Law Department Management Blog

Process maps used to guide much management thinking. Clumps of consultants and teams of clients would spend unlimited hours and dollars describing processes with arrows, triangles, squares, and elaborate inscriptions. Law departments have process mapped how litigation is handled, how patents are obtained, the way bills are reviewed, and how files are created.

Usually the process map describes the “as is” situation. Recommendations then focus on the “future state” of the reengineered process. By depicting the many steps and the decision points of a process, one could supposedly identify areas for streamlining.

It is very important to understand processes, I hasten to add, so you can make recommendations for improving them. But I doubt the cost effectiveness of preparing elaborate descriptions of the old process – especially using the specialized techniques and software tools that process mapping requires.

Process maps used to guide much management thinking. Clumps of consultants and teams of clients would spend unlimited hours and dollars describing processes with arrows, triangles, squares, and elaborate inscriptions. Law departments have process mapped how litigation is handled, how patents are obtained, the way bills are reviewed, and how files are created.

Usually the process map describes the “as is” situation. Recommendations then focus on the “future state” of the reengineered process. By depicting the many steps and the decision points of a process, one could supposedly identify areas for streamlining.

It is very important to understand processes, I hasten to add, so you can make recommendations for improving them. But I doubt the cost effectiveness of preparing elaborate descriptions of the old process – especially using the specialized techniques and software tools that process mapping requires.

The conclusion of my review of a university’s law department coincided with the annual conference of the Association of College and University Attorneys. My client invited the general counsels of five leading universities to gather for a few hours at the end of their conference. I presented eight or ten issues that had arisen in my review — setting aside issues that were specific to individuals.

My client carried on by describing his organizational and reporting structure. Each general counsel gave his or her matching description. That portion of the session alone was quite valuable. More valuable even than that were the discussions thereafter on specific topics, such as having a deputy or providing technology support or using a receptionist.

Most general counsel belong to groups (See my post of Feb. 20 about groups for general counsel and March 24, 2005 about a UK group.) and can find occasions to bring together some of their peers to discuss management issues

I firmly believe that we can best understand law departments, or try to understand those frustratingly complex creations, if we apply the insights of systems theory. Part of doing so is to have a model or a framework. A useful one has been developed by McKinsey, which is commonly known as the “7S Framework.”

The seven components (here’s a clue: they each start with an “s”) are structure, style, skills, shared values, systems, staffing, and strategy. It’s possible to analyze a law department reasonably well using those components. Much more can be said about this McKinsey framework, but its core proposition holds that a law department operates best when all seven components are in alignment.

Law departments often use the Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats tool and its four quadrants in an effort to analyze their strategic position. Its strength is simplicity and superficial explanatory power. Its weaknesses, however, cause me not to discard the tool.

One problem is that a characteristic can be both a strength and a weakness. For example, technology or leverage could be judged either one. Second, few SWOT analyses put priorities on strengths or weaknesses. They are an undifferentiated mass. Third, a strength or weakness should be relative to the characteristic at some other law firm or law department. If it is compared to some platonic ideal (“We don’t communicate well”), the list could go on forever and lack reference to reality.

Fourth, internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats overlap. For example, it might be a weakness to have only one international office, but that observation has an implicit notion about the external threat of global competitors. I also believe that a law department could state most strengths as the inverse of a weakness, and vice versa: “We don’t have e-billing” (weakness) is probably the converse of “We have a successful manual bill review process” (strength).

Finally, but not exhausting SWOT’s shortcomings, the four quadrants are all interlocked and to talk about one separately from the others may appeal analytically but leaves out the complexity and inter-connectedness of a law department. (See the following post on law departments as systems.)