Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/129296
Peter GUteLiUs rBC assistant general counsel who leads RBC's legal team supporting its global commercial litigation. "Litigation comes in various shapes and sizes so where you have blocks of commodity work it lends itself to some types of value billing arrangements." Gutelius says there has always been a historical belief that while value billing is great for commodity work it couldn't work on those large, "bet the company" type of complex cases like class actions. For that kind of work RBC maintains there is a way to do it with controls in place and a plan everyone is comfortable with. RBC asks the firms it works with to go through a rigorous request for proposal process unlike the "beauty contests" of years past. "Any new retainer where we anticipate legal fees to cross over a certain threshold we must run an RFP. Sometimes it's a short form RFP because of the time limits in litigation. Often, we don't have a lot more than the statement of claim," says Gutelius. But this path isn't entirely smooth — rather it's one that has required more direct instruction to the firms. "It has taken us some time with our external counsel to get them to realize we are serious about this," says Gutelius. "If we put something in our instructions as an example of how we'd like to see it handled the firms have often just focused on the example we give. We have sent out the RFP and said 'be imaginative' and they weren't." RBC recently went to its external firms with an RFP to determine who would handle a large class action lawsuit launched in November of 2012. It's an example of how firms are coming armed with more creative alternatives. With a statement of claim issued late last year and some background file material, RBC asked several large firms to bid on the work. The bank provided a case plan that split litigation into component phases and asked the firms to provide budget numbers in each phase and set out all underlying assumptions. RBC received four responses (a number of additional firms were conflicted out right away). The bank then provided feedback and invited three of the four to tweak their bids. In the end, RBC chose McCarthy Tétrault LLP to handle the file. The firm had provided three specific options to RBC. The first was a flat fee if the matter "disappeared" or settled by a certain stage. Another flat fee was w w w. c a n a d i a n law y er m a g . c o m / i n h o u s e june 2013 • 21