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CCCA_V2No2_Innovation-FIN.qxd:CCCA_V1No1_DriversSeat-FIN.qxd 5/1/08 3:10 PM Page 39 is making efforts to educate clients and minimize repetition. As well, the 3M Canada legal department participated in Six Sigma training about five years ago. “It helped us look at our work as process-oriented and identify any defects in our processes,” says MacDougall. Lawyers in the department have also recently become Lean Six Sigma trained. (The focus of lean manufacturing is speed, while traditional Six Sigma emphasizes quality. Lean Six Sigma combines the two for better quality faster.) “The idea is to help you do your work in the least wasteful way,so you’re not always working in crisis mode or coping with the same problems.” A law department cannot be innovative without the right people, says MacDougall. “When a client comes to us with a question,I don’t want someone on my team who says,‘No,you can’t do that.’ I want them to say, ‘No, but here’s the reason why’— that’s the education piece —‘and let’s think about what you need and how else we can get there.’ Our lawyers have to be team players, hard workers, entrepreneurial and innovative themselves.They have to fit in with the corporate culture.” Siemens Canada: corporate integration At Siemens Canada, Christa Wessel, general counsel and vice- president legal, takes a similar approach. “What’s innovative about us is how we align ourselves very closely with the goals and strategies of the company as a whole.We try to be part of the business strategy, part of the business decisions, always applying long-term thinking to what we’re doing.” Six years ago, Wessel was the first lawyer Siemens hired in Canada. (Siemens was an external client when she was in pri- vate practice.) Wessel’s law department now has six other asso- ciates as well as four support staff, and occasionally uses lawyers on contract. In the beginning, she says, an internal client would come to her a week before they had to submit a bid and ask her to“take a once-over” on the contract.“Now they say,‘We’re planning a large project — can you come to the planning meeting?’ So we’re involved at the front end.We’re a much more integral part of the business.” This relationship developed because under her direction, the law department was continuously seeking feedback from its clients and internal business people, saysWessel.“We never rest. We’re always looking at ways to get better.” VFPA: priority communications Dean Readman, director of legal services and corporate secre- tary with the newly amalgamated Vancouver Fraser Port Authority, agrees it’s increasingly common to see lawyers giv- ing strategic advice — and says he’s well aware of what can befall the department that fails to innovate. “A lawyer is a lawyer is a lawyer,”he says,“and unless you can ÉtÉ 2008 CCCA Canadian Corporate Counsel Association 39 CCCA62_039.indd 1 05/05/2008 10:06:04 AM