Report legal issues encountered, not time worked by internal lawyers

More useful than tracking their time, in-house lawyers might better report on the two-to-four legal issues that recently came to their attention. If every two weeks, for example, every lawyer in a department summarized three to five legal issues they had grappled with during the previous two weeks, each in a two- or three-sentence paragraph, the departmental report would not only keep the general counsel and others abreast of what is being worked on but would also educate everyone. Others might also weigh in on a problem, where before they would not have known about its occurrence.

This variation would serve as a status report (See my posts of Aug. 1, 2006 on reasons to do and not to do status reports; and June 25, 2007 on benefits to clients of status reports.) as well as a building block for knowledge management (See my category, “Knowledge Management.”).