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they always want me to push back as hard as I feel is appropriate so they get the benefit of my advice and my expe- rience and that's not always the way it works. Actually, most of the time that's not the way it works," she says. Kiser views the relationship this way: given the protracted nature of tobacco litigation, by necessity the team must work together closely and over the course of long hours. "You're working with these people for a period of years and it's almost artificial to not get to know them on some personal level and understand their strengths and weaknesses. Working as a team you learn to leverage that." Lessons learned — win the war, not every battle Over the past five years, both Kiser and Glendinning say they have learned best practices from each other — in litigation and in managing people. One of the biggest has been to build teams internally and execute nation- ally, which means as litigation comes up in each province, the team is ready to roll. "With our team at Osler we have been able to deploy people across the country as opposed to having differ- ent teams set up in different provinces, which would be duplicative, which is not as efficient and not as centrally organized." The lessons have also come on an individual, professional basis. "I've learned to be less of a lawyer and less of a litigator and more of a busi- ness strategist, which I have found very interesting and challenging," says Glendinning. "Also, managing people is not necessarily something we learn in law school or in practice." Kiser says he has always approached tobacco litigation as one where it's important to pick one's battles. "Tobac- co is always controversial, and what Deborah is referring to is that I think most lawyers are trained to win what- ever is in front of them; in other words they are fighting the battle in front of them and sometimes I think it's to the detriment of their long-term strategic outlook." He says one has to realize that some- times the immediate battle may or may not be that important. If the co-defence wants to do something and Kiser, Gitto, and Glendinning don't think it's the right thing, they evaluate how impor- tant it is in the long-term scheme of things. "It's about taking a higher, wider view of things and trying to solve the bigger problem. I say win the war, not necessarily every battle. Lawyers can sometimes be closed-minded and even one-minded. To me, one of the best things Deborah has done is to show her ability to adapt to a changing situation." Managing costs: How to avoid the 'When in doubt, bill it to Imperial.' When they joined forces, Kiser made it very clear to Glendinning that his costs were no different than the operations costs of any other business unit. "It's a fact of life — it affects law like any other department so cost is constantly on our minds," says Kiser. "One of the things we made Deborah very aware of is that cost is a constant issue. Even though this is massive litigation money is never not an issue — it's always an issue — law does not get a 'bye' on that." Kiser knows that at the end of the day, it's about the number of lawyers and exactly who the lawyers are that has the biggest impact on the bottom line. "I've worked with a lot of alterna- tive billing arrangements and they suit certain tasks like document work and things like that, so you can come up with all the restrictive rates, restricting hours, flat fees, the list goes on and they all serve their purpose, but at the end of the day when you're dealing with the large dollars it actually comes down to how many lawyers do you have billing you and what are they doing? When you know what that looks like you avoid the 'when in doubt, bill it to Imperial' that you can run into when you have cases of this magnitude." Kiser places great value in building such teams and values the relation- ship — he sees it as building equity in the partnership. "I've read articles where the in-house counsel says, 'I'd rather pay the plaintiff a dollar than my defence team a dollar' and that makes no sense to me. I don't see how that plays into a partnership or ongoing legal and business relationships." As the associate general counsel, Gitto says Kiser and Glendinning have proven themselves and she is happy with what they've built thus far. "Debo- rah and John have been very successful and it's certainly helped us deal with the litigation in Canada and elsewhere." IH ... from the wild west all the way to the far east. Plug into Bennett Jones. Your lawyer. Your law firm. Your business advisor. CALGARY | TORONTO | EDMONTON | OT TAWA | BEIJING | DUBAI | ABU DHABI BennettJones-3_IH_Dec_11.indd 1 INHOUSE DECEMBER 2011/JANUARY 2012 • 11-11-25 10:36 AM 25