Canadian Lawyer InHouse

SEPTEMBER 2015 32 INHOUSE bank ultimately is that we want to make sure our customers are getting the best out of their experience. Even though we in legal don't always work directly with customers, I think the benefi t to them would be the preferred pricing we get from law fi rms when they're doing business with us," he says. Ali came from a background in strategic sourcing and was familiar with working through strategies that brought costs down. "With my legal background, it was a perfect fi t for me for the type of work we would be dealing with," he says. He says the legal team looked at the initiative in three parts: • The technology to support the process. • Rationalization of the fi rms from the more than 1,000 it was using. • A strong change management approach. The team approached the search for the right technol- ogy tool and rationalization of fi rms in parallel. "When I think back on it, it was ambitious," recalls Ali. "I was sitting in the centre of the entire project and really just helping on all fronts," he says. "It needed to happen in parallel because individually these steps would have taken at least a year each, and if we had done them one after the other, we would have missed our targets for when we wanted to deliver." A comprehensive request for proposal process involved consideration of three different technology systems: an in- ternal accounts payable system that allowed them to manage invoices more carefully; Serengeti from Thomson Reuters; and TyMetrix 360. BMO ultimately chose TyMetrix for a number of reasons, in part, he says, because of the experience other fi nancial institutions in Canada had with the product. "It was also an end-to-end solution and not just for law fi rm billing, but it has an overall matter management system," Ali says. "We wanted to move to a system where all of our legal fi les would be moved into this system, and when the fi le had a bill- ing or external fi rm component, it would be more seamless." In reviewing the more than 1,000 law fi rms BMO was us- ing, Ali's team began by engaging an external consultant to help and build a review model so there was clear buy-in from the department and business units. "It was not the decision of a bunch of lawyers saying, 'We're going to stop using these fi rms and only use these fi rms.' It was based on objective criteria — based on their rates, their ability to commit to alternative fee arrangements, how they were planning to resource fi les, and commitment to innovating and changing," he says. "We were really focused on the innovation piece because we wanted to know what fi rms were doing around this looming challenge of the billable hour," says Ali. "Some fi rms were really specifi c to say, 'We don't do AFAs' and that was really telling. We said 'OK, well we don't know if we want to do business with fi rms that are not going to be committed to doing alternative fee H e's been in-house for less than three years, but Imdad Ali has already taken on what would be considered massive change management projects at BMO Financial Group. Ali was nominated for the Tomorrow's Leader award by Bindu Cudjoe, deputy general counsel and chief administrative offi cer at BMO. "Imdad brings a strong business focus to his legal practice in part from the years he spent ne- gotiating complex procurement agreements for clients in the bank," Cudjoe said in her nomina- tion. "He also draws on tools and skills from a variety of areas including project management, negotiation, and management consulting. "This unique combination of skills allows Imdad to move seamlessly between legal practice and meeting strategic objectives. He embraces and advocates for constant improvement in how we work (through technology and other means), which creates an infectious environment for those around him to join and support. " Ali joined the bank's legal, corporate, and compliance group in 2012 and took on a stra- tegic role in two initiatives focused on stron- ger risk management while streamlining for effi ciencies through innovation. In two years, he helped take the bank from using more than 1,000 law fi rms across North America to less than 200. He led the end-to-end restructuring of the bank's enterprise external counsel pro- gram and quarterbacked the co-ordination of internal stakeholders including legal, fi nance, strategic sourcing, and accounts payable. BMO was focused on fi nding effi ciencies and law fi rm spend was one of them. "We sat back and said what's the best way to do this? The main goal was to reduce spend, but we quickly realized there were also a lot of broken processes in the whole external counsel program as well," says Ali who was called to the bar in the U.K. in 2008 and in Canada in 2014. The bank was wrestling with issues of lost and unpaid invoices, a lack of detail in the invoices received from law fi rms, and different processes in place across the bank, making it diffi cult to track spending. "We needed to consolidate it," he says. "One of the things that drives the Applying technology to reduce cost, find efficiencies "We were really focused on the innovation piece because we wanted to know what fi rms were doing around this looming challenge of the billable hour." IMDAD ALI, BMO Financial Group.

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