Canadian Lawyer InHouse

21 canadianlawyermag.com/inhouse february 2015 Canada's leading in-house counsel explore their challenges for the year ahead BROUGHT TO YOU BY 2 0 1 5 VIEW COMING TO www.canadianlawyermag.com/canadianlawyer-tv/InHouse Rob Hemstock Enmax Corp. February 2 Roger Fulton Linamar Corp. February 16 February 23 Our View 2015 panel share their top challenges for the year Barbara Munroe WestJet January 26 Mary Martin Metrolinx February 9 Untitled-2 1 2015-01-15 2:20 PM sales, engineering, and operational people around the issues and what the terms mean in those agreements. Then we work with them on a case-by-case basis when they are negotiating and the customer wants to change the language. how do you handle growth with just two lawyers in-house, including yourself? Linamar is a great growth story. We now have more than 18,000 employees, over half of which are outside Canada. Language and time zones are issues we need to handle as well as having to work under many differ- ent legal regimes so we're approaching a size where we are asking ourselves what is the best way to provide legal services globally? Is it centralized, is it regional, or by business unit? Clearly we're driven by service, flex- ibility, standardization, and knowledge. We have to look at what's the best mix for us and we are definitely wrestling with that. We announced a recent acquisition in Germany in November — Seissenschmidt — which is a forging company. That will add about 1,000 employees in Germany in three locations. They have an in-house law- yer, which should help. We have more than 3,000 people in Germany already and will have 4,000 by the time we close. When it comes to the measurement of total legal spend as a percentage of company revenue, ours is far below industry average. That's been a positive for us and in that sense the CFO is happy. At budget time we're treated no differently than any other part of the company. We're expected to always be looking to do things better, faster, cheaper, and we have internal processes to look for ways to shave time and money off the process. Over the last several years, we've de- veloped a lot of proactive agreements and checklists for important transactions and provided training on those for personnel using them. We also have a good roster of outside counsel in the countries we're in. They're very practical and efficient and cost competi- tive and that combination is why we're still at two lawyers — if you look at industry surveys on manufacturing the average number of lawyers per billion of revenue is about 3-3.5. Frankly, we should have 12 lawyers if that was the case and we have two. Our total spend-to- company-revenue ratio is far below average. what about alternative fee arrangements? I get it when banks, for example, have rou- tine transactions and you can drive it down to a lowest cost provider but the rest of it I see as a bit of a black box because no one seems to want to say what they do for that alternative arrangement. My sense is that it's just old-fashioned discounts. What I have done is said: you're getting a bunch of work and I need 10 per cent off your rates and they do it. Frankly I think there isn't that many ways to skin the cat. So I think in some variation that is what everyone is doing. You can also do things like manage better with project management. Our work is primarily transactional. We have some on the immigration side because we have peo- ple moving around the globe and we have an outside immigration firm that does that. IH SaNdra STraNgemore

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