Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/1336129
www.canadianlawyermag.com/inhouse 5 What are your key responsibilities at Nestlé? I have a split role as the head of human resources and general counsel, and I'm also a member of the executive team. On the legal side, I have oversight of all legal issues and I provide strategic leadership to all our Canadian business units. From my perspective, the most important part of my job is creating an environment where people can be exceptional. In what ways has your work been impacted by the pandemic crisis? It has been a year of tremendous uncertainty and incredibly rapid change, and from a legal perspective, that has brought a ton of additional workload with it. It's not possible to do everything, so prioritization has been absolutely essential. We are being ruthless and taking things off people's plates. We deal with M&A and real estate issues and privacy and data issues, which have all been more complicated this year because of the crisis. Creating a really strong and connected team is much harder in the current environment, so one of the biggest challenges has been staying connected — not just from a work perspective — but also from a personal perspective. How has the team adapted to continue supporting the organization? We had to adapt to create a new team dynamic Q&A in an entirely virtual environment. We really focused much more on the human experience this year and became much more connected as people. The team has a weekly social connection during which they play virtual games, for example. They also start each meeting by sharing things that they are happy about and positive things going on in their lives. I'm really proud of my team this year. They did an amazing job responding to the business needs of the organization. What initiatives have you and your team worked on in 2020? Just surviving the onslaught of work was an accomplishment. Also, we rapidly adjusted our compliance program this year and levelled it up despite a lot of complications caused by COVID. We had to pause the compliance program for part of the year and then we restarted and accelerated it. We've done a re-evaluation of the new risks and re-positioned our risk management strategy from that perspective. We developed stronger programs and feedback loops to make sure people are getting things done. What are your goals for 2021? We had to put a lot of things on pause to deal with firefighting just to survive the year, but I think we're going to get back to longer-term planning. We'll also be investing more time in individual and team development next year and levelling up our use of technology. The importance of prioritization Years in the industry: 10 Use of technology: We built a knowledge management database for our team, which has really helped with onboarding new people. We have also been piloting contract automation software and we're looking at electronic billing management. Daniel Holden Senior vice president, human resources, and general counsel, Nestlé Canada Inc evaluation and accreditation program for firms and their corporate law department clients. The data steward program aims to offer in-house counsel a standardized approach to thoroughly, efficiently and affordably assess, score, benchmark, validate and accredit law firms' data security protocols and attitudes toward client data security. The program also allows for the easy and secure sharing of such profiles with the existing or future clients of firms.It builds upon the controls of existing frameworks such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. CLOC expands membership to full legal community The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium plans to restructure its membership model to enable all parts of the legal ecosystem to join. All professionals engaging in the legal industry may apply as members of CLOC under the new membership model. Pursuant to this second expansion of the model since 2016, the CLOC community will benefit from wider participation, from an improved understanding of the community's growth and needs and from the continuing transformation of the legal operations industry. The new model still allows for focused discussions among in-house counsel members. Partnership provides IP advice to Ottawa businesses Smart & Biggar has renewed its partnership with economic development agency Invest Ottawa, with a focus on empowering Ottawa entrepreneurs and innovators to leverage intellectual property for business success. Since the beginning of the partnership three years ago, Smart & Biggar has connected with more than 200 Ottawa entrepreneurs through quarterly IP masterclasses and in one-on-one IP clinic consultations. Through the partnership, Smart & Biggar and Invest Ottawa have helped entrepreneurs use IP to grow their businesses and in turn contribute to economic growth and job creation in the city.