Canadian Lawyer InHouse

29 CANADiANLAWyERMAG.CoM/iNhousE april 2014 you have to be able to do it, adjust and get it done." When the work is too much for the in- house team at FCL, Stener's first choice is to approach local counsel and if they need expertise they branch out to larger centres. "For some of the specialized competition law we might go to Toronto — but we pri- marily work with legal firms in Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver." Growth is also driving the agenda at Sask Energy Inc., says senior legal counsel Terry Jordan. "As a corporation we're really caught up in growth so we're always looking for effi- ciencies and cutting red tape," says Jordan. Over the last five years Sask Energy has seen a 10-per-cent increase in its customer base with 7,600 in 2013 and 7,300 new cus- tomers in 2012. "We haven't really had an increase in staff in legal or as a corporation. They're trying to meet additional demand either through contracting or efficiencies," he says. There are five lawyers in the legal de- partment at Sask Energy now and they do send work out. "I have a couple of external counsel I work with regularly on different things. If I need an opinion on the law in Ontario I go out but for the most part we keep it local," he says. With a strong focus on health and safety, one of the areas Jordan has been spending time on lately is "significant" changes to the province's Occupational Health and Safety Act. Regulatory legislation also keeps the de- partment busy. "We buy and sell a lot of gas because we're a distribution utility and in Saskatchewan most of our customers buy directly from the distribution utility as op- posed to gas retailers. So we're very interest- ed in whether the derivatives regulations are going to affect the way we buy and sell physi- cally delivered gas. It looks like we're going to be OK on that side of things but we also do over-the-counter hedging on an instant so if we have counter parties in Ontario now we have to look at and that gets us looking at Dodd Frank and the European equivalents." In Manitoba, regulatory work also keeps Candace Bishoff, general counsel and di- rector of law at Manitoba Telecom Services, and her team of five lawyers busy. She says they are "expected to be on top of every- thing" and lately that includes Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation as well as privacy issues related to PIPEDA. "We're federally regulated but also subject to provincial oversight as well so amendments to the Consumer Protection Act significantly impacts the way we do business," she says. Regulatory issues involving the CRTC also keep Bishoff and her team busy as do a "proliferation" of class action claims filed for things like recovery of system access fees paid by wireless customers. "It's like there's no consequence to the representative plaintiff and yet the costs incurred by the defendant are high — it doesn't matter how poorly the claim is handled on the plaintiff side," she says. "When it's filed it triggers us to defend and as soon as you get served with a class action claim whether it proceeds or not you have to impose a litigation hold. When it's a one-customer claim it's easy, when it's a class action claim it's not so easy." Often MTS has to engage external coun- sel in other provinces on these matters and Bishoff says it can be "very costly and inef- ficient." The department engages lawyers from regional and national firms but budget is often an issue. "We definitely use local counsel wher- ever possible because we are familiar with them. In some areas you don't have exper- tise here. You need a balance," says Bishoff. "I just about roll over when I see some of the hourly rates for some of the Toronto firms. We will ask for budgets — we went out and asked for the firms to give us a budget on class action — take us through to certifica- tion and we're going to hold you to that. There is a huge difference between the na- tionals and the regionals." Manitoba is now getting its own legisla- tion that will require notification following a data breach which will have many com- panies asking questions, says Judith Payne of Pitblado LLP. Enacted in October, once the Personal Information Protection and Identity Theft Prevention Act is brought into force companies like MTS who have been focused on PIPEDA will now have an- other piece of legislation to consider. "We didn't have our own private sector privacy law and now with our own legisla- tion with its own quirks in terms of compli- ance both here and with companies in the U.S. it's a nightmare for them," says Payne. Even though it's a Crown corporation with a monopoly, Manitoba Public Insur- ance is always trying to improve services to its client base and the legal department tries to follow that by improving the services provided to the corporation, says Michael Triggs, director of legal services with the organization. The corporation is going through a major update to its information technology capa- bilities which involves several multimil- lion-dollar master service agreements with various IT providers which can be time- consuming and protracted. "We handle a bit of the work internally

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