Lexpert magazine features articles and columns on developments in legal practice management, deals and lawsuits of interest in Canada, the law and business issues of interest to legal professionals and businesses that purchase legal services.
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68 LEXPERT MAGAZINE | JANUARY 2013 BUILDING PLANS Law departments strive to build a culture where internal clients know how and when to utilize legal services efficiently. Here are some suggestions for facilitating that relationship. 1 | 2 | 4 | 3 | IN HOUSE INSIGHT information and tools that it needs, Legal will usually need to work with them on the first few iterations of the work. Only then, aer the business has built up the neces- sary expertise, can Legal start to withdraw and rely more fully on the business to take responsibility," he says. McLeod says during his time at Infra- structure Ontario, in draing templates for example, there was a deliberate effort to involve the business teams as opposed to a top-down process. "Each of us [Legal and the business team] worked on the parts of the agreements where we had the most impact and the most concern." In so doing, lessons learned by the business project teams were incorporated, with lawyers pro- viding input and oversight. As a general counsel with an extensive background in private practice, Trumper has witnessed a definite change in the external/in-house relationship. "A decade ago, senior partners at law firms would have a direct relationship with the CEO. Today the culture has changed so the interface is through the general counsel's office," he says. e direct line to the general counsel strengthens the role and, more importantly, it "signifies that we have a strategic role in the development of the business." On the other hand, Trumper doesn't want "to get in the way of a strong relationship between my external counsel and my busi- ness units, or stand in the way of business getting what it needs from external by insist- ing that everything is filtered through me." He's usually involved at the beginning to ensure the relationship gets off to a proper start. en, if the business team is comfort- able in dealing with external counsel directly, he stands back somewhat, while monitoring the process from a performance, problem- solving and cost point of view. Guest feels that, as important as it is for lawyers to be accessible to business people, as much as the law department can bring value to the business by making a range of contributions, lawyers need to strike a bal- ance. So it's important to remember and focus upon the areas, he says, in which law- yers have a "comparative advantage" over other employees. Some of the "greatest contributions that Legal can make arise when you offer your colleagues broad general counsel, risk-man- agement ideas, and alternative approaches to problem-solving in the broadest sense of the term," he says. But "there are other people in the organization who can con- tribute to non-legal tasks as well as the lawyers can do. If push comes to shove, the legal department sometimes needs to step back from non-legal tasks." In other words, "what no one else can do is give legal advice. As lawyers, we hopefully add value in a number of ways, but there's no one else who is able to provide legal advice to the business." So when Guest is allocating his resources he has "to find a balance where I preserve the time for the core legal advisory functions because there is no one else who can do that." e irony is that "it's hard because frankly much of your job satisfaction comes from the non-legal elements. at's why we work in-house. We all have mixed roles where we do legal and non-legal functions. But at the end of the day, I've only got 100 per cent of my time, and if 100 per cent is being demanded by non-legal tasks, then there's no one le to do the legal work." | IN-HOUSE ADVISOR: BUILDING A CULTURE | > EDUCATE IN-HOUSE CLIENTS TO INVOLVE THE LAW DEPARTMENT EARLY ON IN THE PROCESS "It is not ideal to have legal involved at the end of a contract or acquisition process," says Anne Sonnen, General Counsel and Chief Administrative Officer, BMO Financial. The legal department "should be involved at the beginning so we can be proactive and help to say 'yes,' rather than to have to say 'no' or 'not this way' at the end of the process." > UNDERSTAND THE COMPANY'S STRATEGIC IMPERATIVES You can't give your advice in a vacuum, says Steven Trumper, General Counsel at Build Toronto Inc. "In-house counsel can't just say, 'From a legal point of view this is what the rules are.'" Instead, "it's much more effective to say, 'If this is where we want to go with this situation, here are some of the challenges and here's how we can overcome them.'" > IT'S ESSENTIAL LAWYERS BE ABLE TO GIVE CRUCIAL LEGAL ADVICE Even if that means they relinquish non-legal tasks at which they are excellent, says Martin Guest, Vice-President & Chief Counsel, Individual Wealth Management, Manulife Financial. It can be challenging, he says, "to find the balance because there is a huge temptation to do a job if you know that you can do it very well." > BUILD VITAL RELATIONSHIPS It's important to be a true business partner and not simply the legal equivalent of a firefighter that internal clients only call when there is an emergency, suggests Paolo Berard, Head of Legal, Direct Energy Services and Corporate Centre at Direct Energy Marketing Limited. One way to achieve this "is to take a team approach to client service, so internal clients know that if the lawyer they most often deal with is on vacation or tied up on a large project, there are others on the legal team who understand the business, their strategic goals and can support them."