As law firms grow into the thousands of lawyers, thus enabling and rewarding more and more specialization; as partnership decisions tighten, thus rewarding practitioners versed in narrower and narrower areas of law; as clients merge and grow, thus encountering more sophisticated legal issues and seeking just the right spice for the precise recipe, the pressure for lawyers to specialize intensifies. But specialists, whether in the company or outside, strike a Faustian bargain. Technocrats know trees and bushes; generalist counselors gain the laurels.

Most CEOs and Boards want a general counsel who has judgment, whose legal experience combined with commercial instincts encompass business broadly and the law more broadly. The problem is that the private law firm world admires those who know an area of law inside and out, who wrote the treatise, but the law department world favors those who know the world and have breadth of vision.

(As a meta-post on specialists, see my posts in 2005 of Sept. 10 on large law departments and specialization, July 16 on multi-sourcing specialty firms, July 30 on dual reporting of in-house specialists, July 14 on single points of contact, and Nov. 8 on use of outside counsel by inside specialists.)

I interview many law department lawyers who are not direct reports to the general counsel. These intermediate and junior level lawyers consistently complain about the insufficiency of communication from the leadership group. They want to know what goes on behind closed doors, among the elite. Sadly, if they actually knew, much of what transpires in the leadership group is page D4 material, not front page. Still, the yearn to learn persists.

The same lawyers usually chime in with a desire to have more communication across the department, between practice groups. They want to know what is going on, almost in a gossipy way. Yet, they never complain about any obligation they might feel to tell those below them about anything.

It’s human nature to want to be in the know; no one wants to feel excluded. But I often wonder what the lawyers think they would do differently having heard all the chatter that would result from so much circulation of communication.

For some years corporate managers of IP litigation debated whether to use IP boutiques or full-service firms. Given the results of research by IP Law & Bus., July 2005 iplawandbusiness.com, mergers of boutiques may be mooting that question. Of the 16 law firms that filed or defended the most patent cases in 2004, eleven were large, multi-line law firms.

The large firms handled 60 percent of the plaintiff cases (185 of the 307) but 54 percent of the defendant cases (185 of 342), although I should note that the firms were not completely the same in each category.

The same piece stated that a 2003 report by the American Intellectual Property Law Association reported the average cost of a case with over $25 million of damages at stake was about $3.9 million. Patent cases with damages of $1 million to $25 million averaged about $2 million. (See my 2005 posts about patent litigation costs on March 6, 10, 29, and May 1, 2005.)

It’s not as useful to get clients’ opinions on the department’s performance considered in total as it is to understand clients’ opinions about different practice groups within the department (See my post of Aug. 28, 2005 on performance and importance.).

Without that specificity of ratings, such as for the IP group or North American widgets or litigation, none of the department’s senior lawyers, responsible for such groups, will fully accept accountability for the results. How do they know that generic criticisms lash them, or praise boosts them?

In some of my client satisfaction surveys, I have included a question along the lines of, “With which group of lawyers did you work most during the past year?” I then analyze the responses according to the groups identified. (See my post of Nov. 21, 2005 about two unusual client satisfaction questions.)

Benchmark metrics typically come in three forms: averages, medians and weighted averages. Think of 11 law departments each pooling data on their percentage of certified paralegals. For the average, total the 11 percentages and divide by 11.

For the median, rank the 11 figures from highest to lowest and pick the middle one (or average the two middle ones if there is an even number of figures).

For the weighted average, add up all the paralegals of the 11 departments and all the certified paralegals and divide the certified total by the paralegal total.

A variation sometimes seen, which avoids the anomalous outliers that can distort averages, yet draws on more of the data than the median, might be called the average of the middle. After ranking the figures, drop the top and bottom quartile (25%) and calculate the average of the middle fifty percent. So, roughly speaking, drop the top two percentages and the bottom two percentages and average the middle seven.

One other statistical descriptor is common. The range comes from subtracting the highest and lowest percentage.

Previous posts mentioned Faegre & Benson’s Client Technology Services (Oct. 21, 2005), Nextra’s discovery specialty (Sept. 13, 2005), British law firms’ on-line offerings (Oct. 17, 2005), and ADR/CMS’s litigation management assistance (Sept. 13, 2005) – all specialized departures from traditional law firm offerings and economic models. Computer Patent Annuities Limited Partnership (CPA), provides a yet another set of alternative services.

CPA, a partnership owned by an international group of patent and trademark attorneys, has approximately 1,000 staff and 60,000 clients(Conspectus, Oct. 2005 at 6 ). Along with handling the typical functions of obtaining patents and trademarks, CPA performs trademark searching, trademark watching, domain name management, and design protection. (See my post of Nov. 28, 2005 on IP trading on-line.)

An interesting capability marketed by CPA involves mapping the patent spending and holdings of competitors against a client’s spending and holdings.

To assist their clients, law departments might want to keep in the back of their mind the possibility of offering R&D work, patents, and trademarks for sale on the internet. A company called Global Commerce & Communications has set up a web site as a forum for buying and selling IP online.

According to a short piece in the Twin Cities Global Bus. Quarterly, Vol. 2, Jan 2004 at 3, anyone can browse for free and anyone can post IP on offer at costs of $100 or more. The company claimed a year ago that the IP-transfer market (excluding licensing, I assume) was then worth an estimated $1 billion.

As with recovering monies, this method empowers law departments to monetize its legal prowess (See my post of Nov. 25, 2005 on law departments sharing in recoveries.)

A 60-page lease with four attachments, a 230-page asset purchase agreement, or a long, intricate document governing a multi-party joint venture: each such complicated legal document, and others, is hard to understand, see as a whole, and explain.

Software that uses visual representations to display the connections between ideas, generally known as mind-mapping software, helps in-house counsel and clients make sense out of density. A recent post caught my eye.

Programs, such as one from Mindjet, let you show how provisions, representations, and other parts of agreements interconnect. The more important parts of the agreement show up prominently, while lesser ideas have less prominence. Mind-mapping software helps also when you are brainstorming, sketching out ideas for a memorandum or article, explaining the McKinsey 7S model, or planning projects.

(Meta-post on exotic software for law departments: see my posts in 2005 of March 24 on document assembly, March 27 on artificial intelligence engines, April 18 on voting software, May 15 on Monte Carlo simulation, May 24 on concept searching, July 21 on text analysis, Aug. 26 on voice recognition, Oct. 20 on knowledge taxonomies, and Oct. 24 on decision trees.)

A study of three law departments, all in defense manufacturing, looked at the percentage of lawyers in the departments whose law schools were listed in the US News and World Report rankings of law schools. Graduates of one of the top 25 law schools accounted for about one-third of lawyers in each of the three departments.

Graduates of schools ranked 26-100, a group with three times more law schools in it than the top 25 group, accounted for about 45 percent of the in-house contingent. The remaining lawyers, about 20 percent overall, graduated from a law school ranked 101 or higher.

The average age of the 250 lawyers in the three departments was just under 48 years, while the average number of years they had practiced law was just under 21 (See my posts of Sept. 4, 2005 on demographics and keeping the experience of aging lawyers and Sept. 25, 2005 on in-house lawyers working on average 6 years before moving into a company.)

When someone in a law department tries to describe a lawyer’s powers of cerebration, the vocabulary likely foils everyone. We know it when we experience it, but we can’t define with discrimination the level of a person’s mental faculties. A recent article (Historically Speaking, Sept./Oct. 2005 at 14) presented a solution.

Fifty some years ago Benjamin Bloom proposed what has become widely accepted as a model of cognitive outcomes . If you want to more clearly explain a lawyer’s thinking level and develop competency maps, try these six levels of increasing mental sophistication.

Knowledge: the lawyer can list, label, name, state and define legal principles, requirements, or steps in the approximate form in which they were learned: “what is a security interest and how to perfect it”

Comprehension: the lawyer can explain, summarize, describe and paraphrase the principle, statute, or steps, which involves a higher level of interpretation and understanding: “the importance and function of security interests”

Application: the lawyer uses and applies the known and comprehended legal information to solve a problem or complete a task: “perfecting a UCC Article 9 security interest in chattel”

Analysis: the lawyer can analyze, categorize, compare and contrast the facts and legal issues of a situation in light of its structure, assumptions and evidence: “does the lender need a mortgage, an Article 9 security interest, a pledge, or another form of collateral”

Synthesis: the lawyer can create, design, develop and invent a service, product, or plan that is new to the lawyer and suitable for the legal challenge: “the lender needs collateral protection in two countries with different legal codes and judicial systems for foreclosure”

Evaluation: the lawyer can judge, recommend, and critique the degree of protection obtained by the lender on the basis of specific standards and criteria: “the lender, having taken the actions prescribed by the lawyer, has an 80-90 percent level of protection upon the borrower’s default, for articulated reasons.”

(See my post of July 31, 2005 on emotional intelligence and Nov. 13, 2005 on broader intelligences.)