Business and Regulatory Law Portfolio Evaluation

5. Conclusions, Recommendations and Management Response

This section of the report presents conclusions based on the findings outlined in the previous sections. The information is structured along the main evaluation issues.

5.1. Relevance

There continues to be a need for the BRLP’s legal services which are aligned with federal government priorities and roles and responsibilities, and the strategic outcomes of the Department of Justice.

The Portfolio’s activities are inherently aligned with federal government priorities in that BRLP counsel respond to legal services requests related to the existing and emerging priorities of client departments and agencies, which in turn respond to the priorities and policy directions of the federal government. Under the Department of Justice Act, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General is responsible for providing legal services to federal government’s departments and agencies, and the Treasury Board of Canada’s Common Services Policy identifies Justice Canada as the mandatory provider of legal services for federal departments and agencies. The BRLP supports the Department of Justice in meeting its strategic outcome of ‘a federal government that is supported by high-quality legal services’ by providing legal advisory, litigation and legislative services to federal departments and agencies. The Portfolio’s positive client feedback suggests that its services are of high quality.

5.2. Performance

Overall, the evaluation found that the Portfolio delivers high-quality legal services that are timely, responsive and useful. Additionally, counsel are generally very conscious of the need to ‘speak with one voice’ and consult widely in order to provide consistent legal advice. However, the provision of regular and informative progress reports was identified as an area for improvement as clients who are not in regular contact with counsel (e.g. through recurrent meetings) generally mentioned having to seek updates on their requests for legal services. Notwithstanding this limitation, the evaluation findings indicate that clients are generally very satisfied with the legal services they have received from the BRLP.

Recommendation 1:

That the Business and Regulatory Law Portfolio determine if there are ways of improving the provision of regular and informative progress reports in order to better meet the needs of its clients in this regard.

Management Response:

Agreed.

BRLP is committed to delivering high quality legal services to its clients and will ensure adherence of service standards as stated in the Annex A of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with client departments and agencies.

Although counsel perceive themselves as delivering high-quality legal services that meet departmental standards, they identified several factors that constrain their ability to do so, including: an increased volume of administrative related work (e.g. opening and closing files, legal risk management requirements in iCase, timekeeping, reporting and filing), a lack of administrative and paralegal support, and less staff to do the work.

As the largest and most decentralized of the Department’s portfolios, information exchange and communication across the BRLP is a vital aspect of operations. The sharing of secret information between different areas of the Portfolio and the lack of a fluid IT interface between Justice Headquarters and the DLSUs were frequently identified as challenges in terms of information sharing within the Portfolio, though these are larger departmental issues that are not limited to the BRLP.

Whereas the evaluation found that collaboration with the specialized sections of Justice generally seems to be occurring successfully, collaboration with the AAP does not appear to be quite as effective, which respondents attributed to the lack of standardized practices with respect to how BRLP and AAP counsel are to work together (e.g. when BRLP counsel must seek advice from AAP, who to consult within AAP and how to engage AAP). There also appears to be a lack of clarity around the respective roles of DLSU and regional counsel when they work together on a litigation file and, although they tend to proactively delineate their respective roles and responsibilities, opportunities exist for this delineation to take place more systematically.

Recommendation 2:

That the Business and Regulatory Law Portfolio apply project management principles to clarify, at the outset of all litigation files, the roles and responsibilities of each team member.

Management Response:

Agreed.

It is important that respective roles and responsibilities are clearly delineated to ensure that legal service delivery is effective and efficient.

Half of regional and DLSU counsel who were surveyed as part of the evaluation were unable to rate the effectiveness of their collaboration with the CLS. Despite the low number of survey respondents who appear to have collaborated with the Section, internal documentation indicates that the level of demand for the Section’s services has been growing since it was re-established in 2009. Three-quarters of the survey respondents who provided an assessment indicated that the collaboration between their work unit and the CLS is effective. Respondents who rated their collaboration with the CLS less favorably generally indicated that it had been difficult obtaining assistance from the Section, which they attributed to a lack of staff. An equal number of respondents also expressed a desire for more concise, practical and easy to understand advice and products from the Section to inform the advice they provide to the client.

The DLSUs and the regional offices are expected to coordinate and manage significant legal issues (e.g. high impact files, files involving multiple clients) with assistance from the ADMO, as needed. Although there are no formal structures in place for managing files of this kind, BRLP managers provided positive feedback regarding the ADMO’s involvement in this regard.

Case study findings also indicate that legal working groups consisting of the various counsel involved in multi-departmental files have been put in place. These working groups are nimble and flexible in that the distribution of roles and responsibilities that occurs in them shift as files evolve. The delineation of roles and responsibilities tends to depend on the implication of the various client departments and the workload of counsel. Counsel are able to obtain information on varying facets of the file through their participation on the legal working group, thereby enabling them to better advise their clients based on a larger context. However, the evaluation also found some redundancies with this approach (e.g. multiple counsel review written advice and products).

Economy and Efficiency

The Department’s change management initiatives such as Legal Services Review and Process Optimization are contributing greatly to a culture of economy and efficiency within the Portfolio. Through these initiatives, the BRLP has been actively engaged in implementing measures such as ‘Managing Demand’ that are aimed at maximizing the achievement of results, while minimizing the use of resources. In order to manage demand, the Portfolio’s DLSUs have been actively involved in screening and prioritizing client requests for legal services, most notably by developing templates for standard legal documents, meeting with the client to establish priorities, and raising awareness of Process Optimization. There was documented evidence of counsel declining their involvement in non-legal work (e.g. participating in meetings and on committees and reviewing documents where legal issues were not involved). However, on some of the case study files reviewed, there were instances where clients were relying on counsel to do non-legal work for which they would otherwise be responsible, such as front-end information gathering, policy development, and project coordination on the program side of a legal file.

Through Legal Services Review, the Portfolio has streamlined its organizational structure, decreased the number of FTEs in the Portfolio, and contained its salary and operations and management expenditures over the evaluation period. However, the evaluation found that there are opportunities for improvement regarding the level of paralegal support available to BRLP counsel, particularly in the DLSUs. Although the Department more generally is taking steps to increase the level of paralegal support available to counsel by creating a central pool of paralegals, it is too early to say what effect this initiative will have on the level of paralegal support available within the Portfolio.

Recommendation 3:

That the Business and Regulatory Law Portfolio monitor the impact of the new paralegal pool with a view to ensuring that DLSU counsel have sufficient access to needed paralegal support.

Management Response:

Agreed.

We agree that there is a need to monitor the use of and need for paralegal services in DLSUs. This includes but is not restricted to the reliance on the paralegal pool whose mandate is to provide services when there is a temporary surge of work.