Legal Feeds Blog

Thursday, 21 June 2012 13:01

Canadian company among Value Champions

The Association of Corporate Counsel has named a Canadian company among its Value Champions.

Although RBC was recognized for a program south of the border, it also offers similar programs in Canada, notes Todd Schnell..

RBC Capital Markets, along with Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP, was chosen for tailoring its fee structures while cutting employment law spending by 35 per cent.

New this year, the Value Champions program is a component of the ACC Value Challenge, a tool to encourage law departments to “use management practices to enhance the value of legal service spending.” The Value Champions initiative recognizes law departments that find new ways to deliver value to their clients.

Although RBC was recognized for a program south of the border, it also offers similar programs in Canada.

“The program that we were recognized for was specific to an alternative billing program that we are doing here in the United States on employment-related matters. The employment laws in the U.S. and Canada are quite a bit different,” Todd Schnell, vice president and senior associate general counsel at RBC Capital Markets, tells Legal Feeds.

“Our Canadian counterparts are always looking for value-based fee arrangements and they have some very innovative programs in place. In the U.S. we were attempting to replicate that,” he says.

RBC is also looking to implement this program with other Canadian law firms, he says.

“We do have a number of these different types of arrangements in Canada and several of those were actually nominated as well,” says Schnell. “We feel that, in the firms that we work with in Canada, that we have some really innovative and good ideas that should be recognized.”

The steering committee of the ACC Value Challenge chose 12 champions out of 61 nominations. The winners include:
•   GlaxoSmithKline
•   The Home Depot
•   Lucchini S.p.A.
•   Medtronic
•   Pfizer Inc.
•   Rockwell Collins and Seyfarth Shaw LLP
•   The Sherwin-Williams Co. and Gallagher Sharp
•   Target and Nilan Johnson Lewis P.A.
•   Tyco International Ltd. and Shook Hardy & Bacon LLP
•   United Retirement Plan Consultants and Porter Wright Morris & Arthur LLP
•   Whirlpool Corp. and Wheeler Trigg O’Donnell LLP

“The ones we selected stood out not only because of significant results, but for their examples of interesting innovations or practices that could be easily replicated by others,” said Jeffrey Carr, senior vice president, general counsel, and secretary of FMC Technologies Inc., in a release. “As a longtime advocate for change in our profession, I’m excited to see so many corporate counsel, and especially GCs and CLOs, along with their firms, effectively proving their value as business partners.”

Update 5 p.m.: Photo added.