On Dec. 20, 2007, Hercules Offshore, a marine drilling company, issued a press release which let the delighted and fascinated world of business know that it had “adopted BoardVantage to manage its board communications.”

According to James Noe, Hercules Offshore’s General Counsel, "With BoardVantage, we are able to produce highly navigable, electronic board books in a fraction of the time it previously took to create paper-based board books. We are also able to maintain a historical repository of documents, which we can access whenever needed.” More marketing-language praise follows. Joe Ruck, president and CEO, BoardVantage, chimes in with his own, personal excitement and pleasure.

I wouldn’t have thought that licensing law department software would justify a corporate news release, but there you have it. Chalk up one more way a law department can publicize its vendors (See my post of Dec. 10, 2007 about DuPont and an ad.).

Sniffing around on Wikipedia, I realized that no one has written about that topic über alles, that sine qua non, that ne plus ultra – law department management. There are snippets under “general counsel” and “chief legal officer” and I did stumble upon “legal administrator,” but recoiled from the fact that it refers only to those who hold that position in a law firm.

Well, I could not let that effrontery stand (See my posts of Jan. 27, 2006; and Aug.1, 2006 on law department administrators.). In a moment I became Wikipedia contributor number 40,590 as I added a sentence or two to introduce the world to law department administrators.

It’s a tad self-destructive for this blogger to urge readers to add to Wikipedia anything about how to run a law department better, but our industry would benefit if they did.

“Drink to me only with thine eyes” and you’ll get into a lot less trouble at the office fete than if you drink anything stronger. Sadly, wise advice about discretion and knowing one’s limits can too easily sip slip away.

Mad Kane’s Office Party Follies takes a humorous look at how to attend the holiday office party without sacrificing your career. This useful comment and link comes from Hannah Hasl-Kelchner’s Legal Literacy blog on Nov. 17, 2007.

Risk management takes on a particularly personal flavor when an office celebration mixes kegs and colleagues. It’s gin and toxic since staff and hard stuff don’t mix.

Intellectual property lawyers create all sorts of fuss and bother in law departments because their skills and experience spill over into other practice areas (See my posts of Aug. 5, 2007 about Hitachi and its IP function; and March 28, 2006 on PPG’s.). Each overlap has the potential to cause tension, unclear roles, and inconsistencies (See my post of Jan. 13, 2006 with its statement that no IP department is an island.).

One flashpoint is responsibility over IP litigation. Which group of lawyers should have what responsibilities when there is a patent infringement suit? The most common rapprochement is for litigators to run the case, while patent lawyers shed light on the technology, reexaminations and Markman hearings, and the amount of the settlement.

Another divide is between commercial lawyers and IP lawyers over who has primary responsibility for IP licensing (See my posts of Jan. 3, 2006 on patent counsel and their value delivered; July 18, 2006 on three metrics for IP licensing; April 8, 2007 on the UVa licensing office; and March 28, 2006 on PPG’s separate groups.). Business unit lawyers usually do most of the drafting and negotiating, calling on their IP brethren for technical support and due diligence (See my posts of Jan. 13, 2006 on sharing licensing fees with business units; Jan. 3, 2006 about Navigation Technologies; Jan. 4, 2006 on Microsoft and document assembly for licenses; Nov. 7, 2007 and Red Hat; and Nov. 28, 2005 regarding transfer revenue from IP.).

A third friction arises between M&A lawyers and IP lawyers when an acquisition requires due diligence.

No crisp lines of responsibility can be drawn in these situations because real-life legal tasks require both skill sets. General counsel need to set as clear guidelines as they can but recognize the inherent intractability of the tension.

Forgotten by me entirely, a year before this blog first spoke out on Feb. 20, 2005, I set up a blog (Law Department Management Consulting) and published all of six entries between Feb. 1, and April 11, 2004. It is embarrassing to glance over the puny and disjointed items, which appeared on Blogger’s earliest release.

Even so, my pedigree now extends back an additional year as a blogger. But it is telling that I was one of the millions of wannabe-bloggers who flamed out. It is also disturbing to be smacked in the face with the permanence of what is put up on the internet – we leave our electronic tracks long after, like the footprints of fleeing Pompeians.

In a backhanded way this blog has already identified the publications that put out on a regular basis articles that help managers of in-house counsel. I listed the most common sources for my own reading and, inevitably, blogging (See my post of Nov. 13, 2007.), of which 14 of the 23 aim for a target readership of company lawyers. The 14 are listed below.

ABA Journal, ACC and ACCA Docket, Canadian Lawyer InHouse, Counsel to Counsel, Corporate Counsel, InsideCounsel (formerly known as Corporate Legal Times), Legal Week, Metropolitan Corp. Counsel, National Law Journal, GC Mid-Atlantic, GC New York, Law Practice, Law Department Quarterly, and Law Firm Inc.

Executive Legal Advisor is another good source of law-department management writing but it did not make my original list just as top of mind and Legal Week did not. Some of my good sources have not been seen for a while; Inform: Life, Law & Business and Legalaffairs no longer show up.

The weaknesses in this list are that they are all in English, so what publications in other languages have to say about in-house management lies beyond me. As an example, I just ran across Legally Yours, a magazine that looks classy but which is published in Swedish. Second, I have not covered in this list anything by bar associations of the British Commonwealth (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, or India, for example) nor by the Commerce & Industry group in Britain. I have missed out on several of the ALM offerings, such as the Recorder and their Connecticut publication.

I welcome recommendations by others of any useful publications for law department managers that I have missed.

Having offered some thoughts on ergonomics (See my post of April 23, 2006.) and the physical layouts of law departments (See my post of June 5, 2007.), I turn on now to lighting. Talent Mgt. Mag., Vol. 13, Dec. 2007 at 12, recommends “softer illumination … [and] mixing indirect lighting to reduce glare with directly targeted lighting to eliminate points of focus.” Perhaps Judy Garland pink? Also, “add antiglare filters to older computer screens.”

Most offices have dreadful overhead fluorescent bulbs glaring down. Try a soft-bulb lamp or two.
It might be good to have motion-sensitive on-off devices for lights, if only to save energy (See my post of April 27, 2007 regarding environmental sensibilities.).

Of seven methods of consultant training reported on in Consulting, Vol. 9, Nov./Dec. 2007 at 47, the most common, accounting for 32 percent, is “formal in-house training.” I doubt that law departments conduct formal training programs for their lawyers, except possibly writing skills or negotiation skills (See my posts of Sept. 21, 2005 on writing programs; and Feb. 10, 2007 on negotiation skills.).

The next most common method is “professional workshops” (21%), which seems to have no counterpart for law departments (But see my post of Nov. 18, 2007 and its nod to appellate advocacy training.). Perhaps, however, CLE course fall into this category (See my post of Dec. 17, 2007 and references cited.).

Third, at 17 percent, are “e-learning online courses,” which again seem unlikely to apply to in-house counsel. “Informal learning” (11%) accounts for much more of the percentage of learning for lawyers -- on the job training (See my post of Dec. 22, 2006 about the prior year’s survey and my comment about OJT.). Most lawyers learn most of what they know by observing and doing.

The remaining methods for training consultants are “software computer learning” (7% for the consultants but non-existent for corporate lawyers), “university courses/academic workshops” (7% -- see my post of April 12, 2006 about such courses for lawyers.), and “other.” Might “other” include reading?

When lawyers in a law department are asked to fill out an upward appraisal of their general counsel, they probably feel a pang of unease, even if they have been assured that their responses will be held completely confidential. If too few people complete the review, or if there are text comments that might give away the identity of the evaluator, or if there is a scintilla of a chance that the response will be disclosed, lawyers shy away from taking part (See my posts of Sept. 27, 2005 on upward evaluations of leaders; Jan. 1, 2006 for a review of the tool; Sept. 27, 2005 for a partial 360 tool; July 9, 2007 for its use when two subordinates clash; and May 2, 2007 on upward evaluations of general counsel.).

Some personnel experts see the 360˚ report as a way to give difficult feedback to people who are too vain or ego-ridden to listen to it in any other format. To get a message to their boss may push back a bit on the insecurity, but the nagging worry can never disappear. If a third party collates the responses, most people think it is safe to complete 1-5 rating questions, but it is prudent to write carefully in the free-text replies

LawyerKM on Nov. 1, 2007 has a post that had me nodding my head in agreement. Your law department could try a blog.

“But some [law] firms are using blogs to communicate internally. We love the idea because (in theory) it can help cut down on mass emails that contain general, non-urgent information. Those periodic case law update emails are a good example. Blogs are also great because (unlike email) they create an automatic, searchable, taggable archive of content. So, if you need to find that blog post about that certain case law update from three months ago, you can search the blog rather than your Outlook folders. You can also bring new members of a department up to speed more quickly – “Check the blog…” The result: a real KM tool - a place to store our collective knowledge for quick and easy retrieval.”

The entry points out that SharePoint offers a blogging component. Other solutions include Wordpress, Movabletype, and Community Server. Law departments! To the ramparts of blogdom!