Law Department Management Blog

In the Nat’l L.J., Vol. 29, Jan. 8, 2007 at 8, there is a profile of Matthew Fawcett, the general counsel of JDS Uniphase Corp. Fawcett describes how his time is distributed: “25% is devoted to management, 20% to corporate matters, 15% to intellectual property, 15% commercial concerns, another 15% to mergers and acquisitions and material deal issues, and 10% to ‘potpourri’.”

I presume that “management” has to do with running the law department, which comprises 30 lawyers and professionals in four countries. Maybe not, however. Most general counsel might describe a similar breakout, with some having less on intellectual property and others having a category for “participation as a member of executive management” and “board and senior executive advice” (See my post of Aug. 28, 2005 on the role and term “consiglieri.”). Possibly Fawcett includes this facet of a general counsel’s role in “management,” but then when does he lead and manage the law department?

All processes can produce data (See my posts of April 27, May 1, and Oct. 16, 2006 generally on law department processes.). Since processes happens repeatedly, someone can count input, elapsed time, participants, output or all of these. The contract review process comes to mind as an example. Any law department can quantify the number of contracts it handles, turnaround times, sources and kinds of contracts, time spent by lawyers and paralegals on the contracts and the varieties of work done on them, the dollar volume covered, number executed, issues arising, and many other quantifiable aspects. In fact, any process spawns an infinite amount of data.

Data, however, does not fully represent what happens during the process, because inherent in processes are many instances of lawyers drawing on tacit knowledge or experiential judgment. To stay with the contract review, it may be that the in-house lawyer has dealt with the other party before, or the combination of representations made in the agreement bodes ill. Data can’t do justice to the complexity of a legal process, but the data is always there. Where there’s the smoke of numbers there’s a smoldering process.

According to a piece in MIT’s Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 48, Winter 2007 at 11, if you perceive a product or service as a commodity you will stunt your creativity about it. In the author’s words, “the fatal lure of the commodity ideology is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.” The economics of “good enough” innovation become good enough and the potential for change and improvement is consciously or unconsciously undervalued.

Sip and fall lawsuits may be high-volume and low challenge; workers comp issues seem to most people to be administrative and barely legal; nothing much new arises in a sea of bankruptcy claim filings – all of these services are perceived as legal child’s play, commodity work, except by practitioners.

Simply because a certain legal service is frequently done and many lawyers are competent to perform it does not at all mean that someone can’t provide that service much more effectively nor devise a breakthrough service proposition. To label work as commodity work is conclusory, dismissive, and not conducive to thoughtful and creative management.