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CCCA_V4No3_Outsourcing-FIN.qxd:CCCA_V1No1_DriversSeat-FIN.qxd 9/2/10 12:56 PM Page 37 For legal departments that are Feature understaffed and overworked, and for businesses that have no company lawyer on staff, out- sourcing in-house counsel may be the solution. by Michael Rappaport whether part-time or full-time for a period of weeks or months or an ongoing relationship.” Cognition serves both smaller businesses that do not have a full-time in-house counsel and larger businesses with cyclical legal needs,spikes in their workload,or tem- porary gaps in their legal departments. Ian Collins, president of Clickfree Inc., a tech start-up in Toronto that makes data backup devices, has over a hundred employees, about half in Toronto and half in Beijing,and revenues in the tens of millions.Nonetheless, he has no full-time counsel on staff. Instead he uses Joe Milstone Cognition to provide him with part-time general coun- Co-founder Cognition LLP sel services, to oversee corporate housekeeping, do deal- Toronto specific work and review financing matters. “Our legal needs are really lumpy: one month we’ll have a pile of work, the next month very little,” Collins says.He doesn’t anticipate hiring full-time in-house coun- sel until his revenues top the $200- to $300-million mark. “The days when all in-house counsel did was direct outside counsel are long gone,” Ho says. Cognition tends to focus on corporate/commercial law,regulatory compli- ance, employment and staffing issues. However, the firm does not engage in highly specialized areas, such as patent AUTOMNE 2010 CCCA Canadian Corporate Counsel Association 37