Canadian Lawyer InHouse

19 CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM/INHOUSE JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018 focused on CASL and everyone is very good on privacy. What I try to do is find out what the lawyers want to do, let them know what work is available and be very frank and tell them I want to invest in them but want to hear from them on where they want to go. I want to know what they want to do in their professional development. 4. WHAT ABOUT CYBERSECURITY AS A FOCUS FOR YOU IN THE YEAR AHEAD? It is completely top of mind. Step one is making sure your information and data is secure and that's where we have the advantage of the parent company and its resources. Any company knows there's a huge brand risk if there is a breach. So there is willingness to invest in the resources to make sure the data is secure. So we have a huge advantage there. The other thing is you need a good incident response plan and the trick is keeping pace with what's the newest type of breach or thing that might happen. It ends up being quite cross- functional — nothing necessarily legal about cybersecurity except that it's a big risk and lawyers like minimizing risk. 5. WHAT ABOUT MANAGING EXTERNAL COUNSEL? We did a couple of years ago go through a general RFP for firms that would be able to handle everything that wasn't labour and employment and insurance defence — pri - vacy, insurance regulation and corporate governance. It was a very structured process and I learned a lot from that in putting the different things the firms would be evalu - ated on and it was a strict process. Now, if we have a specific niche need, we will do an RFP for that — one of the areas that is de- veloping is cybersecurity and lots of firms say they have that and doing an RFP lets you drill down. The U.S. has a lot of experi- ence in the area and we've been able to learn from that. I think we have a good relationship with the firms we deal with. I try to be very transparent in saying "I don't want to spend a lot of money on this . . . or I have no budget so how can you help me do this efficiently?" The lawyers are tremendously responsive — they understand their areas and some areas don't justify the cost. If there's a new high-level contract that is very Canadian, we might get support from the U.S., but we will also have to retain a lawyer here who has a lot of experience in the area. We've on occasion hired a partner and asked that one of our in-house lawyers be the junior work - ing on the file. They have been very open to that. We've been transparent in saying it will save us some money — it's your expertise we need. We will learn through the process as well and that's something that's worked re - ally well for us. We're buying their expertise and paying them by the hour for it, but they have the opportunity to get familiar with one of those specialty contracts. When we thought of it, we weren't sure how it would go over, but when we suggested it, they said why not. IH Untitled-1 1 2017-12-20 10:50 AM

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