About

As chief legal officer and vice president at Bruce Power, Brian Hilbers leads a large team of 350. Although cost control during litigation has proven to be the biggest challenge for Hilbers, he has managed to implement various strong project management skills to ensure that the cost of legal services has remained at a 10 ten year low. Hilbers and his team have completely revamped the approach the legal department has taken in providing value added legal services. ‘The organisation I inherited was a high performing organisation using “first generation” value add and cost control approaches to the provision of in-house legal services’. He has been instrumental in evolving it to “second generation” of value add and cost control by re-evaluating the work done by in-house counsel using technology, metrics, data mining and other approaches to reduce ‘commodity-type’ legal work, thus freeing lawyers to focus on work of higher value. Secondly, he has moved away from external counsel blended rates to ensure the right and most efficient use of external counsel. Hilbers has also optimised the team by implementing strong project management skills both in-house and with their preferred external legal service providers. When asked about the highlight of his career Hilbers says: ‘Client satisfaction is one of the biggest measures of value added legal services. We have driven up client satisfaction scores to 87%, which is well within the 90th percentile of all in-house departments. This has been raised from the 75th percentile during a three year period’. This value, Hilbers says, is calculated by measuring and reporting to the executive team a set of factors, including the client satisfaction rate, the percent of in-house time spent on corporate strategic issue and litigation management cost and exposure ratio.