Canadian Lawyer InHouse

SEPTEMBER 2015 16 INHOUSE I t seems like it's been a journey of discovering best practices since we started receiving nominations last fall for our second annual Innovatio Awards — an in-house program designed to highlight the innovative work of legal departments and their legal service providers in Canada. Over the last few months, I've had the privilege of meeting in- house lawyers from many different sectors and sizes, and learning about how they want to evolve the way they are delivering services to their internal customers. In May, I had the chance to travel to Ottawa to see how Export Development Canada's legal department has created an open-concept approach to solving client needs. The EDC team won in the category of law department management, large departments. It created tracking tools, an online international legal info hub, and loan documentation templates with a negotiation guide. The initiative increased productiv- ity and reduced outside fees for its end customers. As one of our judges, Dean Scaletta, director of information and litigation at Manitoba Public Insurance, said in his assessment of the EDC project: "It was an example of a quasi-government agency thinking and acting like a busi- ness. The lawyers established the vision/goal of 'ease of doing business,' then established the framework to make it happen — that's leadership!" Innovatio's goal in its fi rst year was to recognize that kind of leadership and other interesting things in-house counsel were doing to address the time and money crunch they fi nd themselves up against. We also wanted to show how legal departments were responding to business units. You can also see this year how outside counsel have stepped up to address the different demands of their in-house clients. Ultimately, from all of the Innovatio submissions and subsequent category winners, the judges chose BMO Financial Group's nomination for how it has revamped its litigation department as "Innovation of the Year." "BMO's litigation submission was the overall winner for me," says Lorne O'Reilly, senior counsel with Dow Chemical Canada ULC. "My deciding factors were the initiatives to improve operations for considerable benefi ts to the business (effi ciency gains and cost savings), and to undertake the comprehensive review and redesign of a number of processes that had measurable impact through the businesses." The "scope and proactive aspects of the project were truly innovative," says Scaletta. "This type of culture shift in an organization the size of BMO, over the span of just two years, cannot be accomplished in the absence of demonstrable leadership." Please read the stories of innovation InHouse discovered. Perhaps next year it will be your department the Innovatio Awards will be recognizing. IH By Jennifer Brown B ringing a large group of litigators together to work more effi ciently to a common goal of serving the business better was the focus of a major initiative at BMO Financial Group. The Litigation Practice Management Group is a subgroup of BMO's legal, corporate, and compliance group. Established in 2013, the LPMG is responsible for adopting and imple- menting best practices and processes for litigation risk man- agement across the organization. "While we've had some good successes informally co- ordinating our practices, in 2013 we saw an opportunity to unite all the litigators and the e-discovery specialists across the enterprise in a formal practice management group, really leveraging the diverse views of our litigators from across our global footprint in Toronto, Chicago, Montreal, and London, to think creatively about how to do things better, more effi ciently, and consistently in our litigation practice," says Pascale Elharrar, associate general counsel and managing director, litigation, BMO Financial Group and chair, litigation practice management group. The LPMG's efforts have resulted in signifi cant cost savings and effi ciencies for the bank. Since it was created it has developed group work alternative fee arrangements in several areas including: • Enterprise employment AFAs in Canada and the United States that have resulted in cost savings and greater predictability. • Broker/dealer litigation AFAs in Canada and the U.S. • Small claims litigation AFAs across several lines of business. Strengthening and re-defining the litigation muscle ADDING VALUE THROUGH INNOVATION

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