visit the decades-old system that involved an external counsel fi rm mailing a hard copy invoice that would work its way from desk to desk — a slow, painful process that really only served two key purposes — to docu- ment the internal approvals and inform ac- counts payable at the city how much to pay and which budget to take it from. "Our external counsel had been pretty accommodating in terms of preparing man- ual summaries, but it was just ineffi cient — it was slow and prone to being held up. Individual line items on an invoice would need a cost centre tagged to them before a bill could get paid — the bill sat on some- one's desk and we would lose track of it until we heard from the vendor as to when it was going to be paid," says Alani. There were about half a dozen fi rms doing work for the city and each one would have a different point of contact within the mun- cipal organization, so invoices were going to different people. The process issue aside, there was also the fact that the information was not being committed to a system that would record the historical billing informa- tion and Alani knew he was missing out on valuable data he could potentially be using to budget or leverage better rates. "I fi gured there had to be a better way," says Alani. "I didn't want to spend a signifi - Getting billing data under control Like other departments they work with, in-house lawyers aren't tech phobic; they just want what other business partners have to report and track bills and matters like everyone else. BY JENNIFER BROWN

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