Canadian Lawyer InHouse

JANUARY 2016 20 INHOUSE Q Q Canada's leading in-house counsel explore their challenges for the year ahead BROUGHT TO YOU BY COMING TO www.canadianlawyermag.com/canadianlawyer-tv/InHouse Chris Hoeschen UrtheCast January 4 Philip Moore TD Bank January 18 Marni Dicker Infrastructure Ontario December 28 Genevieve Richard Belron Canada January 11 accustomed to the old model. With all the new entrants to the space market wanting to launch, it means the regulatory authorities aren't ready. We also have a lot of work around export controls. Often in the space industry you need to go to government to get clearance in order to export because a lot of these technologies are dual-use technologies — they can be used for military or civil- ian applications, so there is a lot of back and forth with various governments around the world around that type of issue. Because the industry is evolving so quickly, I think we're going to have to see regulatory bodies adapt to the changes and update the legisla- tion accordingly. The regulatory framework is such that, in the past, most satellite systems were funded by government, so you had a simple regu- latory system to make sure that companies had disposal plans and they were keeping the government informed of what they were taking pictures of. Now, because costs are dropping to manufacture, you're having more people jumping into the small-sat market. I don't think governments are ready or equipped to deal with this — it's a re- ally different model. Certain governments are now inundated with applications for li- cences and they are not sure where things are going and not funded to the extent they need to be to keep up with all the changes. What areas of risk do you manage? Our operational risks are in the forefront of our executive team's minds these days, as are strategic risks and enterprise risk. We're a small company and our legal de- partment is well integrated into the business itself, so I think any risk of the business is automatically a risk of the legal department to oversee. As an example, we recently ac- quired a company called Deimos Imaging, and there are obviously risks associated with any transaction, and there are aspects of the due diligence whether it is fi nancing or myr- iad of other things. Some other risks involve onboarding customers and distributors and everything that goes along with that activity. How do you decide what work goes to external counsel? That is more of an art than a science, but what we try to do is look at the work, and if it's repetitive work and can take a long time, sometimes we will outsource that to external counsel. Sometimes, if it's strate- gic and high value, we will also use external counsel. That may sound counter-intuitive, but we fi nd if there is a lot of heavy lifting to do, it's helpful if you have someone on the outside and can take more of a strate- gic role in guiding it from the perspective of the business. There is also the issue of when something is very specialized — I'm not going to touch anything tax related — something like that automatically goes to an external fi rm. We have a real mix of external counsel, and where the work goes really depends on the subject matter. For some of the work we do, it would be hard to fi nd people in Can- ada who have experience doing it and, as a consequence, we are learning as we go. We do a lot of sourcing based on expertise and relationships we have developed over the years. It really depends on the subject mat- ter and the relationships with the individual lawyers. We have established fi xed-fee ar- rangements and budgets where we can. IH

• Cover