Page 28 - CCCA 259155 Magazine_Winter 2016

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HOW DATA IS RESHAPING THE IN-HOUSE ROLE

By Jennifer Lewington

In 2014, Charles McCarragher and his legal team at TD Bank Group
faced a problem familiar to in-house counsel: too much work
and not enough people to do it.

ore staff, in his view, was not the answer. “Adding lanes Working with McCarthy Tétrault LLP, a long-time strategic
to the highway is not the way you solve rush-hour traf- partner of the bank, and Exigent Group Ltd., a global provider
Mfc,” says Mr. McCarragher, Assistant Vice-President Legal of legal process outsourcing services, the Canadian TD legal
(Technology), especially without a quantitative explanation for commercial contracts team gathered internal data to analyze
“we’re busy.” Instead, he turned to data analytics—the business and conduct a triage of incoming work. Assisted by its two
of mining internal and external company information to drive external partners, TD developed precedents, playbooks and
decisions—a strategy gaining ground with in-house counsel as resources guides to ensure that commercial contracts serviced
they look to manage growing demand for legal services and add through the model met internal bank procedures and legal de-
value to an organization’s bottom line. partment standards, according to McCarragher.
“There is a high level of acknowledgement that data analyt- McCarthy lawyers, aided by Exigent where appropriate,
ics is central to the discharge of a general counsel’s mandate,” now handle the bank’s medium-risk contracts, becoming a
says Deloitte Partner David Stewart, co-author of the consult- proxy for TD’s in-house lawyers for the fundamental fle work.
ing company’s annual General Counsel Report. “The question is, As well, McCarthy and Exigent apply technology, processes
‘Are they happy with where they are today and do they feel they and reporting to track certain commercial contract provisions
are optimizing the data and tools to their full advantage?' A lot identifed by the bank.
of people would say there is a lot of room for improvement.” McCarragher describes the new model as
At TD, the need to rethink contract review procedures came a cost-effective, effcient and scalable re-
to a head in 2014. source that generates a rich source of data
With the quantity of work “increasing year over year,” Mc- on contracts and gives TD an “effective and
Carragher’s fve-person team spent about 75% of their time on prudent way” to service lower-risk work and
high-risk legal matters—the equivalent of 10-20% of work vol- keep high-priority assignments in-house.
ume on an annual basis. Only 20% of the time was left for low-
to-medium risk issues that accounted for 80-90% of the volume “Enabling the model was fundamentally based
and still required scrutiny. on the data that TD had been collecting for the past
Rather than hire more in-house lawyers, he used data to ap- three years,” he says. “Without the data, it would have been very
proximate the annual workload of one lawyer on staff, includ- diffcult to understand the opportunity and to ultimately devise
ing the quantity, type and risk levels associated with the port- a resourcing model to allow members on the legal team to focus
folio. That information fueled a discussion with external law on what really mattered for the bank.”
frms on alternate resource models for some of the legal work. Beyond workfow, patterns of information provide in-house
In 2015, a hybrid model took shape. counsel with material for evidence-based discussions about
corporate strategy.

28 CCCA MAGAZINE | WINTER 2016 HIVER