Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/50890
COVERSTORY By Kirsten McMahon In the search for high-quality legal advice at a lower cost, Fred Crooks, CLO of Bell Aliant, has come up with a creative, collaborative model of delivery that builds on established relationships with external counsel. It's not rocket science, he says, but it's also not for everyone. left to right: Daniel F. Gallivan, Richard F.D. Corley, Fred Crooks million customers and 80,000 enterprises in Atlantic Canada, Ontario, and Quebec, Crooks is under the same pressures and constraints as any other head of an in-house legal team. "As always, the challenge in getting the kind of external advice F 12 A UGUST 2008 C ANADIAN Lawyer INHOUSE that you need — particularly if you've got the requirement of advice in a wide variety of areas at different levels of expertise and different degrees of specialization — is to get the quality of advice you need at the greatest cost efficiency," says Crooks from his Halifax office. "We're in no different boat than anyone else in that regard." In his search for a workable solution, Crooks looked at dif- ferent options for particular transactions or time frames. RFPs crossed his mind, but the problem with those, he says, is the lowest quote may not equal the highest level of knowledge about the business. On the flip side, if you're not going out and testing the marketplace every few years, you may not be getting the best value. "The advantage in continuing and building on established relationships is that you really get a level of understanding of your business and commitment to the business that we think it's important to have in our external advisers," he says. So Crooks got to thinking about alternatives to simply putting out a general call for proposals from a variety of law firms and PHOTO: DAN CALLIS red Crooks is faced with a challenge that most in-house counsel are no strangers to — getting the high-quality external advice required at the greatest cost efficiency available. As CLO for Bell Aliant, a telco with more than two