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CCCA62_052-055.qxd:CCCA_V1No1_Profile-FIN.qxd 09/14/2007 04:31 PM Page 54 Profiles Searching for Searching for Barry M. Fisher Barry M. Fisher SAP Canada’s vice-president, general counsel and corporate secretary, is a philosopher at heart hen Barry M. Fisher signed on at SAP Canada has built a 13-person in-house legal department that is WInc. 12 years ago, he found a legal department woven into the fabric of the company. that was more reactive than proactive. “The contract Contract administrators are involved in the structuring administrative function was viewed merely as a ‘booking of deals. In-house lawyers, located in diverse centres such function’,” remembers Fisher, vice-president, general as Calgary, Montreal and Toronto, attend the meetings of counsel and corporate secretary. “Standard contracts the business lines they advise.They are also vocal in defin- were negotiated and merely amended.” ing issues and objectives, including when to bring in out- To Fisher’s way of thinking, the department, staffed by a side counsel for specialized legal needs. handful of people and generally autonomous from the Well-respected within the global legal industry as a company’s business executives, wasn’t bringing the value it thinker and speaker — his “Ten Commandments for the could to the company. Relationship between In-house and Outside Counsel” is a In fact, he viewed the situation as “somewhat danger- classic — Fisher initially set out to be a philosopher. He ous,” since the company, a subsidiary of SAP AG, the earned an undergraduate degree in economics and philos- world’s leading provider of business software, has its feet ophy, along with a masters degree in philosophy, before firmly rooted in the constantly shifting IT sector. switching to law. Unlike in the mining sector, where Fisher was previous- In the 1980s, his wife, Rosemary McCarney, also a ly an in-house counsel — “a very extractive-based sector, lawyer, was offered a professorship at a prestigious law the business was more straightforward and the price of the school in the U.S., so Fisher moved south. He practised commodity was pretty well determined by global force”— corporate securities and international law at a large law technology evolves quickly, he says. firm during the day, while attending Cleveland State The challenges for a company such as SAP is that these University part-time to earn his LL.M. He eventually technological changes are“not necessarily a linear movement, helped found the Committee on Canadian Laws of so the company has to be on the right train and hopefully, the American Bar Association’s International Law and conducting the right train. If the company gets it wrong, it Practice Section. may be selling the intellectual equivalent of buggy whips.” Back in Canada, the bilingual Fisher practised corporate Since then the 56-year-old, high-energy Fisher, who and trade law with two major Toronto-based law firms, sleeps a mere six hours a night and is up at dawn exercising, was in-house counsel in the mining sector,and opened the 54 CCCA Canadian Corporate Counsel Association FALL 2007