Sponsored by Osler Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, and moderated by Canadian Lawyer editorial director Gail Cohen, the fifth annual roundtable was held in May. This year’s roundtable dealt with some of the most important topics affecting in-house counsel and their relationship with law firms — project management, value billing, technology, and risk management.

Roundtable participants:
• David V. Pathe, senior vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary, Sherritt

  International Corp.
• Daniel Desjardins, senior vice president and general counsel, Bombardier Inc.
• Joseph Agostino, general counsel, Hydro One Inc.
• Simon A. Fish, executive vice president and general counsel, BMO Financial Group
• Anne Fitzgerald, senior vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary, Cineplex

  Entertainment LP
• Barbara Silverberg, head of Dell Canada Legal, Dell Canada Inc.
• Fred Krebs, president, Association of Corporate Counsel

INHOUSE: What does project management mean to you, and is it part of your legal department? What sort of matters lend themselves best to project management?  

JOSEPH AGOSTINO: Project management within our legal department has two focuses: one internal for the company and one external with our external service providers. . . . So I like to have a lawyer involved from Day 1 as part of a team. And we are very oriented in project management within the team. It is an engineering company, because we deliver electricity, so we have a project management system for everything. . . . Some of our programs are new initiatives that are out there, so I like to have the lawyers be part of that team to see how it works and to contribute. It  helps them do all the things that are appropriate for the legal perspective. The other part of project management is to co-ordinate working with our external legal service providers. . . .  That includes [finding] what we can do in-house to save ourselves some money. 

DANIEL DESJARDINS: What we do is large project management. Large dealings are complex, and you want to be efficient, and you want to control costs. If you don’t have strong project management, it’s easy to lose track and go into the details and ultimately not be efficient . . . ultimately not see the big picture. . . . I do quarterly phone calls and a contact meeting once a year. We have a discussion with respect to the quarterly result so everybody sees the big picture. 

ANNE FITZGERALD: Lawyers are innately project managers. We’re list people, we’re task people. . . . So as an example, Cineplex is currently going through the transition from 35mm to digital projection, which is a tremendous technology change within our company, and it’s happening internationally. . . . There’s an extraordinary amount of work that goes into that. A lot of which is legal work, and a lot of which is business work. But we do have a task list and identify what departments are responsible for what and who has signing authority on what. You’re just making sure that you’re not missing any steps along the way and that all of the teams are speaking with each other. Ultimately our key competency is going to be: Are we getting results? Are we results-oriented? Are we efficient? I think that the project-management tools we use . . . whether it’s closing checklists or whatever help us really quantify that. 

FRED KREBS: One of the challenges again that we’ve noted is . . . people get comfortable doing what they do, and they don’t like to get out of it. . . . [P]roject management, or the Six Sigma type of analysis, forces people to think about that and maybe pushes them out of a comfort zone. . . . [T]here are a couple of things. One is avoiding the silos. Two is addressing a process and trying to avoid repetition. . . . Both firms and companies are trying to access value . . . one of the most important things they can do is just consider [how they do things now, and whether they are doing them the right way.] . . . And project management seems to me to be very much a part of that. 

DAVID PATHE: We spend a lot of time to have one person who’s designated as the guy who is going to run [the project management process] and it tends to fall on the legal group to be making sure that the right people in the business unit, wherever they happen to be located, are getting input at the right times and co-ordinating and pulling things together. It’s very important that there is one coherent understanding in the company of where we are in the process of whatever it is we’re trying to achieve. 

SIMON FISH: Project management is an effective tool for implementing projects and getting work done where you’re response-constrained either in terms of time or the number of people or costs. So it’s not only the obvious examples of volume or perhaps your litigation or discovery processes, but we use it in particular in relation to implementation of these huge trans programs that we’re constantly having to adopt. [As] new pieces of legislation come out, we have to go through a process of analysis, application, monitoring, and reporting, so putting in place the various tools and processes and policies to get things done is important.