TLOMA Today

Welcome to 2022. I sincerely hope all our members and business partners were able to have a safe and happy holiday season.

January is often a time of reengagement with our work lives. New projects and programs are launched, people are back to work and there is real a sense of optimism. While the recent government lockdown announcement may have dampened some people’s moods, it should not take away from the new year we are stepping into.

2022 will be a year of evolution for TLOMA with our new Executive Director, Joe Mauro, now in the fold. Your board is very excited about what Joe will bring to the association and over the coming months we will share with you some of the initiatives that TLOMA has planned.

Our slate of SIGs will begin on January 27^th with David Chernitzky of Armour Cybersecurity discussing the impact a cyberattack could have on your firm. This is an incredibly timely topic with the number of attacks rising at an alarming rate. We are excited to have Jane Southren and her team at the Southren Group delivering our in-person PD Event in April and have begun planning our early summer golf tournament.

We may have started 2022 with a pivot but I have high hopes that TLOMA will experience a tremendous year of knowledge-sharing, community engagement and inclusivity.

Mark Hunter
TLOMA Vice President

I am excited to be joining TLOMA as your new Executive Director. I would like to take this occasion to thank the TLOMA Board of Directors for giving me this opportunity.

As a seasoned not-for-profit executive with over 29 years in the sector I am no stranger to associations and the challenges they face; having led 2 national organizations and recently worked with an association management company.

Working at the Canadian Kennel Club (CKC) and the International Association of Airport Executives Canada (IAAEC); I created programs focused on enhancing the member value proposition through what I describe as a niche approach. 

It’s an approach which identifies the unique or special attributes that attract you to be a member of TLOMA. Once these attributes are ascertained, we then create unique programs tailored to you.

In this way we can support our members through enhanced Professional Development experiences and increase the value of a TLOMA membership for you and your firms.

I hope to take my diplomatic style, combine it with a collaborative approach and forge partnerships with the TLOMA board, our Business Partners and you the members.

2022 holds some exciting possibilities and I am eager to get started.

Joe Mauro
Executive Director

As I wind down my tenure as Facilities SIG leader, I am grateful for the encouragement and support from my peers and previous Facilities SIG leaders such as Wayne Gayle & Patrick McFetridge. 

Unfortunately, the pandemic put a damper on our plans to have any in-person Facilities SIG's. However, we still managed to host five webinars in 2020 related to Facilities, yet relevant to the current atmosphere in the world. 

In 2021 the atmosphere in the world around us changed from bad to worse. The Facility leaders were staring squarely in the eyes of another challenging year. Finding topics relevant to the challenges all law firms faced regardless of the size was a bit of a challenge. We managed to host four events pertinent to all law firms, "Future of the Legal Workplace; Working from Home: Taking Care of Your Most Valuable Asset in the Next Normal; How to Plan for a Return to the Physical Office; and COVID, Air Quality and Purification Systems" as Facilities SIG with great success! 

All this wouldn't have been possible without the support of one extraordinary person with such dedication and loyalty to TLOMA, Karen Gerhardt. I am very grateful for your continued support throughout my tenure.

I am keeping true to my predecessor's tradition and passing the torch to the new Facilities SIG leader with the promise of helping in any way possible. I wish Gabor Balogh all the success in his tenure.

Despite a couple of challenging years, I have to say it was a great experience and getting to know many like-minded professionals from many law firms with whom I have forged friendships that will last a lifetime. I truly appreciate the opportunity has allowed.

2021 was my third year as the Finance SIG leader for TLOMA.   Working with the fantastic finance folks across the city has been tremendously rewarding for me.   Sharing ideas and concepts makes working with peers satisfying.   After all, we are all working towards the same goal!    Despite a second full year of conducting sessions remotely, we successfully managed to have 4 Finance SIG’s, which were all extremely well attended.

Nov 17, 2021 - TLOMA Finance SIG Event - Financial Reporting Update for Law Firms
Sep 15, 2021 - TLOMA Finance SIG Event - Making sense of Today’s Insurance Market: An in depth look at insurance markets status, appetite and underwriting for Law firms
May 06, 2021 - TLOMA Finance SIG Event - Roundtable Discussion
Apr 21, 2021 - TLOMA Finance SIG Event - Business Continuity Planning – What, why and how?

Hopefully 2022 will keep everyone safe with a potential “live, in-person” SIG or event.   Can you imagine that!!!!!

Build it and they will come……

The topics for the 2021 Human Resources Special Interest Group sessions revolved around the themes of working in the remote environment and changes that firms were either experiencing or thinking about implementing as our industry worked through a changing landscape.  The HR SIG topics included “How to Virtualize Your In-house Training”, “Building Resilience” and two roundtable discussions where TLOMA members shared their experiences. One roundtable discussion related to not only remote work but also emerging trends on the horizon as firms started to think about returning to work in the office (fondly known as RTO). Our second roundtable discussion and the last session of the year was titled, “ The Evolving Role of the Legal Assistant” which garnered a good deal of interest and was very well attended.

I have really enjoyed my term as HR SIG leader; I had an opportunity to learn new skills, meet new people and expand my network.  Nicole Hunter takes the reins over for the next term.  As we start 2022 with different challenges, I look forward to the programming that she has in store for us.

Special thank you to Karen Gerhardt and Joanne Gibson-Davis for their support and guidance over the past 2 years.

Welcome to 2022! As you kick off this new year, you are probably dealing, whether directly or indirectly, with the return to online learning among Ontario students. The sudden shift to distance education was certainly a challenge for everyone involved the first time around. But now that it’s become part of our day-to-day, seesawing between physical and virtual learning is now a familiar experience that will be considered the norm for many years to come. More than a remedy, it has presented us with opportunities that we wouldn’t have been able to seize otherwise. Learning from our own experience and that of industry experts also makes the process a lot more rewarding.

Compugen’s education specialist, Adrienne Veneziano, shares her thoughts on the current state of hybrid learning and how she foresees the modern classroom to evolve. As the host of our Ask Adrienne video series, she also provides tips, tricks and insights on how to make the best of Microsoft Teams in any setting, from education to the modern workplace.

  Not just a pandemic remedy:  Why hybrid learning is here to stay.

Ask Adrienne -  Adrienne helps you build collaborative workspaces, connect with colleagues
and create your ideal working environment within Microsoft Teams 

Organizations of all sizes enter 2022 in truly unique circumstances. Ongoing concerns around vaccination policies, return to work policies, hybrid work solutions, and the most competitive employment market in recent times are all aligning to make 2022 a transformative year for both employers and employees.

Here at Gallagher Benefits Services, we use data to drive the discussions we have with our clients. In order to do that, we ask those clients and prospects alike to participate in a number of optional surveys and reports. The Benefits Strategy & Benchmarking Survey provides data and insights that help guide to better outcomes through better benchmarking. From February to April 2021, 558 organizations across Canada responded to questions covering the total compensation spectrum.

In recent issues of TLOMA today, vaccine policy and hybrid working have been covered extensively, so this article will focus on some other total rewards trends to consider heading into 2022.

Employers continue to prioritize attracting and retaining a competitive workforce.

• The top 3 benefit challenges were: attracting and retaining top talent, controlling employee benefit costs, and workforce engagement and productivity
• Attraction and retention (56%) narrowly outranks controlling employee benefit costs (52%) as the top benefits-related challenge for 2021.
• The high costs of specialty (52%), non-specialty drugs (45%), as well as medical services (38%), put the greatest strain on financial management.
• Specialty drug costs are a growing issue for 69% of large and 56% of midsize employers, up 8 and 4 points respectively from 2020.
• Small employers express more concern about the cost of medical services (44%) up 3 points.
• Nearly 1 in 3 employers lack the data-driven insights necessary to identify optimal benefit changes. (Gallagher Benefits Services, 2021)

This can be expected in a tight labor market like the one we are currently in. Organizations of all sizes will be trying to figure out solutions for how to enhance their value proposition to employees while ensuring it is done is a sustainable and cost effective way.  As always the rising cost of pharmaceuticals is a concern for organizations of all sizes heading into 2022.

Benefits plan design changes in 2021 to emphasize program enhancements.

• In 2020, 39% of organizations altered their benefits plan design. Changes typically took the form of program enhancements, applied by 24% of employers in total.
• By the end of 2021, 38% plan to make updates and program enhancements. (Gallagher Benefits Services, 2021)

Organizations are frequently looking into all aspects of the employee experience. The pandemic has revealed to Canadians that healthcare access is not necessarily guaranteed and that has increased appreciation for medical and mental health benefits. 
Organizations will be faced with the dilemma of how to enhance the benefit program, while also managing the costs and risks of prescription medications. Ensuring your benefits program is designed to meet your firm’s unique needs and reviewing that plan regularly is the key to maintaining costs.

The most common total rewards boosters include enhancing compensation and wellbeing initiatives.

• Most organizations (63%) are enhancing total rewards in order to meet 2021 attraction and retention objectives — small employers appear to face more limits with twice as many (49%) holding off on changes compared to large (25%).
• Small and midsize employers are more likely than large to adjust base salary (36% vs 25%). (Gallagher Benefits Services, 2021)

It’s not only health and dental benefits that are being revisited, over half of the organizations polled plan to enhance all aspects of the total reward offerings.

Longer-term compensation and benefits planning can bring cost efficiencies and other advantages.

• Employers commonly manage benefits (64%) and compensation (72%) from year to year.
• Large employers are twice as likely to develop a benefits strategy that covers more than two years (21%), compared to their midsize (11%) and small (9%) peers. Longer-term strategies prepare employers to address employees’ needs more proactively. (Gallagher Benefits Services, 2021)

Our survey revealed that large organizations tend to take a longer multi-year approach to employee total rewards. Which allows them to implement employee centric and cost effective strategies, as opposed to reactionary salary increases.

As the saying often goes, no one plans to fail, they fail to plan. Organizations off all sizes need to face the challenges posed by 2022 head on. Forward thinking and multiyear planning is not exclusive to large organizations, employers of all sizes can begin proactive planning for all aspects of compensation. The companies and firms that take a pro-active approach to total rewards will benefit greatly in the war for talent and gain a competitive advantage for years to come.   

This article only shared small fraction of the data found in the Gallagher Benefits Strategy & Benchmarking Survey, if you are interested in reviewing the whole document in more detail, please contact me anytime.  Joshua_ruiters@ajg.com.

Gallagher Benefits Services. (2021). The Benefits Strategy & Benchmarking Survey. Canada.

For something that we all thought would last a few weeks or months, it has now been more than two years since we first heard about the ‘novel coronavirus’. Since then, workplaces have been turned upside down and sideways, and will continue to pivot as we learn more about this virus and its far-reaching impacts. For partners and office managers, there are ongoing demands to implement safety measures unique to each law firm. Ensuring clean, healthy and safe spaces while keeping an eye on the bottom line has never been more challenging.

As we continue to monitor data and follow public health guidelines, we cannot ease up when it comes to keeping clients, staff and guests safe; we aren’t anywhere near being out of the woods – as Omicron has shown us. The ability to adapt operational strategies while prioritizing your employees’ health is the key to your success. With ION Facility Services as your strategic Covid-19 consultation and maintenance partners, we provide resources and supports to move forward during these exceptional times. We have outlined some best practices to help lead us through this (persistent) pandemic and come out stronger as a result.

Effective assessment strategies

Most businesses have been diligent in their efforts to stop the spread of Covid, but many have noted that fatigue has taken its toll. Here are some strategies to reinvigorate your teams and best serve your clients and staff:

• Take a fresh look at each area of your office each month to identify high-traffic areas and frequent touchpoints, noting that traffic and movement patterns change.
• Document how many people are in the building at various times and for how long. Do they need to be there from an operational standpoint? Even with vaccine policies and/or passports in place, we must assume that Covid-19 pathogens are present.
• Assess your common areas, including lobbies, hallways, washrooms, stairwells, etc. to identify locations that could harbour or transmit viruses.
• Examine air flow/HVAC systems – learn how and where air moves to lower the risk of exposure.
• Talk to your staff – learn their key concerns and keep communication flowing both ways.

A revised plan of action

After assessing your office space, it is time to implement a customized action plan. There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution, as every building has unique (and ever-adapting) operations and policies. Below is a list of procedures that will reduce the spread of infection within your law firm:

• Control point of entry access – e.g., utilizing security personnel, card swiping, ‘one in, one out’
• Limit touch points and install/retrofit hands-free equipment
• Boost cleaning frequency, especially in high traffic areas
• Disinfect using electrostatic sanitization and other high-potency cleaning
• Provide PPE (including N95 masks where budgets permit), rapid antigen tests and hand sanitizer
• Improve availability of hand sanitizing and hand washing stations
• Install acrylic or polycarbonate barriers/partitions to reduce person-to-person transmission
• Arrange/adjust spaces for optimal distancing and air flow
• Ensure signs, banners, floor decals and other posted information are visible, accessible and accurate
• Layer your ventilation improvements – such as open windows, strategically place fans, increase air filtration, maintain exhaust fans, add portable HEPA fan/filter systems, add UVGI (ultraviolet germicidal irradiation) to enhance air cleaning, and adjust HVAC systems to increase airflow to occupied areas - where possible.

As we collectively navigate this pandemic that we thought would end ages ago, it is important to remain vigilant, follow the science and public health guidelines, and be flexible, yet strategic.  

You log in to work one day and discover your firm’s most critical files are inaccessible – they’ve been taken hostage. Cybercriminals have infiltrated your network and if you don’t pay up, they’ll either destroy the files or release them on the dark web.

Ransomware is a very real threat to Canadian law firms of all sizes and areas of practice. According to the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, in the first six months of 2021, two thirds of Canadian victims were small and medium-sized organizations. Law firms are attractive targets because of the sensitivity of their data, which means they are higher value for extortion.

How Ransomware Works

Very likely you’re already familiar with the concept of ransomware and the devastating impact it can have on a law practice and its clients.

Typically picked up when a firm member clicks a malicious link or downloads an attachment in a phishing email, ransomware spreads through the files on their device in a matter of seconds, making its way through the network to locate sensitive or business-critical information.

Once its target is reached, the cybercriminal locks everything down and demands a ransom. The average ransomware payment in 2021 was more than $200,000 CAD. Adding the cost of downtime and system and data recovery on top of this, it increases significantly to an average $2.3M CAD.

Third-Party Attacks

Cybercriminals target small and mid-sized organizations for two primary reasons: they tend to have weaker security, and they can provide access to more lucrative targets – their clients. Sophisticated ransomware operations will sometimes attack companies’ third-party vendors as a means to gain access to their primary target.

Firms with clients in financial, insurance and government sectors are finding themselves subject to third-party security audits where their IT infrastructure, security policies and even staff training are assessed.  This can be a months-long process and if your organization’s cyber security isn’t up to their standards, you could lose out on their business.

Protect Your Firm and Clients

Law firms with remote or hybrid workforces are at higher risk for cyberattacks, which is why attacks have increased since the onset of the pandemic. IT management becomes more complex when workers and devices are distributed, increasing risk.

Endpoint Protection

Secure endpoint security is critical for preventing the initial breech. Remote and in-office device security, best practice management and employee cyber security training are essential for protecting your front line.

However, you can’t rely on endpoint security alone.

Detection and Containment

If an employee’s device becomes compromised, your organization requires immediate containment to mitigate further damage.

Ransomware is insidious, entering your network stealthily and taking its time, learning your systems, searching through files and even monitoring employee communications. Like a sophisticated bank heist, cybercriminals take the time to gather information to ensure a swift and effective blow. In fact, a 2020 IBM study shows that the average time for an organization to even detect a breach is 207 days! Immediate ransomware detection and containment is critical.

Firms need automated software that detects ransomware encryption and stops it in its tracks -  even when the malware has bypassed all endpoint protection and other security tools. This type of software is a vital element of your overall defence strategy, providing critical protection for a small portion of your security budget.

Conclusion

Ransomware is scary stuff, however, the good news is that technology is continually evolving to provide enterprise-level security at scale for law firms of all sizes. Ricoh Canada provides a wide range of cybersecurity solutions and services, including automated Ransomware detection and containment, so you can rest easy and focus on serving your clients.