Canadian Lawyer InHouse

21 CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM/INHOUSE MAY/JUNE 2018 upfront. That's, for me, really the evolution of the group — building infrastructure and reporting capabilities." When class actions or other significant litigation arise, the bank seeks advice from external counsel, but it is always looking at ways to internalize some of that work. "When you look at cost savings, there are ways to reach a resolution without pro- longed litigation and that's always a good resolution," says Yaneza. "Where we have significant cases we're likely getting advice from an external law firm, but we might take those matters and break them down into components and find ways to disrupt how we have done things in the past, like where we have handled discovery or moving away from hourly billing and looking at AFAs for categories of billings or a specific case." The rise of in-house litigation depart- ments within the insurance industry has dramatically changed the legal landscape in Canada. Where once insurance companies hired one or two lawyers to manage outside counsel, now insurers are developing sophis- ticated litigation groups and running trials on a regular basis. The team has eight offices across the country working for commercial and individual clients of Aviva Canada in Toronto, Hamilton, Edmonton, Vancou- ver, Calgary, Dartmouth and St. John's. At first glance, one might easily mistake Aviva Trial Lawyers — the newly branded name for the company's Canadian litigation team — for an external law firm. The team has its own marketing materials and is working on a website to showcase its lawyers. All total the group includes 170 people including law clerks, assistants and an opera- tions team. The operations team that man- ages the group nationally sits in Toronto at First Canadian Place. Previously, the liti- gation lawyers were for 10 years located at Yonge and Eglinton. "I think we drifted off the radar there for a while," says Lianne Furlong, vice president, legal and chief litigation counsel at Aviva Trial Lawyers. She is the mastermind behind the group. "I started here in 2009. In 2012, I started to get into managing lawyers while still practising. I remember being at a leaders conference and at the breakfast table people didn't even know we existed." All of that has changed. Furlong reports to the chief claims officer on the executive and oversees all claims. The work comes from the casualty line of business and through a litiga- tion management group. Most of the cases the litigation team han- dles are personal injury related. If you are an Aviva policyholder and you rear-end someone in a car accident and get sued by that person, Furlong's group steps in to defend you. The trials the team has done are either motor ve- hicle or slip-and-fall types of injuries. "Our structure is unique to in-house, I think," says Furlong. "What we did when we built it two years ago was take what we thought were the best parts of a private law firm — in particular, those boutique and in- surance defence law firms — and then took the best parts of practising in-house and put them together." Aviva Trial Lawyers has six practice groups and each practice group has different levels of lawyers. At the top is senior practice counsel Bill Evans. Each of the six practice counsel are like the partners of Aviva Trial Lawyers. Furlong fills the role of the man- aging partner. The company has corporate counsel separate from the litigation group. The senior practice counsel assigns files, oversees the work and oversees the trials and mentorship and the national managing coun- sel is there for the people issues to make sure there is consistency across the practice groups. On the leadership team is a quality con- trol lawyer and her title is matter manage- ment counsel. "We have quality checks going on con- stantly and it's not so much about did you do something in a certain amount of time but more to the 'art of lawyering' — making sure the lawyers are being strategic and that they are getting the right result on files," says Furlong. Evans started with Aviva 18 years ago when there were just six lawyers at the company. About three years ago, it took the biggest leap forward, not just in terms of the number of lawyers but in setting up the practice groups and the management team and it became more structured in order to grow in the future. It's a much different organization than it was in 2015 when every lawyer at Aviva re- ported to the one senior person. "That structure was not scalable and you also cannot understand the performance of that many people," says Furlong. "We didn't have a story to tell — we couldn't tell what benefit we were providing to the company and we couldn't accurately say how the law- yers were performing." At the end of 2015, Furlong started looking for lawyers with trial capability. "We call it our transformation year. We built the operating model, looked at the talent we had, measured it against the operating model, made sure we had the right talent and then did massive amounts of recruiting and hiring," she says. In 2016, Furlong hired 35 new lawyers. "We built this new unique structure that I don't think anyone has ever seen before, es- pecially in the insurance defence industry," she says. Computer software tracks in real time what the lawyers are doing and at what stage the files are — all toward helping to manage files better and show greater value for the company. "We sensed that we were saving the com- pany money, but we weren't able to prove it empirically. Now we can and we're really We did things in 2017 that I don't think other in-house departments have ever done. LIANNE FURLONG, Aviva Trial Lawyers PHOTO: ROBIN KUNISKI Bill Evans and Lianne Furlong, Aviva Trial Lawyers.

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