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CCCA_V6No2_Q&A_Faure-FIN_CCCA_V6No1_Q&A_Faure 5/23/12 11:57 PM Page 27 Photography by Pierre Charbonneau Cover His mantra: “If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.” Trevor Faure believes in-house law departments can learn a lot from the companies they serve. what events will derail your careful budget or efficiency planning. company in a single jurisdiction learn from this model. Those issues which lawyers are uniquely placed to address — be A Let me split that up, if I may. In the case of first application, they regulatory investigations compliance issues, litigation and the results of the bespoke conclusion was something called restructuring — are subject to a range of factors that lawyers are SMARTER: it happened to have an acronym that was ‘Segment not necessarily there to control: Is there likelihood for settlement? and Subject Management, Regional Teams, and External What are the underlying facts?What are the prospects and appetite Resources’ and the acronym that came as a result of the method- for an appeal?What is the regulatory disposition of a certain coun- ology was called SMARTER. The methodology, in itself, is try? That may well not just affect your spend assessment, but also generic and could apply to any legal department.At the moment, your resource assessment: the expertise you want on your team, I think partly because of the results of globalization, we are find- both internally and externally, and how you spread them either ing a lot of businesses are being led by cross-nation and cross-ter- across subject matter or across nations in the case of multinationals. ritorial subject or segment experts and thus SMARTER fits neat- ly to that multinational model. But there are certainly multi- QYou have described your approach as a bespoke conclusion for a nationals that are regionally driven in which case there may be a vertically managed multinational with many segments,not a panacea different conclusion; the approach in methodology would be the for all legal departments. But you also say that the methods used to same. So, that leads to the second sentence, the methodology arrive at this model could help others design their own “bespoke should be used to reach bespoke conclusions. I am very anxious conclusions.” What can the legal department at a medium-size to emphasize that SMARTER does not denote or prescribe any ÉTÉ 2012 CCCA Canadian Corporate Counsel Association 27