Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/50891
INHOUSE: What does project man- agement mean to you, and is it part of your legal department? What sort of matters lend themselves best to proj- ect management? JOSEPH AGOSTINO: Project management within our legal depart- ment has two focuses: one internal for the company and one external with our external service providers. . . . So I like to have a lawyer involved from Day 1 as part of a team. And we are very oriented in project management within the team. It is an engineering company, because we deliver electricity, so we have a project management system for everything. . . . Some of our programs are new initiatives that are out there, so I like to have the lawyers be part of that team to see how it works and to contribute. It helps them do all the things that are appropriate for the legal perspective. The other part of project management is to co-ordinate working with our external legal service provid- ers. . . . That includes [finding] what we can do in-house to save ourselves some money. DANIEL DESJARDINS: What we do is large project management. Large dealings are complex, and you want to be efficient, and you want to control costs. If you don't have strong project management, it's easy to lose track and 16 • AUGUST 2010 which is business work. But we do have a task list and identify what depart- ments are responsible for what and who has signing authority on what. You're just making sure that you're not miss- ing any steps along the way and that all of the teams are speaking with each other. Ultimately our key competency is going to be: Are we getting results? Are we results-oriented? Are we efficient? I think that the project-management tools we use . . . whether it's closing checklists or whatever help us really quantify that. go into the details and ultimately not be efficient . . . ultimately not see the big picture. . . . I do quarterly phone calls and a contact meeting once a year. We have a discussion with respect to the quarterly result so everybody sees the big picture. ANNE FITZGERALD: Lawyers are innately project managers. We're list people, we're task people. . . . So as an example, Cineplex is currently going through the transition from 35mm to digital projection, which is a tremen- dous technology change within our company, and it's happening interna- tionally. . . . There's an extraordinary amount of work that goes into that. A lot of which is legal work, and a lot of INHOUSE FRED KREBS: One of the challenges again that we've noted is . . . people get comfortable doing what they do, and they don't like to get out of it. . . . [P]roject management, or the Six Sigma type of analysis, forces people to think about that and maybe pushes them out of a comfort zone. . . . [T]here are a cou- ple of things. One is avoiding the silos. Two is addressing a process and trying to avoid repetition. . . . Both firms and companies are trying to access value . . . one of the most important things they can do is just consider [how they do things now, and whether they are doing them the right way.] . . . And project management seems to me to be very much a part of that. DAVID PATHE: We spend a lot of time to have one person who's desig- nated as the guy who is going to run [the project management process] and it tends to fall on the legal group to be making sure that the right people in the business unit, wherever they happen to be located, are getting input at the right times and co-ordinating and pulling things together. It's very important that there is one coherent understanding