Canadian Lawyer InHouse

19 canadianlawyermag.com/inhouse february 2015 what projects are you working on for 2015? Our group is going to be extremely busy in 2015. We're commissioning a $1.4-billion power plant in Calgary. Our focus is on completion of our large generation facility called Shepard, east of Calgary — a natural gas combined cycle generation plant. We entered into a joint venture with Capital Power, which involved a signifi cant amount of legal work. We are also working on a similar sized plant with the same company on one of their sites west of Edmonton with an existing coal fi red generation site. That is Genesee 4 & 5 — expected to come online in the 2017-20 timeline. take a look at it. I did so reluctantly because I think I gain a lot through one-on-one ex- posure to each of the lawyers in terms of what they're doing but I couldn't do it all and do it well. I also work with talented and ambitious lawyers. One of the problems with in-house departments that a lot of people talk about is that they are very fl at. There is the general counsel and then everybody else. If the general counsel doesn't look like she or he is approaching retirement there isn't much place for anyone else to go. So I formed a structure that tried to par- allel the management level structure in the rest of the organization. I introduced the equivalent of vice presidents, directors, and manager levels in the legal department and I did that by appointing two associate gen- eral counsel. One of them is on the com- mercial side and one is on the real estate side. Those are the only two lawyers who now report to me other than the associate corporate secretary. That changed my life a lot but below those lawyers I also have four director level lawyers now called senior counsel. They report to the associate general counsel. Those director level-lawyers now see where they could move to, such as the associate general counsel position. Even though I have dramatically cut down my direct reports, I still believe in an open- door policy, and as per the recent General Motors case, the general counsel needs to know of any major, worrisome trend that's developing. You have to get that balance — you can't be in an ivory tower isolated from the real issues of the organization and nor do I wish to be. IH what projects are you robert hemstock: executive vice president, regulatory and legal services enmax Corp., Calgary years as evp: 9 department: 15 lawyers There is also signifi cant growth going on in our regulated wires business and that's driven by the expansion of the City of Calgary and replacement of old assets. do you have increased concerns about data protection for the organization? We have more than 800,000 customer sites and we have the normal obligations under privacy law but in addition there are specifi c regulations that apply to the electricity industry relating to the use of customer information. We have privacy obligations but overlaying that we have unique rules to the electricity sector that apply to us given we're in both regulated and competitive businesses. So we spend a lot of time on code-of-conduct compliance. It is rooted in a compliance plan that we are mandated to have by the electricity regulations in Alberta and by our regulator. That gives us a higher level of complication relative to most companies. are you exploring alternative fee arrangements with external counsel? We have long-standing relationships with a group of law fi rms and we spread our work out over two or three with some others doing specialized work. Generally our experience is that our hourly billing framework works fi ne for us. Part of the responsibility of our in-house lawyers is to stay engaged in all the fi les going on and that includes monitoring legal bills. So the expectation of external counsel is the same as internal counsel — they are value adders and so we carefully monitor what our legal costs are and if there is an instance where we feel the fees are not in line with the value of service provided we will point that out. We have some small retainer agreements that have worked reasonably well, but on major spends like large commercial transactions or large-scale litigation those matters are still being billed on an hourly basis by major fi rms. are you expanding your department to cut external budget? We aren't getting pressure to bring more work in-house, but I think it's incumbent upon us to always be looking for opportunities to make the case why an in-house lawyer would be a good idea. We actually did that for 2015 — adding one more purely based on a fi nancial business model. The revenue increase as well as the avoided external cost against the cost of Paul ToTH

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