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{ FEATURE }

Earlier this year, with an eye to boosting pro- Last year, Pepin introduced time-tracking to identify issues
ductivity, Pepin wanted to identify potential handled by her team, with a view to better allocate client as-
distractions for her eight-member legal team. signments. The analysis showed that several lawyers spent at
A quarterly report on departmental activities least 15% of their time on HR matters—the equivalent of more
revealed that a high volume of queries took than 150% of a full-time headcount. That information created
less than an hour of a lawyer’s time. “It’s a business case to add a dedicated employment lawyer, freeing
what I call the ‘noise’—the small stuff—that other lawyers to focus on the top legal priorities.
interrupts you from your priorities,” she says. A member of Hootsuite’s executive leadership, Pepin says
data analytics is transforming the role of the general counsel.
In response, her department introduced “offce hours” for “The traditional key performance indicator of the legal depart-
small-scale requests, leading to a 50% drop in the volume by the ment has always been satisfaction and service levels. It doesn’t
third quarter of this year. “Instead of sending 15 emails a week, cut it these days,” she says.
they come and see us between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. on Tuesday Elsewhere, data analytics can frame an organization’s strat-
morning and we hash through all of their requests,” she says.
egy in labour negotiations.
As Chief Negotiator, HR Services at McMaster University,
Geoff Tierney oversees bargaining with faculty, support staff
CCCA Mines and other unionized employees at the Hamilton, Ont., post-
secondary institution.
“Before we even get to the [bargaining] table, we use data
“Little Data” to analytics to create a compensation mandate using a whole set of
Serve Members factors internally and externally,” he says, such as salary ranges
for comparable unionized workers in the region or at other uni-
versities. McMaster has customized a Microsoft Excel spread-
With “big data,” computers harness complex batches of in- sheet to track an array of line-item costs, from vacation pay and
formation to generate insights about trends and behaviour. taxes to salaries and workers’ compensation payments.
But “little data” has its place too.
“Everything is data-based driven now; we cost everything,”
Six years ago, the CCCA carried out an analysis of who he says. “If I don’t know what it costs, I don’t propose it.”
attends the organization’s annual National Conference, says For now, some in-house counsel are feeling their way on data
Executive Director Cathy Cummings. The data revealed a analytics.
worrisome gender disparity: men accounted for more than
70% of 350 attendees despite a 50-50 male-female split “We are trying to integrate more into some as-
among CCCA’s 4,700 members. pects of our internal practice,” says Matthew
“The next year we changed the conference program to Hawkins, Vice-President, Legal Counsel and
make sure there was a keynote on diversity, on women Corporate Secretary at Colliers International
in the boardroom, for example, and to make sure that Group Inc., but describes the effort as still
speakers were a minimum of 50% women,” she says. The “in its infancy.” Still, he sees potential to
redesigned program “moved the needle,” with National harness data to improve his department’s
Conference attendance now closer to a 50-50 gender split. ability to communicate about risk manage-
CCCA staff also examined internal information to spot demo- ment and apply the knowledge to “right-size”
graphic differences between those who attend the National resources (such as differentiating between low- and high-
Conference and the In-House Counsel World Summit, which priority legal tasks).
attracts around 500 attendees from around the world.
TD’s McCarragher praises the unheralded contribution of
“We used that recognition of the differences in the demo- analytics to a positive work environment, ensuring the most
graphics in our marketing,” says Cummings, targeting The important, professionally challenging assignments remain in-
Globe and Mail Top 100 companies for the domestic Con- house. With a deeper understanding of workfow and the life
ference and those on the Fortune 500 list for the Summit. cycle of a typical transaction, McCarragher and his team can
“I have become more focused on making data-driven deci- identify ineffciencies in the contracting process and de-bunk
sions where we can,” she says. the stereotype of the legal department as a bottleneck.
For instance, the CCCA is currently reviewing the class “I have a general motto with the team: for them, I want this
profle of its Business Leadership Program for In-House to be the best place to work on Bay Street,” he says. “One way
Counsel delivered in collaboration with the Rotman to get to that goal is to make sure you have the right balance of
School of Management. Gleaning information on working on the right things.” ❚
participants, says Cummings, “will help
us with our marketing in the future to
expand the program. Jennifer Lewington is a writer based in Stratford, Ontario.

30 CCCA MAGAZINE | WINTER 2016 HIVER