Canadian Lawyer - sample

32 N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 7 w w w . C A N A D I A N L a w y e r m a g . c o m J ean-Francois Denis, a huge baseball fan, says his favourite book — Mon- eyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis — is not just a book about baseball. "It's a business book," Denis, director of operations, legal affairs with SNC-Lavalin in Montreal, explains, calling relying on statistics and working with economists and lawyers to develop a good baseball team fascinating. When he saw an article about five years ago called Moneyball for Law Departments that promoted the application of that methodology to the management of law departments, it sparked his focus on legal operations. Still senior legal counsel, commercial transactions at Bombardier at the time, Denis started a personal project research- ing the area and then persuaded the com- pany's management to formally launch a legal operations function, which he led as senior legal counsel, legal operations and litigation since its creation in 2014 until coming onboard with SNC-Lavalin in March of this year. Denis, whose current role consists of managing the department's strategic plan, budget and outsourcing strategies as well as finding ways to better enable the cor- poration's legal counsel through the addi- tion of new technologies and processes improvement, says he's noticed a lot of legal ops people are not lawyers — large corporations have moved to procurement- background types for the job, which he calls unfortunate. "I think lawyers should be manag- ing their departments," he says. "Maybe lawyers are no longer interested or people in their organization — which would be more alarming — believe they should not be managing their department. That's obviously a huge concern to me." Legal department management and structure/moving to legal operations was a pretty big concern for the 232 respondents to Canadian Lawyer's Annual Corporate Counsel Survey as well — it ranked second overall as a key issue in respondents' legal departments, coming in just behind cyber- security. When asked if the general counsel has the autonomy to select firms with which the company works, a little less than 70 per cent — 67.6 — said yes, which more or less holds steady from the last survey at 68.5 per cent. But Denis points out that means that more than 30 per cent either don't decide or share the responsibility with other people. While it may not necessarily be a bad thing that upper management is deciding on firms, Denis thinks it should be the legal department's prerogative and counts himself lucky that in his working experi- ence legal has strong equity with the rest of the business and, therefore, a good level of autonomy. But Denis — who is also president of the Association of Corporate Counsel, Quebec chapter and a member of the Que- bec bar's liaison committee with corporate counsel — notes that this is a privilege and not a right. "We have to show we're capable and I think that's where you connect it with budgets. If a law department struggles to properly manage its budgets, that's where they lose credibility." He points to question 9 of the survey, which asked if external spend changed and if so, why? Underlying that question is a bigger, more important one: Is your budget under control? Can you efficiently forecast? Do you measure it? Denis says lawyers need to be cautious here because businesses — including his own — are going to ask for cost predictability. For 51 per cent of respondents, external spend went up because an isolated/one-off Legal department management and cybersecurity topped the list of concerns in Canadian Lawyer's Annual Corporate Counsel Survey What keeps in-house counsel up at night By Mallory Hendry "If a law department struggles to properly manage its budgets, that's where they lose credibility." Jean-Francois Denis, SNC-Lavalin

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