Page 15 - CCCA Magazine Winter 2017

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It Can be Done

Schuster is not alone when it comes to responsibility for mak- or delivery service with a feet of vehicles could tap.
ing money. He likens it to a private labeling service for insured and un-
Gord Davies, Executive Vice President, Chief Legal Offcer insured claims. “We’ve got extra capacity.”
and Corporate Development at OpenText Corporation, for ex- “It’s a long burn,” he says of the law frm’s development, “but
ample, oversees his software company’s compliance program, does it take in more than what goes out? The answer is yes.”
which audits clients to make sure they are onside with their He says managing claims in-house for BT’s fleet delivers
software licenses, a service that generates revenue for the com- benefits at the EBIDTA level to BT in “the low millions,”
pany. “It’s nice when Legal is not only a cost centre but also con- noting that BT vehicle-related claims brought in £14 mil-
tributing on the revenue side,” he says. lion last year.
Companies like DuPont and Ford have both spoken pub- There have been additional benefts to the creation of BT
licly about their legal department’s efforts to bring in money Law. “One of the non-fnancial benefts is that the team thinks
through loss recovery programs. like a business now,” he says.
Then there’s British Telecom Group (BT) in the U.K. When Then there’s DuPont Company, the 800-pound gorilla when
that country’s legal regulator permitted the creation of alterna- it comes to evolving a law department. In the 1990s, it revamped
tive business structures, BT’s legal department saw an opportu- the way it delivered legal services and the role of the law depart-
nity to leverage its existing investment in its claims services and ment under then General Counsel Tom Sager, who is now in
its in-house legal department of 80 legal and support profession- private practice at the U.S. law frm Ballard Spahr LLP.
als. It created BT Law Limited, a captive law frm within the legal That included employing what it called a loss recovery pro-
department, to market claims services to external parties. gram to shift the needle on how law departments approached
“We are all under pressure and therefore the impetus is to revenue generation and the lawyer’s role in it. In an interview,
go shake the tree and see if any money falls out,” says Dan Fitz, Sager explains that “every practice area was assigned a leader to
General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of BT Group, which identify opportunities for recovery.”
owns BT Law. It meant adopting the “mindset of a plaintiff attorney” and
BT Law provides services to external clients in three areas: looking for wrongdoers, he says. No stone was left unturned
motor claims, public liability and legal liability. and everything from seeking recovery in bankruptcy to anti-
The team handles legal issues for feets totalling 43,000 com- trust suits, commercial spats with business suppliers, mistakes
mercial and non-commercial vehicles with more than 6,000 and insurance claims were fair game.
third-party and uninsured loss claims annually, and another He calls it a “programmatic” effort, rather than ad hoc. It
5,800 claims related to public liability and 400 accident and has to be a “very data driven, disciplined process,” he says of
disease claims involving employees. With little to no market- assessing claims, noting that when a company threatens to sue
ing, revenues in fscal 2017 hit £378,000, up 50% from the prior customers or suppliers, the latter can “get their back up.”
year. What started out as a money-losing operation in 2013 is However, the focus wasn’t litigation. In fact, very few of the
now proftable, adding almost £60,000 to its parent company’s matters ended up in court. Most were settled through negotia-
bottom line after tax. tions and arbitration. The attention was on enforcing the com-
Fitz admits, “It’s an experiment.” pany’s rights under existing contracts and laws.
The company was already paying to manage its own feet The key, he says, is that the claims must be legitimate. Those
claims. In fact, it repatriated the work from different law frms brought forward were “well documented” and in some cases
across the U.K. to get better effciency and build a more uni- brought recovery within a matter of months.
form, consistent service across the country, so it was a chance to
leverage that investment.
“We don't accept conficted work,” Fitz notes. “Our frst pri-
ority is to look after BT.” For example, it’s a service that a courier

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