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particularly risky area. Daniel Bourque, senior corporate counsel and chief privacy officer at Xerox Corp. Canada, says more and more of his company's business is being outsourced overseas. Services must be maintained, but geography can make overseeing the processes, and keeping a handle on potential danger areas, more difficult. Bourque says: "We need to get a hold on laws in different jurisdictions — which laws apply, and how we handle the issues." Disaster recovery plans are put in place so the company is prepared for any incident that may arise. Being a subsidiary of a U.S. firm brings additional challenges, especially because the biggest risks facing Xerox are related to privacy breaches, and the U.S. lacks overarching privacy legislation such as Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. This means the U.S. is not classed as a "Safe Harbour" country by the European Union and firms with international operations must undergo a certification process to prove they will safeguard clients' privacy. Bourque says methodically assessing risk in this way is highly valuable. "In this day and age, where everything is more and more almost exclusively held in electronic media, it focuses you to think about what it is we're doing and how we handle information." York University also recently experienced the challenges of mitigating risk in an international environment when a researcher received a federal grant for work in Kenya that involved constructing a school. This was around the time of the March general elections and, as Silversides acknowledges, "Kenya's not necessarily the most politically safe environment." Around 1,200 people were killed and 600,000 displaced in the aftermath of the previous election, in 2007. The university had a long list of risks to assess, including: "What kind of risks are we taking by sending our people, by having a school built on land in Kenya? What's the land title system in Kenya like, how do you own land in Kenya, how do you make sure the money is flowing through to the right people and being used for the things it's meant to be?" In the end, a decision was made that staff would not visit the country, and York paired up with a local university, that had a better understanding of the legal system, to build the school and take on a share of the risk. Risk management is not the same as being risk averse; the in-house counsel role is to find ways to move business goals forward. The solutions will only come from regular interaction with colleagues, a determination to make risk management a priority, and the open-mindedness to tackle risks that lie beyond one's immediate legal comfort zone. As Silversides says: "I know that a lot of organizations have their beautiful little risk management policy that goes on the shelf. It hasn't developed into an organic collaborative culture. That's the key . . . a lot of it is personality." IH Employment and Labour Lawyers Experience Counts. Referrals respected and appreciated. Shields O'Donnell MacKillop LLP 416.304.6400 65 Queen Street W, Suite 1800, Toronto, Ontario Canada M5H 2M5 Shields_IH_Apr_11.indd 1 w w w. c a n a d i a n law y er m a g . c o m / i n h o u s E october3/1/11 10:04:5637 2013 • AM

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