At Cox Communications, in-house counsel in managerial roles can take part in the company's formal mentoring program. If they do participate in the year-long program, they are never matched with other lawyers. Instead they are mentored by high-level leaders from elsewhere in the corporation.

According to the article about this program in the ACC Docket, Vol. 25, Nov. 2007 at 28, during the mentorship, pairs spend a minimum of three hours a month to face-time together. (See my posts of April 30, 2006 on the looseness of the term “mentor”; July 14, 2005 on the difference between a mentor and a coach; Nov. 25, 2006 on a program by Commerce & Industry that taps mentors outside each company; and April 30, 2006 on mentors and threatening successors.).

Sabine Chalmers, the chief legal officer of InBev, the world's largest beer company by volume, has written a series of thoughtful columns for the ACC Docket. Her latest, Nov. 2007 at 10, treats the topic of law departments that have a corporate group as well as decentralized business groups of lawyers.

One of her four suggestions to bridge the divide is to survey members of the legal team to learn their views on areas of focus and effective ways of working together. Chalmers suggests that "Questions could cover:

• The respective roles of the corporate and business unit lawyers;
• Practice areas which the function as a whole believes benefit from centralization and/or decentralization;
• Ways to improve best practice sharing and efficiency; and
• Ideas for improving communication and eliminating bureaucracy."

Along with the ideas gathered this way from members of the legal function, for integrative ideas a law department might consider communities of practice and solid line reporting of all practicing lawyers to the CLO.

In Fulbright & Jaworski’s Fourth Annual Litigation Trends Survey, at 50, a chart portrays data from 303 UK and US companies. The chart shows what percentages of those companies carry nine kinds of insurance against litigation costs. In decreasing order, the insurance coverage included general liability (56% had such a policy), D&O (37%), “other” (35%), “self-insured” (18%), EPL (10%), “E&O” (9%), umbrella (2%), excess (1%) and “GC” (0%). E&O stands for Errors and Omissions.

This is quite a list of coverage types, but it is not exhaustive. Insurance against legal risk is available in a number of practice areas (See my posts of July 25, 2005 and July 20, 2005 for patent litigation; March 23, 2006 #5 for employment practices litigation [EPL]; and Nov. 16, 2005 #3 for IP insurance in Denmark.), This blog has commented more generally on insurance against litigation expenses (See my post of July 30, 2005 on external legal fees and insurance; April 23, 2006 about litigation insurance after a lawsuit is filed; Nov. 16, 2005 #3 for its availability in Europe.)

On Google’s BookSearch on October 26th, the term "law department" turned up 3,260 hits. Many were addresses to graduates of law schools and a wide variety of other cites. The term "legal department" returned a mere 2,550 hits.

What interested me as I scanned the pages of results were the four aged treatises that showed up on law department management (See my posts of Aug. 17, 2005 with other management books; Feb. 23, 2006 that relates a similar search of Amazon; and July 18, 2006 with some early publications.).

Guidelines for a Corporate Law Department Manual
by Robert L. Geltzer, Helen C. Trainor (ABA 1980) - 54 pages

The Administration of Municipal Legal Services: The Chicago Law Department
by Robert W. Siebenschuh - 1942 - 58 pages

Corporate Law Department Practice
by Harold Vogel - (Prentice-Hall 1972) - 191 pages

The Company Legal Department: Its Role, Function and Organization
by Walter Kolvenbach - (Kluwer 1979) - 135 pages

By co-author Linda DiSantis,

In his book, Profit with Honor, Daniel Yankelovich argues that corporations must be on the forefront of addressing key issues – including the need for sustainable development, climate change, and energy independence. He argues that the assumption that government or educational and religious institutions can and will address these issues alone is unrealistic. He makes a compelling case for what he labels “stewardship ethics” and how it will be the next stage of market capitalism.

He also argues that companies cannot simply rely on the “law” as the means to achieve this goal. He calls the law a “blunt instrument” and states that if you want results you need to give people a basis for trust and inspire them with an ethical vision.

What is the role of in-house counsel in the development and implementation of such a vision? You need to ask yourself as the company’s lawyer, do you provide guidance that leads the company to think in narrow terms of “legal compliance” or do you assist the company’s management in envisioning a broader, ethical approach? For example, if you were asked to advise your organization on how to deal with possible sweat shop conditions by your suppliers, do you approach it from with a lawyer’s view that we must focus on how to comply with the law of the country in which our suppliers operate, or do you take the opportunity to argue for a more inspired view that takes into account the living conditions of the workers and how your organization can help improve those conditions?

You can argue that your role is “only to be the lawyer” because all you are required to do is ensure your client has the right advice on complying with the “law.” Or you can view your role more broadly to encompass what it takes for a company (your client) to become and remain a compliant and ethical company and promote the view that without some inspiration, you are likely to be dealing with same legal compliance issues over and over. If your employees are not be led by an inspired vision of the role of corporations in addressing the needs of society in our increasingly complex (and smaller and flatter) world, it is likely that your company will be dealing with the “blunt instrument” of the law repeatedly.

In several speeches, I have excoriated ten practices that some law departments have effectuated. Here are the ten and some of my blog references regarding them.

1. Mostly seeking discounts from hourly rates (See my posts of June 30, 2007 about how to calculate savings; and May 26, 2007 where I deride discounts.).
2. Aggressively auditing bills with third parties (See my post of Oct. 24, 2007 about audits by both employees and third-parties of bills.).
3. Permitting decentralized retention of law firms (See my posts of Aug. 30, 2006 for a general statement of this principle; and April 26, 2006 for the challenges from clients.)
4. Focusing on low hourly-rates (See my post of March 29, 2005 on hourly rate differences by size of firm; and Feb. 24, 2007 on drivers of law firm pricing.).
5. Creating detailed and strict guidelines, such as for travel charges (See my post of Sept. 5, 2007.).
6. Relying on task-based billing systems (See my posts of April 23, 2006 and Dec. 1, 2006 that criticize UTBMS efforts; April 22, 2007 regarding updates to the system; Oct. 15, 2007 about using the data to contest a bill; Feb. 21, 2007 on difficulties law firms have with the codes; and May 26, 2006 on the possibility of rate changes by code.).
7. Insisting on Most-Favored-Nation status (See my posts of Oct. 30, 2005; Nov. 21, 2005; and Jan. 25, 2006 on difficulties with MFNs.).
8. Obsessing on disbursements (See my posts of Dec. 1, 2006 with references; Feb. 14, 2007 on metrics; and March 4, 2007 on the goal of focusing on fees not disbursements.).
9. Freezing rate increases (See my post of April 26, 2006, which is cold on this practice.).
10. Becoming complacent with incumbent firms (See my posts of May 1, 2005 on the dark side of partnering; and Dec. 16, 2005 on complacency among entrenched firms.).

NostradamRees peers into the crystal ball. Swami sees four developments that will come true within five years.

(1) Current practices regarding conflicts of interest will give way to the realities of a much more complicated world and much larger law firms (See my post Aug. 23, 2005 on the effects of law firms growing larger; and July 16, 2007 on conflicts of interest and references cited.).

(2) Law firms will find new ways to demonstrate their thought leadership. They will do so through the evolving platform of web 2.0 tools, such as social networks, blogs, and collective intelligence platforms like wikis (See my posts of Dec. 9, 2005 about Cornell’s legal wiki; Feb. 12, 2006 that predicts wikis between law departments; March 17, 2006 on wikis; May 17, 2006 on wiki-law.org; March 9, 2007 about Legal OnRamp; and March 20, 2007 #1 about Lucent’s law-department wiki.),

(3) Law firm economics will be much more transparent to clients. In part, law departments will share more data among themselves as to costs. Further, law firms will provide real-time time recording information that electronic billing systems will be able to analyze instantaneously (See my post of May 19, 2006 on instantaneous billing information from law firms.). Publicly-traded law firms will disclose more information (See my post of April 8, 2007 on an Australian law firm going public.)

(4) Increasing amounts of law-related services will be provided in low-cost jurisdictions. Offshoring as this is generally known, will cause productivity changes, staffing changes, and will significantly test the managerial capabilities of both law firms and law departments (See my post of June 11, 2007 on offshoring and many references cited.).

The usefulness of benchmark data depends on the number of survey respondents, in part, as minor score differentials (such as the variation between a 4.1 and a 4.2 on a five-point scale) may only be significant with larger sample sizes (See my posts of Dec. 9, 2005 on margin of error generally; and Aug. 29, 2006 on subgroup analyses.). My faithful and intellectually-insatiable readership demands a more precise explanation of margin of error.
n = 2 * z2
D2
This formula calculates a survey’s margin of error, where:

n = sample size
2 = variance
z = z value from a normal table reflecting the degree of confidence, squared
D = level of precision, squared

Nothing more is left to say (except the "2's" above are supersripts -- squares).

My long-time friend Eric Little, the founder a number of years ago of one of the most successful document-assembly companies (Analytic Legal Programs), has recently joined the world of blogging. Eric and I got back to the early days of Wynn Smith and others in the ABA Law Practice Management Section and its Document Assembly Newsletter (See my post of Jan. 28, 2007 on some other historical reminiscences.).

I urge readers who are is interested in the technology and practice of law-related document assembly to visit Eric’s site and say hello.

Law departments often negotiate or demand discounts from their law firms. Sometimes the amounts of the discounts rise, according to the volume of work received from the law department (See my post of Aug. 8, 2006 on tiered discounts from hourly rates.). Because these arrangements are arrived at prospectively, neither side has assurance of what the actual spending figures will turn out to be.

The negotiating lawyers may go back and forth on figures but eventually settle on some discount schedule for some volume of work expected. The disappointment is usually on the side of the law firm because it has visions of golden sugarplums while the law department dreams of higher-level discounts and praiseworthy savings. Insufficient volume disappoints both.

It might be possible for both sides to revisit the discount schedule, say quarterly, or agree to a more sophisticated algorithm. Perhaps the discount rate would be based each month on a rolling three month figure and therefore would automatically correct as the year goes by (See my post of Jan. 6, 2006 on rolling averages.).