Canadian Lawyer InHouse

opportunity. We get quite granular around the performance of individual partners or lawyers that have been working on particular matters. We also ask for feedback about ourselves. We ask how we're doing and what concerns them about our own capabilities or how we've gone about working with them on a particular matter. The conversations are sometimes difficult to start but they're always well appreciated. I generally sit down with the managing partners of the firms concerned. We recognize it's really about the quality of service that's provided. The relationship with outside counsel is like hiring people — the general counsel really shouldn't delegate it. I have a support team that helps me manage it but at the end of the day I sign the engagement letter and attend those performance reviews and insist on seeing the most senior people at the law firm. robyn collver svP, secretary and general counsel, canadian Tire WHAT NEW BUSINESS CHALLENGES FACE THE CANADIAN TIRE LEGAL TEAM IN 2014? P eople think of Canadian Tire as being the Canadian Tire store but from a legal perspective we cover a lot of law. We are a controlled public company, which brings a bit of a twist. We're in retail, retail gas, fi nancial services, and real estate and we employ over 85,000 people. Our legal department deals with fi nancial services, competition law, banking, insurance, real estate, municipal regulations — you name it, it pretty much affects us. In 2013 we had a busy year. We announced we intend to see a fi nancial partner for our credit card assets and funding liabilities for fi nancial services. We kicked that off in August and we're not very far into that process. It will represent a significant amount of legal work in 2014. Even the 24 February 2014 INHOUSE process of looking for a partner will absorb a fair amount of time. This past year we also created a Real Estate Investment Trust so now in addition to a bank we now have a public company in which we have an 85 per cent interest and it's listed on the TSX. We will be building processes and controls and working on disclosure for that entity and working on a growth plan for it over 2014. Our organization is also really focused on enhancing the retail experience and connecting with customers in a meaningful way. To that end we have opened a new digital development lab in Waterloo — a retail technology lab taking advantage of minds in that area to develop new retail technology. WHAT'S YOUR APPROACH TO RISK MANAGEMENT? In the legal department it's about trying to anticipate where you will have challenges throughout the course of a transaction; to solve the problems quickly and effectively. So it may look like it's overstaffed in a particular area but when the tsunami hits you have sufficient people in that area to run with it. Because the business is moving fast our legal team is really engaged in the work of the organization. We're constantly looking for ways to achieve our objectives in a way that is consistent with our brand. What that means is that our collective focus is not just on complying with laws but on being consistent and enhancing the brand. In terms of risk I'm very focused on execution risk. Risk management for me is really about our enterprise risk management program. We work very closely with the enterprise risk management team to develop the program. We identified 11 risk areas like strategic operational risk, risk of our key relationships, and legal risk is one of those 11 but under that legal risk heading there are more than 10 pieces of significant legislation that affect Canadian Tire, and then if you looked at every piece of legislation that affects Canadian Tire it would be over 10,000.

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