Canadian Lawyer InHouse

19 CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM/INHOUSE JULY 2016 more money in the legal department makes a lot of sense such as a very strategic litiga- tion need. Sometimes, it's very important that you get clarity in the law and there's value in that. Sometimes, it is transactional- based, of course, but I think it's also about rethinking how the legal department is viewed. Are you just a cost centre or can you be part of the strategic growth of the indus- try and the company? SOCCIO: I think the challenge is that legal matters don't start and end during the fi s- cal period. There is also what you plan to spend, and then there's the unexpected. There's always pressure to reduce, to do more with less. • INHOUSE: How do you go about choosing law fi rms? SILVERBERG: There's defi nitely a no- ticeable difference in law fi rms being more proactive and trying to be more creative and probably just more hun- gry for business than 10 years ago, certainly more so than 20 years ago. There are a variety of ways we choose law fi rms; it kind of depends on the matter and for some matters you may just go to the person you know who does it really well, but for larger mat- ters we have lots of creative kind of ways of handling this. We even do reverse online auctions for some of our large repeatable liti- gation. We will set aside one particu- lar day and a handful of law fi rms are pre- pared to go on and bid for the business and they bid, not only on price, but also on staff- ing and strategy, and it's live, it happens in real time, and you see them kind of watch- ing other law fi rms bid down their hourly rates and trying to do the same. We've been doing it for probably four or fi ve years. It can work very well, and we don't necessar- ily go lowest bidder because obviously man- aging litigation is about more than just the cost, but it's defi nitely a factor. We do lots of creative things and obviously all of those include a fee cap — fee caps are a pretty im- portant part of negotiating. Otherwise, on larger transactions or litigation, the sky is the limit as we've all probably learned the hard way. SOCCIO: It's a buyer's market for legal ser- vices. The economy has changed, the legal profession has changed, and companies have changed. Given the economic climate in Canada, there's always this pressure on ser- vice providers to bring more to the table. So a lot of fi rms are providing a lot of admin- istrative support — a legal budgeting system or legal tracking system for matters, in particular, toward litiga- tion, where you can access a portal and view the status of a litigation matter and review any correspondence from the litigation and where the current legal spend is at. I think that helps internal counsel, especially people like myself who are the sole counsel and don't have the bandwidth to deal with the added administrative burden large legal matters attract. SPEIRS: What I've seen is a greater emphasis on training and education and that's very helpful — especially timely education and training when, for instance, a new regula- tion is just about to be enacted. That's very helpful. Where I see a growth area is with project management when a regulation is about to come into force and they say they can provide a-to-z project management to roll it out to your company. I see a lot more of that and that's very helpful. For instance, CASL would be an excellent example, or with amendments to the Privacy Act, for in- stance, the new Digital Privacy Act. YOUNG: I agree with Lara that fi rms seem to be doing much more when it comes to useful content generation. I think part of that is a result of the CLE require- ments that the Law Society instituted a number of years ago, but it's also great for relationship building, too. I fi nd that far more helpful. Time is precious so you often don't have time to sit down for a two-hour lunch or even coffee some days. If I can build into my day rela- tionship building through something else We're the gold standard globally for other countries in the organization because the organization because our department can be half the size of comparable organizations around the world. BARBARA SILVERBERG, Dell Canada

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