Legal Week, Feb. 8, 2007 at 10, reports on the move by Lovells partner, John Davidson, to lead the SABMiller in-house legal function. Davidson was hired to replace company secretary and general counsel Andrew Tonkinson. A fact unremarked on in the article follows the statement that Davidson has practiced law for more than 20 years: "In contrast, Tonkinson, while a lawyer by training, did not practice law." Whoa! The general counsel of a $15 billion global company had not and did not practice law? Had he gone in-house directly and that doesn’t count?

The article also states that the beverage giant has a “surprisingly small team for a company with a turnover of more than $15bn". Six lawyers “sit under Davidson's command in London.” Yet two paragraphs later the articles says that “worldwide, the company's legal function comprises around 70 lawyers across the various arms of the business including local general counsel in Colombia and the US.” Apparently, many of the businesses have their own legal teams and those decentralized lawyers, it appears from the article, do not report to Davidson. It’s not exactly a lean legal team to have five lawyers per billion dollars of revenue.

It was also noteworthy that the company's first in-house lawyer, which apparently refers only to the small headquarters team in London, was a secondment from Lovells in 2002. For five years the team has maintained a “rotating six-month secondment scheme” with the firm since then.

The Bus. Lawyer, Vol. 62, Nov. 2006 at 1, contains a 36 page article entitled "The Tensions, Stresses, and Professional Responsibilities of the Lawyer for the Corporation," by E. Norman Veasey and Christine T. Di Guglielmo. It describes eight different roles of general counsel and heavily footnotes previous articles that have discussed the roles. A solid piece of scholarship, one which pulls together much of the academic writing on the in-house lawyers, and therein lies the reason for some of my lingering doubts.

Nowhere does this article refer in any significant way to metrics or benchmarks. For example, no mention is made of the ample survey data on the reporting lines of general counsel. My second criticism is the absence of quotes from actual general counsel; nearly all of the material appears to be drawn from secondary sources written by law school professors. The article has the feel of a scholastic, prescriptive view more than a numbers-and-reality based view of general counsel.

In 2005, the law department of Caterpillar was chosen as one of five law departments selected as visionary thinkers by Corporate Counsel magazine. This year, in a reprise, Corp. Counsel, Vol. 13, Dec. 2006 at 89, describes the subsequent expansion of the department's annual law-firm grading system.

"The 1-to-5 rating scale has been expanded to include 60 questions in five major areas: strategic input, operations, cost/billing, overall performance, and technical savvy; firms are graded in each area." Lawyers in Caterpillar's law department apply this elaborate evaluation to all ten law firms selected to get the bulk of the approximately $32.5 million of products liability work the department has to offer each year, as well as many other firms because the grading system has been replicated in all legal areas across the company's 27 international legal offices.

This is surely one of the most comprehensive, fine-grained assessment programs underway (See my posts of Nov. 1, 2005 about most departments’ shortcomings in this area; Nov. 16, 2005 on some evaluation tools and references cited.).

According to Corp. Counsel, Vol. 13, Dec. 2006 at 80, among the 62 lawyers and 14 paralegals in Exelon’s law department, half of them worked on pro bono projects in 2005 and logged in all more than 800 hours. That averages approximately 20 hours per person.

Exelon’s "participation rate tops that 50% pledge goal set in 2006 by the Washington-D.C.-based Pro Bono Institute." Not all the time goes to legal representation; some is closer to community service (See my post of Feb. 11, 2007 on the distinction and some further references.). Some projects are group efforts, like one known as Lawyers in the Classroom. Other projects sustain individual interests, such as to pitch in for the Philadelphia Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts.

In the words of George Socha, a consultant who works with e-discovery systems, "Pfizer was the first company to hire a lawyer to build such a system from the ground up," Corp. Counsel, Vol. 13, Dec. 2006 at 80. That’s a distinction!

And, note that the lawyer -- Laura Kibbe, initially came to the attention of Pfizer through a secondment. Kaye Scholer loaned Kibbe to the pharmaceutical company in 2004 and it hired her in January 2005 (See my post of Sept. 21, 2005 on reserving the right to hire secondees.).

The third point is that Kibbe’s team "includes two other lawyers, two paralegals, two project managers, one technology manager, a senior operations manager, and various administrative assistants." At nearly a dozen people, the discovery team is larger than most law departments and extraordinarily focused (See my post of Sept. 10, 2005 on specialist roles in law departments.).

UPS’s law department has working for a number of former operations personnel now practicing law, because the company paid for them to attend law school and pass the bar (See my post of Jan. 25, 2007 on UPS.). From CanadianLawyer InHouse, Vol. 1, April 2006 at 18, here’s another technique for self-help when its hard to hire good talent.

The Dutch-based international bank ABN Amro has had a tough time finding qualified lawyers who do derivatives law. To fill the void, the department created a formal program to train its own finance lawyers based in Hong Kong, London and New York on derivatives law. "To help make it happen, the Bank contracted with Clifford Chance, a UK based law firm, to do the training reportedly at a cut-rate price. Good for the law department; good for the firm.

From Amy Campbell’s Web Log comes a comment by Emily Dickinson, a lawyer with Hannaford Bros. Co.: “When I hire a new firm, I take them on store tours and show them our business.” What a fine idea, to help counsel – presumably on their dime – become more familiar with the business and culture of a new client. As to who drops the dime, I believe that law firms ought to invest non-chargeable time in getting to know a client (See my post of June 19, 2006.).

Another instance of a similar intention comes from one of my clients, which prepares brief bios of each lawyer and paralegal and give them to new counsel. The summaries describe the person’s background and key responsibilities. Both tours and summaries help and humanize a fledgling lawyer-client relationship.

Other items have commented on Indian providers of off-shore law-related services (See my posts of June 15, 2005, which mentions Imaging & Abstract International; Nov. 14, 2005, which mentions Xania; and Jan. 6, 2006, which provides more detail on the report referred to here.). A report, issued in late 2005, profiles 15 vendors: ALMT Systems; Atlas Legal Research; Comat; IndiaLegal.net; Integreon; Intellevate India; Lexadigm Solutions; Manthan Services; Mindcrest; NewGalexy (sic); Pangea3 (See my post of Jan. 28, 2007, on it and Lumen Legal.); Prolifus; Quislex; Variante Global; and Verist Research.

I checked most of them and they at least have a web presence. Meanwhile, I also found material from the Legal Support Global Group (a division of Goodsoft Inc.), which provides offshore “legal and paralegal support in such areas as “contract review and monitoring, contract drafting, document review for due diligence, patent drafting, simple filings, legal research,” and “litigation support.” The disclaimer at the bottom of page three of the Group’s website notes that “We are not a law firm and we do not provide legal advice.”

As veteran lawyers retire, invaluable experience goes with them. To ask them to write down their hard-won tacit knowledge is to be disappointed: few people like to write. “Enterprise search” capabilities, from such companies as Autonomy in the UK and Fast Search & Transfer in Norway, are alternatives on the forefront in the war against talent drain, according to the Fin. Times, Nov. 22, 2006 at 9.

Another tool is video recording. The same article describes how Ove Arup, the UK engineering group, salvages knowledge from its employees. “Ove Arup pensioners now record briefings on their specialist topics to video. Using Autonomy software, later generations of workers searching for information will be able to pull up relevant segments of the videos as well as text.”

It would be a far-thinking law department that arranges videos of post-mortem sessions (See my post of Dec. 10, 2005 on reviews after litigation concludes), or after someone attends a CLE event (See my post of May 1, 2005 on how to spread CLE learning.), before the retirement of a key lawyer (See my post of Sept. 4, 2005 on demographic forces.), and during training programs run by outside firms (See my post of Aug. 26, 2006 on other forms of experiential learning.).

The mission statement of Johns Hopkins Medicine’s Legal Department could be prescribed , with XYZ filled in, for any law department. Examine it yourself, but let me quote and generalize that legal department’s statement: “The mission of the Legal Department of [XYZ Corp.] is to further the strategic goals and to protect and preserve the legal, ethical and financial integrity and reputation of [XYZ Corp.]. Such a mission statement expresses lofty ideals, exudes the resonance of profundity, and washes smoothly over the legal landscape – but try to ground it on the shore of reality, to operationalize it, to make it intelligible to Chris Lawyer (See my post of Jan. 15, 2007 on high-level statements and the knowledge curse.).

Too much foam, too little wave.