TLOMA Today

My fellow TLOMA members: 

I am writing to you on Thanksgiving Day, which as you know, we celebrate every second Monday in October, much earlier than our neighbours to the south, who celebrate US Thanksgiving every fourth Thursday in November.  Thanksgiving is the day on which traditionally people celebrated the harvest and all other blessings of the past year.  Canada being so much farther north and having a much earlier harvest may account for our much earlier Thanksgiving.  According to some historians, however, the first celebration of Thanksgiving in North America occurred during the 1578 voyage of Martin Frobisher from England, in search of the Northwest Passage.  This too may have contributed to an early Canadian Thanksgiving Day – the Northwest Passage would have been frozen solid by the last Thursday of November – but is peculiar because there is no Thanksgiving Day in England.  They do have a Harvest Festival around the same time, which probably is the basis of all this.  

Anyway, Thanksgiving Day is a time for many people to give thanks for what they have.  Here in Canada it is a time to also give thanks for what we don’t have – guns!  I am sure you all watched in horror the events unfolding in Las Vegas a week ago.  To me it felt like I was there.  I had spent a week in the same hotel wing, ten floors below the shooters room, just over a month before this senseless act of terror took place.  It felt very real.  But that’s the thing, isn’t it?  We are deeply affected only when tragedy hits close to home.  And the gun pundits are still looking for what’s wrong with the man who kept pulling the trigger.  The families of the victims don’t care who the shooter was but why he was allowed to legally obtain dozens of automatic weapons that can shoot thousands of rounds at unsuspecting innocent people.  To paraphrase one of the NRA’s own mantras “Guns don’t kill, men with guns do.”  Something has got to change. 

And since we are on the subject of change again I wanted to share with you some of the thoughts that Dr. Mark T. Greene shared with us during his Marketing SIG session titled “Artificial Intelligence and the Business of Law”.   No matter what one’s definition of artificial intelligence (AI) is, the evidence is everywhere that it is gaining momentum in all cognitive occupations, of which the business of law is one example.  Solutions based on machine learning algorithms are currently employed widely in eDiscovery, contract review and knowledge management and in all facets of legal research and library services.  And they are only getting better.  So, what should we do?  Embrace it is Mark’s advice.  The sooner, the better.  Transformation is inevitable.  Law firms should embrace it or risk oblivion.  How to do it?  Start now.  Small steps, but start.  Find the repetitive and mundane tasks and automate them.  Then build from there. 

This is sound advice, in my humble opinion.  Transformation is all around us.  It’s just another word for change.  Dramatic change, perhaps, that’s happening so fast that it makes us feel it’s crept up on us.  But it is inevitable and unstoppable.   

Talking about transformation, when was the last time you thought of Amazon?  A company which did not exist 22 years ago and is now valued at more than Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Macy's, Kohl's, JCPenney and Sears combined.  Did you know that 7.5% of Seattle's working-age population are Amazon employees or that Amazon accounts for 43% of all on-line sales?  Amazon ships 1,6 million packages per day and 45,000 robots roam its warehouses.  Amazon recently acquired Whole Foods and I doubt that it will be too long before we start getting our grocery orders delivered by drones.   

This and many other similar conversations will be had at the 2017 TLOMA Conference, which is literally a few days away, so come join us.  If you are still undecided just take another look at the full Conference Agenda.  Excellent events, great speakers, plenty of educational content and networking opportunities are awaiting you in Deerhurst.  Some sponsorships are still available our Business Partners to take advantage of.  Thank you.  

I look forward to seeing you at Conference!

On October 7, 2017, the legal community was saddened by the passing of Bernie Pasquantonio after a courageous battle with brain cancer at the age of 64.  Bernie joined the firm of Ridout & Maybee LLP as General Manager in 2008 and then he moved into the role of Chief Financial Officer.  Prior to 2008, Bernie was the Chief Financial Officer at Goodman & Carr.

Bernie was a long-time member and supporter of TLOMA and was a valuable resource to many of his peers at TLOMA with whom he regularly shared his experience and wisdom on handling the day-to-day challenges that law firm managers face.  Among his other contributions, Bernie appeared on a Finance Special Interest Group panel at the 2011 TLOMA Conference at Blue Mountain.

Bernie will be missed by his many friends at TLOMA for his guidance, wisdom and his friendly confident demeanour.  His valuable contribution to the legal community will serve as an inspiration to everyone who was fortunate enough to know him.

Gerry Tipold
Chief Operating Officer
Lenczner Slaght Royce Smith Griffin LLP

TLOMA would like to Thank the 2017 Conference PARTICIPANTS

Law Firms Must Become Receptive to Change in Order to Effect it 

Innovation has become buzzword that has lost its meaning. At its core, innovation is a desire to be new and different. That desire leads to breakthrough thinking and pioneering action. Risk is involved, which means failure is probable, not just possible. 

True innovation is difficult to achieve — and it can be elusive. 

The Tale

The Emperor’s New Clothes, by Hans Christian Andersen, is a short tale about weavers who dupe an emperor into thinking that his new clothes are visible to only a certain class of people. When the emperor appears in his new clothing, everyone admires his wardrobe until a child points out that he is naked. 

The moral of this story is that not everything we’ve been led to believe is true — and nor are various claims about legal innovation, which is why innovation isn’t only elusive; it can be illusive, too. 

The Reality 

According to The Illusion of Innovation at Canadian Law Firms, a January 2017 study from the Faculty of Management at McGill University, there’s a chasm between what partners and associates think is innovative. The study was conducted by McGill University law and MBA student Aly Háji under the supervision of professor Karl Moore, with mentorship support and guidance from Mike Ross of Juniper, a boutique innovation consultancy.

The numbers tell the story. For example, 84 per cent of partners surveyed agreed that “Innovation is one of the firm’s highest strategic priorities,” while 42 per cent of associates thought so. As for experimenting with new ways of delivering value, 92 per cent of partners agreed that they did so, while only 43 per cent of associates agreed.

The divide was equally wide when the topic turned to money. In response to the statement “Our compensation structure encourages myself and other lawyers to try new things,” 54 per cent of partners agreed, while just 25 per cent of associates did.

As for alternative fee arrangements (AFAs), just 33 per cent of partners said they employ them frequently and 17 per cent never do. For associates, only nine per cent use AFAs frequently, nine per cent use them periodically and 18 per cent had never heard of AFAs. This finding alone should alarm traditional law firms that are losing clients to legal service providers who live and breathe AFAs, and who have chucked the traditional law firm billing structure in order to offer new ways of catering to clients.

The survey received 105 responses from practitioners who had spent at least three years working in a law firm in Canada. Sixty-one per cent of respondents ranged in age from 31 to 55 years old, and so had been working in law firms long enough to have seen changes in the market. But as one respondent now working outside of a conventional law firm observed, “The legal model is at least 25 years out of date. Everyone wants to keep their Benz but I think they will have a big surprise coming their way very shortly.” 

The Seismic Shifts

Pressures cause shifts. Sean Bernstein, a 2015 call and corporate lawyer at Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP, was a respondent in the study. He thinks the differences of opinion between partners and associates may be generational. “The legal industry has moved slowly so older generations may view any changes as monumental. Younger generations may not see change as monumental because they’re used to it.”

These shifts are happening more so outside of the conventional law firm setting. For example, there are lawyers who prefer to work full-time from their homes rather than be pressured by law firm politics and office space. Their work-life balance includes more informality and ease of mobility. For client visits, they’ll toss their computer into a backpack and take a bike or public transit, if not a car, to get where they need to go.

Patrick Hartford is a 2016 call who says, “Inefficiency drives me crazy.” That frustration led him, with co-founder Ori Barbut, to launch Notice Connect, a website enabling individuals and businesses to publish legal notices online, which has been shown to be more effective and less expensive than publishing them in newspapers. Now an entrepreneur and resident at Ryerson University’s Legal Innovation Zone, Hartford believes that once change is adopted, “it becomes a new convention.” 

Happily Ever After?

Whether innovation happens inside or outside a law firm, it must be tangible, meaningful and effective in serving clients every day. As Bernstein says, “the industry is in good hands with people willing to take a risk.” And with clients holding the buying power, they’ll have a big say in determining which innovation fairy tales end happily ever after.

Law firms everywhere are feeling the pressure from the market to provide high-quality legal services for competitive prices. No longer are firms guaranteed that their long-standing clients will use them for every matter and case. The demand for how legal services are delivered has changed, with many new low-cost options cropping up. These changes are forcing traditional firms to find new ways to control costs and be more aggressive with their billing practices to maintain profitability and meet client demands. 

Initially when these cost pressures arose, many firms turned to cutting administrative staff to decrease costs. This short-term solution unfortunately had drawbacks. Firm management expected remaining support staff to do the same amount of work with fewer people, leading to increased stress, lower morale and compromised work quality and customer service. More and more, firms are consolidating back-office work to an administrative pool, an off-site (less expensive) location or third-party service providers in an ongoing effort to reduce overhead.

Meanwhile, most firms currently do not have a standard process or central system to effectively delegate tasks, manage workflow and allocate resources. Many firms have no system at all, relying on administrative staff to manage a multitude of requests that have been submitted by email, voicemail, paper forms or verbal requests. Without a centralized system, it is nearly impossible to quantify and prioritize work on a firm wide basis, let alone the work a department or individual has in queue. With more firms turning towards centralization or outsourcing some or all of their back-office functions, managing this new process and workflow will be paramount.

To be successful in reducing costs without sacrificing their level of service, firms must consider more long-term and systemic changes to their processes. One quickly emerging option is software that is built specifically to manage administrative workflow and task delegation for law firms. This new technology not only centralizes and captures all the work in the queue, it also helps management track, analyze and optimize resource allocation to ensure exceptional service that meets and exceeds clients’ expectations.

How Workflow Technology Works

Automated workflow software is designed to aid lawyers and support staff in accurately and efficiently managing the many tasks that are sent throughout the firm daily. A centralized system helps to accurately capture, assign and quantifiably manage the processing of these tasks. This method takes the place of randomly assigning tasks through disparate means and allows delegation of work into a unified system via a standardized process. Accurate instructions are gathered as the task is entered into the system, and it is then automatically routed to the appropriate party. Some workflow systems allow a time estimate to be assigned to each task, helping identify not just the number of tasks in the queue but also the time necessary to complete those tasks. Some systems offer a dashboard that enables a transparent view of all tasks in the system, including who is responsible, level of priority and status. These systems can track metrics as tasks are completed, capturing the amount of the time it takes to accomplish each specific task and creating an accurate estimate for those tasks going forward. 

Benefits Of Workflow Technology

One important benefit of a centralized workflow system is that it allows management to streamline task delegation. Configurable workflow streams ensure that tasks are assigned immediately to the right person or team that is best suited to manage the work. The firm can tailor input forms by task to capture all the required information at the start of the job. This helps minimize needless back-and-forth communication to clarify incomplete instructions that typically result from email or other inconsistent delegation techniques.

The best centralized workflow systems can also give firms an improved ability to manage work on a micro level, providing information as to how much work is in the queue, whether the firm has the right resources to complete tasks, what work can be moved to meet deadlines and status of specific projects.

These systems can also provide firms a greater ability to manage work on a macro level:

• How much work is each practice area generating and are they properly staffed? 
• Which employees or teams are most efficient and at what tasks? 
• Can we centralize a team around a certain workflow? 
• Should we outsource more of our work? 
• Are our service providers meeting their Service Level Agreements ('SLAs')? 
• Are we meeting our clients’ SLAs?
  
  

From a client-facing standpoint, a proper workflow system ensures deadlines are met, projects are completed accurately and efficiently, and potential resource challenges are identified long before a client service issue arises. Naturally, quality of work is improved if projects are properly defined on the front end and assigned to the person or teams best able to complete them. Lawyers and staff can track the work on a desktop or mobile application and accurately communicate status as needed.

Finally, a central system that captures workflow can provide metrics and critical data that allow law firm management to analyze and improve operations. Real-time information on how many tasks are in the queue along with accurate estimates of the time needed to accomplish that work is a powerful tool in ensuring optimal resource allocation and task management. This information is key to the ongoing success of law firms as the market and industry continue to evolve. 

Canadian law dictates strict standards on how companies should manage sensitive data like patient health information (PHI), personally identifiable information (PII), and any financial information. To comply with regulations and to safeguard the future of your business, you need to take some extra steps to prevent potentially sensitive data from being inadvertently disclosed. 

Any legal practices using Office 365 will be relieved to learn that the industry-leading productivity suite also features a set of tools for implementing a data loss prevention (DLP) policy. You can find the platform in the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center. Here, you’ll be able to set up automated safeguards for monitoring, identifying and protecting sensitive information.

How Does Office 365 Data Loss Prevention Work?

Regardless of which government-mandated compliance framework your company falls under, you should still be committed to top-level cybersecurity. Fortunately, Office 365 makes data protection easier by allowing you to apply automated controls to data handled using all Office applications, such as Word, Excel, OneDrive, Outlook, Exchange, PowerPoint and SharePoint.

Data loss prevention ('DLP') in Office 365 provides a full view of where your data is located. It discovers sensitive information throughout your entire database, even if it contains years’ worth of legal documents, payment records and more. Thanks to its powerful automated tools, Office 365 can locate and inform you about such data all while doing away with the element of human error.

Once you’ve set up DLP in Office 365 and used the platform to discover confidential data, you’ll be able to set restrictions on how said data is handled. To prevent data leaks, you can activate customizable policies that dictate what your employees can and cannot do with the data. In fact, you can even prohibit the sharing of sensitive data outright.

Depending on the size and complexity of your Office 365 database, fully implementing a DLP policy can take a matter of hours. However, if you have a very large database containing many years’ worth of data, you may find the task too lengthy and complex to handle alone.

How to Create a Data Loss Prevention Policy

Implementing a DLP policy using Office 365’s Security & Compliance Center will make it easier for you to meet the demands of legislation such as PCI-DSS and PIPEDA, among others. To use the feature, you’ll need to be able to access the Office 365 admininstration center, which will be available to you if you have a business subscription plan and administrator privileges. The Admin Center is cloud-based, and may be accessed by signing into your Office 365 account.

Once you’re in the Admin Center, choose Security & Compliance, and expand the Data loss prevention menu. Here you’ll be able to create a policy simply by following the on-screen instructions. 

You can also choose from a set of templates specific to different regions and industries. For example, selecting the finance option allows you to choose country-specific policies for handling financial data as per the regulations in place in that country. For every available policy, you’ll be able to view a short description explaining which information it is meant to protect.

After you’ve chosen which policy to implement, Office 365 will allow you to select the locations where you want to implement your policy, such as SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts and Exchange email databases. 

Alternatively, you can select all locations to ensure your DLP policy is as exhaustive as possible.  Finally, once you’ve chosen which locations to monitor, you’ll be able to configure sharing rules and restrictions for your end users.

Data loss prevention in Office 365 helps protect your data from human error, which is always the weakest link when it comes to cyber security.

The IT landscape for law firms is changing. Today’s clients expect greater responsiveness, transparency, and cost-efficiency. To meet these shifting expectations, law firms need to ensure their technology is also evolving. The fundamental choice that law firms are faced with is: switching to the cloud, or re-investing in their in-house IT. 

The model of in-house IT was always a compromise. The business of law firms is law, not IT. In-house models require law firms to buy, implement, and maintain expensive IT networks. The result is often unreliable systems with unpredictable costs that hamper the delivery of current client service requirements. 

The advent of cloud technology promised an end to the inefficiencies and high costs of on-site systems. Cloud IT has now become the standard for law firms in Canada because it not only solves the problems of in-house IT, but also delivers a multitude of benefits that can’t be duplicated with the old model. 

Let’s take a closer look at what the cloud can bring to your firm. 

Eliminate Capital Expenditures

Unlike owning an in-house IT system, Cloud IT eliminates the need to make significant capital expenditures in server equipment.  All IT infrastructure is owned and managed by the cloud provider, including all the costs for upgrades and maintenance. You retain ownership of your most important asset – your data – while avoiding the costs of running expensive equipment. All you need is a connection and a device, and the rest is taken care of.

No More Interruptions

Nothing is more frustrating than interruptions when deadlines are looming. Whereas in-house servers are susceptible to slow performance, breakage, and malware, a Cloud IT network is designed for consistency and reliability. World-class data centres give you stable, standardized systems, high uptime, and superior virus protection. In addition, your data is monitored and maintained by experts who proactively protect the integrity of the system. This combination of better technology and expertise makes the cloud model inherently more stable, and therefore, less likely to cause annoying interruptions. 

Works With Your Apps

Cloud IT is designed for compatibility with existing applications. You can check a precedent, delegate a task, or view a limitation date, all while on the go. You get the best of both worlds: high performance cloud technology, and compatibility with your existing applications. You can move your current software to the cloud and continue to use the apps your firm relies on like PC Law, ACL, Primafact, Time Matters and MS Office. 

Simple Monthly Fee

Cloud IT providers offer risk-free payment models which allow you to take control of your IT budget. A predictable monthly fee with everything included means costs are always clear. Because maintenance and fixes are the responsibility of your cloud provider, you assume zero financial risk. When your firm needs to grow, the cloud offers easy scalability and built-in capacity at a predictable, incremental cost.

Work From Anywhere

Cloud IT solutions work everywhere you have an Internet connection. Access to your complete desktop provides everything from full client files, to legal applications. Simply log on to a secure desktop in any location you have a connection, on your laptop (yes, even Macs), tablet, or phone. Built for remote access, you can work seamlessly off-site and between multiple offices. It’s like taking your office with you wherever you go.

Secure Your Practice

Security threats are varied and ever-changing. Applying security patches, updating virus definitions, and maintaining firewalls is time-consuming and error-prone. Cloud IT provides a superior level of protection including power redundancy, fire suppression, and 24-7 physical security. Best of all, specialists test, monitor, and upgrade all software patches and virus protection to provide the most up-to-date, secure systems. This level of data defense is not possible with in-house systems.

The New IT Standard

Cloud IT has become the new standard for law firms. The arguments are in: trade capital expenditures for a simple monthly fee, server downtime for high reliability, and IT hassles for a legal expert provider.                                    

At TLOMA, we provide education, professional development, mentorship, and support to our Membership. Through these initiatives, TLOMA members are offered both a professional and social network of professionals working in law firms of all sizes. To encourage members to grow their network at TLOMA, we would like to profile TLOMA members in each issue of TLOMA Today to give readers a snapshot of who we are within the legal industry.

• How long have you been a member of TLOMA? 10 Years
• Where do you work? DLA Piper (Canada) LLP
• What do you enjoy most about working in the legal industry? Providing the best customer service to our administrative staff and lawyers and the opportunity to network with my colleagues.
• What has been your volunteer experience with TLOMA over the years? I have served on both the Nominating Committee and Conference Committee including this year as the Conference Chair.
• Favorite TLOMA memory: My first year of Conference back in 2007 and meeting colleagues for the first time that have since become my dearest friends.
• Where was the last place you vacationed? Puerta Vallarta, Mexico
• What is your favorite lunch spot during the workweek? The Duke of Westminster at First Canadian Place
• What is the name of your favorite restaurant? Sambucas
• What is your favorite book? Anything by Anne Rice - The Witching Hour is probably at the top of the list.
• Where is your go-to coffee shop? Second Cup
• If you were to start a blog, what would it be about? The humorous side of working in a law firm
  
  If you are interested in participating in the Member Spotlight feature of TLOMA Today to share some of your experiences at TLOMA, please email editor@tloma.com for more information.