A profile of the Teri McClure, the General Counsel of UPS, has three points of idiosyncratic interest to this blog host. First, according to InsideCounsel, Jan. 2007 at page 76-7, she became the general counsel when her predecessor, Alan Hill, "stepped down as general counsel … to become vice president of human resources." (emphasis added) Now we know how UPS’s legal and personnel functions rate!

The second notable point is that the department tries “to have all of our attorneys participate in a district [business operations] experience.” Some of the lawyers spend a week on the front lines, some several weeks or even a month. Now we know how to understand the business!

The final point of note is that “about half of the attorneys here [in the UPS law department] started with the organization on the operations side, went to law school at night and then joined the legal department.” I assume UPS paid for their law school education. Now we know how to recruit business-savvy, dedicated lawyers!

In several of my consulting projects I have helped my client law departments compile a representation of their management history. In the form of a timeline, it depicts changes in the department’s size, locations and spending in relation to significant external events. The events include acquisitions, divestitures, organizational restructurings, revenue milestones, government investigations and others.

The diorama on paper pulls together an assortment of useful background information. The resulting map can be useful, such as how it correlates the number of lawyers in the department and their specialties to various changes in the company and to outside counsel spending. A retreat or off-site is a good place to display the results.

General Motors Detroit-based legal department employs 107 attorneys and 109 support staff. The department chose Mitratech’s TeamConnect and then both designed and implemented an impressive set of modules. The integrated modules include "document management, records retention, off-site storage management, regulatory reporting and rule compliance, intellectual property, litigation support, and issue and problem tracking."

Further, according to InsideCounsel, Jan. 2007 at 2 (Mitratech Special Section ad), GM's legal department also has modules for matter management and budget controls.

Nine applications! There are a few others I have run into, such as corporate secretary and subsidiary tracking, board books (See my posts of July 19, 2006 on board software, Aug. 9, 2006 on the merger of corporate secretary and Board software; Oct. 1, 2006 on matter management software joined with corporate service-of-process software; and Jan. 24, 2006 for ten corporate-secretary applications.), and options tracking, but this is an impressive collection.

Quite a few positions in law departments end up being molded to the lawyer’s background, preferences, and styles (See my post of March 16, 2006 on A-positions more than A-players.). This makes sense because “It turns out that a surprisingly high percentage of jobs are idiosyncratic, created, designed and customized to fit the preferences and skills of some unique person,” in the words of Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Harvard Bus. School Press 2006) at 81.

A high-performance law department might not comfortably be described by a traditional org chart. The gifted manager in a law department makes the most of the talent available, shifting and adjusting responsibilities and workloads to best match positions and roles to the paralegal or lawyer.

It was a small item, but it touches a topic many readers may never consider: how secure from third parties is the information in electronic bills transmitted by law firms?

An item about Utica National Insurance Group, which uses billing review software from Allegient Systems, mentions that “every legal invoice submitted will be subject to a highly secure (128 bit encryption) communication link.” Every bit of me is impressed, all 128 of them, but I have no basis for comparison or experience to understand the issue. Has anyone ever hacked into a law department’s e-billing system?

According to a recent piece in Agenda Week, Boards of Directors are intruding more and more on the selection of the company's general counsel. According to one board member, "the board should never outright veto a candidate the CEO is considering because their role is to offer recommendations without dictating who the General Counsel will be."

A wise CEO should consult with the Chairman of the Board and maybe with the heads of important board committees, but the decision of whom to hire or promote to general counsel rests with the CEO. The trust and respect between those two officers is the paramount consideration.

According to the European Company Lawyers Association website, “In the US there are about a dozen companies offering on line selection services of law firms. In Europe the choice is limited to London based First Law www.firstlaw.com and Legal BenchMarket International B.V. (“LBI”) www.legalbenchmarket.com in The Hague.”

The ECLA describes First Law as mainly active in the UK where it conducts an in-depth analysis of the legal aspects of the matter, assigns a professional agent (the case manager) who not only selects but also monitors the legal work from start to finish. Fees are generally paid by the law firm.

Legal BenchMarket is mainly active on the continent (> 15 countries). LBI does not divulge the identity of the client until the short list selection is complete, so that law firms submit bids on the work described in a Request For Proposal and cannot take into account the attractiveness of the client, hence there can be no “reputation billing” or low-ball bidding. Legal BenchMarket’s fee is always paid by the client and is a percentage of the realized savings against a pre-agreed benchmark.

If any readers know about the US companies that provide similar services, I would appreciate your e-mailing me.

One hundred percent of the readers of this blog should realize that I like statistical analyses, think they are insightful, and wish the law department industry had more and better statistics (See my posts of May 31, 2006 urging in-house counsel to become comfortable with statistics; Sept. 4, 2005 on Richard Thaler and the value of statistics and evidence in decisions; and Sept. 4, 2005 on how legal intuition should yield more often to metrics.).

Let’s catalogue the appearances on this blog of 20 or so statistics terms or concepts:

See my posts of Jan. 20, 2006 on Bayesian statistics; May 31, July 25, and Oct. 24, 2005 on bell curves; April 5 and May 10, 2005 on correlation and Jan. 14, 2007 on the amount of variance in an independent variable explained by correlation; June 30, 2006 on several dispersion statistics; Oct. 22, 2006 on Gini coefficients; June 6, 2006 on trend-line equations with least squares calculation; Jan. 3, 2007 and March 10, 2005 on linear and exponential growth; Jan. 14, 2007 on log-log analyses; Dec. 9, 2005 on margin of error; Nov. 30, 2005 on mean, median and average; May 31, 2005 and Jan. 1, 2006 on normalized data; Nov. 13, 2005 on power laws, and bell curves; Aug. 14, 2005 on regression analysis and Feb. 7, 2006 on regression to the mean; Jan. 6, 2006 on rolling averages; Nov. 25, 2006 on weighted averages and references cited; Nov. 6, 2006 on standard deviation; and June 19, 2006 and Feb. 8, 2006 [lawyers and productivity] and Dec. 8, 2006 [patents and financial performance] on statistical significance.

An item in MIT’s Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 48, Winter 2007 at 6, distinguishes between developmental coaching, where a supervisor addresses an individual’s knowledge or performance gaps, and executive coaching, which is more about peer guidance and addresses differences in behavior and managerial style.

In either situation, "coaching is set to address specific performance deficiencies or gaps, as opposed to general-purpose training."

For lawyers in-house, the equivalent of executive coaching is more likely to be the appropriate technique (See my posts of April 14, 2005 on coaches for general counsel; July 14, 2005 on knowledge coaches; April 30, 2006 on the looseness of the term “mentor”; and July 14, 2005 on the difference between a mentor and a coach.). For those lawyers, on the upper rungs of the corporate ladder, basic skills and knowledge are presumed, but more subtle behavioral adjustments may be needed.

One of the bubbles burst in Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Harvard Bus. School Press 2006) at 49 is that managers remember well and therefore learn accurately from the past. There is “an enormous problem with inferences based on recollection.” Humans have terrible memories, and worse, according to the authors, those lousy memories are further distorted when events are labeled successes or failures. As the authors put it, “using reports from winners and losers to find ways to turn your … team into a winner is questionable at best.”

Unfortunately, journalists, consultants, and others outside law departments depend on participants from a law department to recall how the department triumphed. Their memories are incomplete, changeable, and biased. In all likelihood, revisionist history runs rampant.