Canadian Lawyer InHouse

21 CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM/INHOUSE JULY/AUGUST 2018 GEARING: That sounds wonderful, but I think it's still very underexplored even among some of the larger firms. One thing I would like to see in terms of artificial intelligence is software that reduces the cost of due dili - gence on large transactions — an algorithm or machine that can read hundreds of thou- sands of pages of documents and tell you all you need. I think they are getting there on that front and I would be welcoming of a firm interested in using that kind of technology. FARR: We have electronic billing, so for a law firm to get paid by the Bank of Canada, they submit the invoice electronically and it goes into our financial management system. I still get paper envelopes with billings — I don't know whether it's a law society rule, but they are meaningless — they just get ripped up and thrown away. No matter how much you say it, every 30 days you still get those invoices coming through in the mail. INHOUSE: Does your software provide you any analysis on your billings? FARR: Yes, it is run through financial ser- vices, but we can get, by code, what areas we are spending the most money on and we do use that information. We have selectively hired individual lawyers in-house in order to reduce outside spend and it's been very successful in some areas. BABIN: One of the firms we work with pro - vides legal project management and we have asked them to provide dashboards of infor- mation about how our money is being spent on certain files. We're intending to partner with them to figure out if legal project man- agement is something we can deploy more broadly then with just this one firm and use internally and with our other service pro- viders because that data is really fundamen- tal to understanding how we're spending our money and how we can maybe spend it differently or more efficiently. To the point about AI, I feel there are some firms that are more on the leading edge of these things and they are actually going out and talking to legal tech companies and entrepreneurs and bringing them into their own incuba - tors within the firms and then saying to cli- ents: "We have a tool that may be able to help you with this or with that," which then means we don't have to be spending our time figuring out what works. They have already done that work. GEARING: To your point on project man - agement, at Rexall on major projects, we'll generally get a project manager involved. We have some of them in-house that have been trained and they don't necessarily need to be lawyers. On the last major proj- ect I was involved with, they set meetings, distributed information, kept track of a due diligence tracker so that other people work- ing on the deal could focus on other things. Visit canadianlawyermag.com/inhouse Our video coverage topics: CHALLENGES OF MANAGING TECHNOLOGY IN-HOUSE, online July 3 MANAGING CYBER RISK IN-HOUSE, online July 9 USING TECHNOLOGY FOR EFFICIENCY, online July 16 AI AND BLOCKCHAIN, online July 23 13 th Annual Canadian Lawyer InHouse General Counsel Roundtable Jeremy Farr, Bank of Canada Kikelomo Lawal, Interac Corp. Shelley Babin, Ontario Power Generation Beth Gearing, Rexall Gordon Ackroyd, SecureKey Technologies Inc. Brought to you by GC ROUNDTABLE

• Cover