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CCCA_V2No2_Innovation-FIN.qxd:CCCA_V1No1_DriversSeat-FIN.qxd 5/1/08 3:11 PM Page 40 Feature Brian Armstrong Executive Vice-President and General Counsel Bruce Power, Kincardine show you’re adding value to your organization, you’re gone; executive vice-president and general counsel at Ontario’s Bruce they’ll buy a new commodity. Whereas if you become a more Power, says a number of his department’s initiatives have involved integral part of the organization, that’s more valuable.You have to the development of performance metrics that enable him to show them what you can do, or you’ll be dying a slow death.” measure its performance over time, and — to some extent — Readman zeroes in daily on managing his people. He conducts a benchmark his department against others. 10- to 15-minute meeting with his staff every morning,not to review The first and most important metric he uses deals with client business, but “just to catch up. It lets me take the pulse of what my satisfaction, he says. An independent consulting firm administers lawyers are doing, what’s going on in their minds and lives,” he says. an internal client survey annually,designed to measure the level of “We’re all human beings,and we function in response to what’s satisfaction clients feel with the service his department provides going on in our lives. Communication is so important to every and the results it achieves. It allows clients to comment on how kind of relationship. If you don’t talk, things break down, get mis- they feel about the law department’s various contributions. construed. I try to communicate on both a department-head level Armstrong says his department has used the results to make with my staff, and up to my executive as well, just asking what’s improvements, and has enjoyed a rising level of client satisfaction the buzz, is anything going off-kilter — if so, you want to catch it over the past six years in response. before it goes too far.” His department also relies on a metric relating to litigation. It sounds simple,warm and fuzzy — a far cry from notions like “We measure our success in litigation on a straight won-lost basis, performance metrics, Six Sigma or intricate ranking systems — as well as on a cost-to-exposure basis,”he says.“We measure won- yet Readman counts these informal meetings among the most lost on the basis of whether we got out of the litigation with a important things he does every day.Without good communica- result that is equal to or better than what we would have settled tion, he says, no matter how innovative you are, nobody is going it for.And we measure our cost to exposure on the basis of what to know about it, understand it, benefit from it, or (perhaps most we either settled or litigated as an outcome against the maximum importantly) give you the credit for it. downside exposure that we assessed at the outset. “We want to get out of all our litigation with a cost that is 40% or Bruce Power: metrics system less of our maximum downside exposure,” he says.“So we’re able to ALENA GEDEONOVA At the other end of the spectrum,some departments take a much say at the end of our year, to the executive team and chief executive, more quantitative approach to innovation. Brian Armstrong, that we’ve mitigated X million dollars’ worth of potential downside 40 CCCA Canadian Corporate Counsel Association SUMMER 2008