Send me press releases, to be sure, but only if they tell me something about a law department that uses your service or product.

Of late I have received a handful of press releases from providers of services to law departments. To merely repeat a press release is not to give sufficient value to my readers. I need to know about a more specific use by a law department, a named law department, and perhaps some metrics to make a post worthwhile.

Gradually I am turning away from systems and technology and other impersonal resources of law departments and towards an emphasis on people (See my post of July 20, 2008: resources is the wrong word for humans.). All the best practices in the world falter if your people are incompetent, unmotivated, or poorly led; given ability, engagement and direction, people will overcome almost any dysfunction.

Motivated by this mindset that talent is the most important piece of a successful legal department, I published my most recent article on one aspect of it: core competencies. Click on the following URL for a PDF of my article. Download core_competencies_legal_times_72108.pdf

Since my article came out in Legal Times on several problems with discounted billing, I have posted more. Click on the following link for a PDF of Rees Morrison's article.Download discounts_legal_times_42108.pdf

Three have appeared (See my posts of April 8, 2008: freeze billing rates rather than negotiate discounts; April 13, 2008: discounts and law-firm margins; and May 11, 2008: prompt-payment discounts and 10 references.).

In April of this year I published an article about how to alleviate some of the concerns law departments and law firms have regarding fee arrangements that deviate from hourly or discounted hourly billing. Click on the following link for a PDF of the Rees Morrison article on alternative fees. Download alternative_fees_gc_nylj_april_17_2008.pdf

Meanwhile, I kept churning out supplemental blog posts (See my posts of March 24, 2008: business intelligence in law firms and fee alternatives; April 6, 2008: partner premium coupled with associate discounts; April 27, 2008: just because the matter is big, don’t pass on alternative fees; May 11, 2008: monthly flat fees; and July 27, 2008: bonuses and references cited.).

This blog has commented on relocations of lawyers (See my post of May 25, 2008 – 7 posts.)
but the topic is not even remotely fully covered. An advertising section www.fortune.com/adsectins in Fortune, July 2008 at S7, lays out data from GMAC’s 2008 Global Relocation Trends. That report ranks the relocation obstacles companies face, which presumably apply to law departments.

The ten obstacles are “finding suitable candidates” (21%), “career management” (16%), “partner dissatisfaction” (10%), “policy exception control” (10%), “return on investment” (8%), “relocation reluctance” (7%), “adjusting to environment” (5%), “intercultural understanding” (4%), “education concerns” (4%), and “safety & security” (3%).

“Career management” may have to do with the difficulties of slotting the foreign posting into a career development plan for the lawyer, as well as what to do with them next. “Partner dissatisfaction” has to do with spouses, not lawyers at firms. “Policy exception control” may involve the difficult situations of making exceptions too often, such as how long a posting lasts. These plus the other obstacles are very legitimate and make it difficult for global law departments to distribute their lawyers around the world.

This finding comes from Inside Counsel, July 2008 at 49, from its recent survey of law department satisfaction with law firms.

Loyalty rates of law departments to law firms suggest otherwise, and incessant fee increases by lawa firms suggest otherwise, and the infrequency of competitive bids suggests otherwise, and the rarity of fixed fees suggests otherwise, and slow adoption of offshoring suggests otherwise, and stymied document assembly suggests otherwise, and soaring profits per partner suggests otherwise, and proliferation of mega-firms suggests otherwise …

But what’s your point, Rees Morrison?

My point is that in-house lawyers respect the quality and individuality of craftsmanship produced by the particular firms they use, and that they do not look at those firms or their services as fungible.

Does this finding suggest that many firms look alike to these in-house counsel? Does it suggest that the work product many firms produce is indistinguishable from the work of other firms? Are their steps and deliverables standardized (See my post of June 6, 2008: meanings of routine, standardized, and commodity.)? The facts belie this artifactual finding.

I wrote before on the convergence program of Linde Group (See my post of June 18, 2007.). More information about its circumstances appear in FocusEurope, Summer 2008, at 31. The article mentions that both Honeywell and Brady Corporation have chosen a single firm to handle all their legal work in Europe or adjoining regions. Brady asked eight firms to pitch for work worth more than $1 million annually.

Just before the shrinkage of law firms from 150 to five firms, General Counsel Nick Deeming had survived the $16 billion acquisition of the BOC Group. In fact, Deeming was the group legal director of BOC so he must have been promoted over Linde’s legal director. [Typically, the acquiring company’s top lawyer takes over the combined department.].

Asked to find synergies between the merged law departments, Deeming “ultimately reduced the size of the in-house team from 100 to around 60,” which amounts to almost a 40 percent downsizing (See my posts of Sept.13, 2005: Honeywell and Oracle and the layoffs that result from mergers; Feb. 19, 2007: BellSouth/AT&T; and May 5, 2008: morale consequences of layoffs.). The article does not make clear the degree to which the layoffs were lawyers or non-lawyers. Is there any connection that Deeming himself left Linde shortly after the bloodbath, in June 2007?

All decisions, including those made by in-house attorneys, are based on values and involve an implicit or explicit trade-off of values. That being true, attorneys will make better decisions if they have a methodology for addressing the values inevitably present in a situation.

According to MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 49, Summer 2008 at 75, a useful article about values and decisions, “Values are enduring beliefs, both hard-wired (i.e., acquired genetically) and shaped by cultural context, about preferred ‘end states’.” The authors of the article describe a decision map – “a tool for exploring the values and motivations inherent to” important decisions. The map consists of four elements: choice options, consequences, outcomes, and values/goals.

Choice options are the alternative actions available to the person making the decision. Most of us feel cabined in our choices, even though in fact we often have several we could choose from. Consequences are the short-term results of a decision; outcomes are the longer-term impacts of a decision. The framework proposed by the article pushes decision-makers to express the positive and negative poles of outcomes and consequences for a broader array of choice options. The final step is to consider all that in light of personal goals and values (See my post of May 23, 2008: values of a law department, with 12 references cited.).

One question in a recent survey about satisfaction with law firms, from Inside Counsel, July 2008 at 47, asked in-house counsel to rank on importance at least 10 criteria they apply when hiring outside counsel. In order, the eight highest-ranking criteria were responsiveness, industry experience, creative solutions, billing rates, reputation, preventive counseling, multiple practice areas, and alternative fee arrangements.

Three of those eight criteria come into play when a law department decides whether to keep using a law firm, but they have little to offer during the initial decision to hire the firm. No one a law department can evaluate law firm responsiveness much even by a competitive process, nor creative solutions, and especially not the firms adeptness at preventive counseling. Once a law firm has represented a company for a while, the members of the legal department can have views on those three attributes – responsiveness, creativity, and preventive counseling – but among a group of unfamiliar law firms, no input is available.

The in-house counsel responding to the survey also feel that "national reach and international reach are the least important factors when general counsel are selecting a firm" (See my posts of July 13, 2008 and July 27, 2008: a claim that global forces drive law department agendas.).

We admire law departments that regularly hive off general counsel to other companies. We recognize that strong talent may have too little head room in one department, but can stand tall elsewhere (See my posts of Dec. 19, 2007: inevitable to lose some talented lawyers; and Jan. 18, 2008: general counsel unconcerned with loss of talent.).

A department that is consistently the farm team for the major league team of another company, that every year or two exports a qualified, strong lawyer to take a senior position elsewhere, is a law department that has hired well, given good managerial and substantive experience, and bred an attractive recruit (See my post of Feb. 7, 2008: more disadvantages of low attrition rates.).