I have often written about this blog (See my post of Feb. 20, 2006: first anniversary and 1,000 posts; Feb. 20, 2007: two years and 2,000 posts; Feb. 5, 2008: third anniversary comments; Dec. 5, 2007: my pride in this blog; March 30, 2008: Law Department Management selected for Forbes blogroll; Sept. 22, 2005: difficulties in assigning posts to categories; May 13, 2007: cross references and metaposts; June 16, 2007: no hyperlinks to my cross-references; Jan. 18, 2008 #2: references to previous posts; Jan. 4, 2008: third-order information; Feb. 24, 2008: information architecture of this blog; Sept. 9, 2008: more ways to set up post categories; Sept.18, 2007: humor; and Aug. 12, 2008: vocabulary.).

I have asked for questions and submissions (See my post of Aug. 10, 2007: an unsuccessful contest.) and implored readers not to lurk and remain silent (See my post of Oct. 26, 2007: silence from blog readers; Feb. 16, 2008: a shout out to those who have commented; and May 5, 2008: ask me for topic collections.).

Quite a few times I have shared my rational for content and the development of this blog (See my post of Nov. 5, 2006: various ways I think about its concepts; Aug. 21, 2005: consolidated posts on this blog by category; Sept. 22, 2008: concepts and hierarchies; May 4, 2007 attack on blawgs by a magazine publisher; Nov. 13, 2007: publications I have sourced; Sept. 7, 2008: the bulk of this blog; Nov. 24, 2007: first use of “artiblog” here; Oct. 16, 2006: this blog’s value in three dimensions; Jan. 4, 2008: disappearance of posts on writing well; Sept. 3, 2006: gratitude to my assistant; Jan. 10, 2008 #2: harmonics from the ideas of this blog; and July 30, 2008: my views as a blogger on press releases.).

I am also fascinated by what other sources say about this blog’s persona (See my post of Nov. 20, 2006: Concordance software and its insights; Feb. 20, 2007: SiteMeter; March 4, 2007: Technorati; March 4, 2007: pages with highest numbers of visits; Jan. 13, 2008: Feedburner on topical categories that most interest readers; Feb. 16, 2008: top domains referring to this blog; and June 17, 2008: USLaw Blog Directory’s popularity rankings.).

Stepping back, I have noted weaknesses of this blog (See my post of Dec. 5, 2007: weaknesses in this blog; March 23, 2006: blogs don’t persuade general counsel to hire anyone; and Feb. 27, 2008: capabilities I wish this blog had.) and even tossed in a wry comment on my forgotten history as a blogger (See my post of Dec. 26, 2007: my vestigial blog.).

MetLife has published a handsome Annual Review 2007, which includes in its 33 pages one on its Legal Affairs group. Every activity described in the section marks a contribution by Legal Affairs of “critical support and guidance that enhanced MetLife’s corporate structure and investments, delivered innovative products to the market, and expanded compliance programs that protect the company.”

Terminology and orientation are important for legal teams. The MetLife summary always refers to “business partners.” The lawyers of Legal Affairs don’t advise clients, they pitch in shoulder to shoulder with their business partners (See my post of Oct. 8, 2007: banish the word “client”.).

Productivity metrics count at MetLife. The summary proudly notes that in 2007, “Legal Affairs supported capital-raising activities in excess of $12 billion and was instrumental in the formation of new entities.” Where possible, an impressive scorecard for a law department should detail quantified contributions (See my post of Feb. 25, 2008: practice area benchmarks with 24 references.).

Cost control accomplishments likewise deserve praise. MetLife’s legal team helped deregister Metropolitan Life Insurance Company as a broker-dealer, which “significantly reduces enterprise costs and regulatory exposure.”

The summary also highlights industry involvements of Legal Affairs. For example, the summary mentions that Legal Affairs personnel were a “primary force in an investment industry effort to draft model covenants that better protect public bond investors.” This effort is not pro bono, nor is it lobbying. It is standards development for the lawyers in an industry.

A vital goal for most law-department retreats is to have the lawyers get to know each other better. Familiarity helps build trust and teamwork. One technique to help accomplish that goal, as well as to start the retreat off in an upbeat way, is to begin with an enjoyable ice-breaker.

One law department kicked off its conference by having each person tell two truths and a lie about themselves. From my experience at nearly thirty law-department conferences, I know that self-revelation embarrasses some people. That kind of ice breaker chills their hearts. A safer alternative is to have the leadership team give some personal history that the broader group may not know and the crowd has to guess which team member the fun fact applies to.

Another legal team used a jeopardy-style game that teaches the participants interesting things about the company. I can imagine a variation that turns facts about the law department and its history into jeopardy questions.

Dinners the night before the main conference begins are intended as icebreakers, but should you allow people to sit with whomever they want? Or do you use the dinners as a forced time to mingle?

Patent lawyers in companies can retain a slew of service providers. Given the huge sums of money involved in patents and their strategic importance (See my post of Aug. 13, 2008: total legal spending related to R&D spending and patents.), it is not surprising that this blog has mentioned quite a few categories of patent support services:

1. Auctioneers (See my post of Jan. 16, 2006: Ocean Tomo.).

2. Consultancies such as ipCapital Group, described in IP Law & Bus., Vol. 6, Sept. 2008 at 42, as an “intellectual property consultancy. That is also the forte of Eyal Iffergang at Project Leadership Associates.

3. Coordinators of filing and annuity fee payments (See my post of Nov. 30, 2005: Computer Patent Annuities (CPA) and its services.).

4. Invoice analysts (See my post of July 21, 2008: foreign-bill reviewers IPR IS and PTFM).

5. Networks of patent specialty law firms (See my post of April 10, 2006 # 4: Association of Patent Law Firms.).

6. Offshore services (See my post of Sept. 3, 2008: LPO service providers.).

7. Vendors of specialized database software (See my post of May 1, 2005: Master Data Center, Dennemeyer and Computer Patent Annuities.).

Many more service providers to patent lawyers are out there and I welcome any updates from readers.

An article from IP Law & Bus., Vol. 6, Sept. 2008 at 41, extols the changes the chief legal officer of LexisNexis, Kenneth Thompson, instituted after he took over in 2005. The division of Reed Elsevier soon “had a patent review board, an incentive program that rewards employees for inventions, an intranet site giving information on the patenting process and the incentive plan, and life-cycle management of the patents the company does obtain.” In addition, “In-house patent attorneys attend senior management meetings of business units and meet with researchers to actively find inventions to protect.”

Each of these initiatives is important for legal departments. This blog has material on all of them except life-cycle management (See my post of March 25, 2008: patent activities except litigation with 49 references.); and June 25, 2008: patent lawyers pay off.).

An earlier post covered the three most populous categories of sponsors at the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) Annual Meeting (See my post of Sept. 21, 2008: law firms, discovery, and compliance.). As I contemplated the group of sponsors as a whole it became clear that many vendors offer products and services that are hard to capture in a single term. A large consulting firms, to cite one example, might render services in “Billing,” “Legal Software,” “Management & Business Consulting,” and “Compliance.” Law firms are about the only pure play around.

Second, this particular group of sponsors ranges from start ups to Fortune 100s. It is quite common to be a small as a niche player; and yet consolidation has also created enormous organizations that sell to law departments.

Third, I suspect that the entrepreneurial cauldron is boiling. Most of the sponsors are probing other companies, strategizing about what direction to move, losing employees to spin-off efforts, seeking financing, and generally trying their best to grow and make money.

Profound observations aside, here is a list of most of the remaining sponsors by the first category in which they list themselves. Five sponsors classified themselves in “Billing” (Duff & Phelps, Mitratech, Serengeti, TrialNet, and UnitedLex). This is a mixture of consultants, matter management software, and an LPO. Also at five sponsors are “Legal Employment, Recruitment and Search Firms” (Ajilon Legal, Laurence Simons, Major, Lindsey & Africa, Robert Half Legal, and Special Counsel) (See my post of Sept. 16, 2008: search firms with 12 references.)

The category of “Legal Software” has four sponsors who described themselves that way in the first listing (CT Tymetrix, DataCert, Discovery Mining, and Legal Files Software. This is a broader category than “Billing,” mentioned above, and the vendors could have placed themselves in that group. One of them appears to be in the electronic discovery field.

With three sponsors each are “Legal Process Outsourcing” (Integreon, Pangea3 and UnitedLex) (See my post of Dec. 16, 2007: offshoring with 18 references.) and “Online Compliance & Ethics Training” (Corpedia, Practicing Law, and SAI Global).

Dispute resolution companies – “Other Specialty Legal Services” is the category – include two sponsors (National Arbitration Forum and American Arbitration Association) as did “Records Retention & Document Management” (IntraLinks and Jordan Lawrence).

A huge source of information about the law resides in blogs. The ABA Journal, Vol. 94, Sept. 2008 at 54, drawing on responses of approximately 850 lawyers to a nationwide survey, states that two percent of American lawyers maintain a law blog. Since there are something like one million lawyers practicing in the United States, that would mean 20,000 law-related blawgs! If that number is even close to reality and a moderate portion of the blogs are active, it means an incredible amount of law-related material is available at no cost online.

The article adds that eight percent of all law firms in America “maintain a law blog.” The Journal may be confusing web sites and blogs, but either way it means that more explanations of statutes, regulations, and areas of law are online – not to mention tour de force blogs on law department management (See my post of March 9, 2007: the price of legal information is being driven to zero; Jan. 10, 2006: lawyer time online; Nov. 15, 2005: online resources; Jan. 13, 2006: free online information; Jan. 28, 2008: hard to find the right law firm through the internet; and Jan. 25, 2008: Martindale-Hubble and shared evaluations of law firms.).

Finally, the survey found that 15 percent of lawyers have joined a social network, while four percent of firms have joined one (See my post of Feb. 21, 2008: Texas Bar Circle network; Jan. 19, 2008: LinkedIn; Aug. 15, 2008: legal department management group on LinkedIn; Jan. 30, 2008 #2: LawLink; March 9, 2007: Legal OnRamp; March 25, 2008: PreCYdent; and March 16, 2008: Web 2.0 and in-house lawyers.).

Insights about huge law firms, publicly-traded law firms, their profit margins, and commercial “nous” all appear in one item in the Economist, Aug. 23, 2008 at 55.

Vast revenue at huge firms. Baker & McKenzie brought in annual revenues of more than $2 billion (See my post of Feb. 20, 2008: Latham & Watkins and Skadden Arps breach $2 billion.). Further “Britain’s top four firms have reported revenues up by an average of 15% this year, with all four passing the £1 billion ($1.85 billion) mark.” It’s hard for any but the largest law departments to have much leverage over such behemoths (See my post of May 3, 2006: consequences of firms growing to behemoth size.).

Use of equity funds. An Australian firm that went public in May 2007, Slater & Gordon, used the money it raised to swallow up six smaller rivals within a year. Law firms in Britain are champing at the bit to have the same opportunity. Law department managers can foresee even more tumult among their providers and continued consolidation (See my post of Nov. 15, 2005: consequences of convergence and mergers.).

High profit margins. Law firms typically have high profit margins (20-40%). The article states that “On average, litigation departments are thought to account for around 45% of law firms’ revenues in America, and 25% in Britain.” Even with those fat margins, “Few managing partners know their firm’s profit per billable hour, even though that is the main product law firms sell.” Very few companies enjoy such salivating profit margins, which ought to give general counsel reason to aggressively challenge law firm fees (See my post of April 6, 2008: profitability of several law-firm practice groups.).

Narrow view, not commercial. “Clients frustrated with private practice lawyers often accuse them of lacking commercial nous.” No nous is bad news. As outside lawyers are focused on the fine print, “big picture concerns can go unnoticed.” One fundamental advantage of in-house lawyers over out-house lawyers is that they have their ear to the business ground.

In the final decades of the 20th century, a backlash to Enlightenment values came to be known as postmodernism. “Postmodernists are hostile to the idea that truth can be objective, are skeptical of the authority of science and resist the idea of progress,” according to Frank Furedi, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone: Confronting 21st Century Philistinism (Continuum 2004) at 46, fn. 37. At the risk of being presumptuous, permit me to apply some tenets of postmodernism to legal departments.

Postmodernists “claim that all knowledge is socially constructed” (at 62). As such, they would hold that what we think we understand about how best to manage law departments is a mixture of folk wisdom, prejudices, and unexamined mental habits and constructs (See my post of Feb. 21, 2007: under-determination thesis and the theory/fact dichotomy.).

Postmodernists accept no single road to understanding, including no privileged methodology such as scientific method or quantification. By their lights, benchmarks, surveys, and natural experiments have no more probative force for managers in law departments than do anecdotes, narratives, or legends.

Progress, according to post-modernists, is an illusion, a teleology unsupported by reality. Over the past decades, according to this belief, the effectiveness of legal operations in-house has not advanced. We fool ourselves to imagine it has.

Whereas Enlightenment thinkers acclaimed universalism, truths that apply to all mankind, postmods celebrate particularism. Best practices in law departments suggests a universal application, whereas the belief that we can do no better than identify the right practice for a specific context is a particularist conclusion.

Another plank of postmodernist thought is that the language we employ falls far short of what we think and need in terms of clarity and precision. Words are unreliable and leaky vessels. How we describe law departments suffers from this inherent inadequacy.

In short, postmodern philosophy assails almost everything about what we think we might understand about law department management. Ours is a culturally bound, linquistically constrained, view of knowledge that is unmoored to any axiomatic truths. Here is a summary from another source: “Our knowledge is generally couched in language, so it does not mirror the world as we believe most of our perceptions do. Our knowledge is constructed from elements of our culture, employing concepts and forms of argument that we have learned and believe to be appropriate. Our descriptions of the world reflect our interests, values, and purposes, so they are not perfectly impartial and complete accounts of the subjects they describe.” C. Behan McCullagh, “Postmodernism and the Truth of History,” in Historically Speaking, Vol. 6, Jan./Feb. 2005 at 8.

Equine-imity: spurring horse metaphors until I am hoarse. Equipage leaves me cold, but when I saddle up I write/ride with a herd of horse metaphors. At a gallop I will reel off my posts that have been horsing around (See my post of Dec. 23, 2005: racehorses in a paddock and 11 double entendres; Dec. 4, 2006: horses for courses and transferring cases; Sept. 12, 2008: change horses in mid-stream; Aug. 28, 2006: beating a dead horse; July 31, 2006: horse equals knight in chess; Nov. 30, 2007 #3: price serves as a whipping horse; April 1, 2007: horseshoe litigation; Aug. 4, 2007: workhorses in a law firm should present; and Aug. 10, 2007: horsepower and virtual law firms.). I never look a good horse trope in the mouth nor give them an hors d’oeuvres.

Collective action on diversity. DuPont has teamed with Royal Dutch Shell and Wal-Mart to publish for the first time a list of minority-owned law firms the companies have used. The three have also sent a directory of the firms to about 100 in-house lawyers and they've also launched a Web site (See my post of June 17, 2008: diversity with 29 references.).

Two more associations of law firms, one employment and one Latin American. An ad for Worklaw™Network in ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Sept. 2008 at 107, caught my eye. Then I mentioned The Bomchil group as a sponsor at an upcoming trade show (See my post of Sept. 21, 2008: ACC Conference, a network of 19 Latin American firms.).

An in-house lawyer in the House?. Of the 435 current members of the House of Representatives, 174 are trained as lawyers. Another lawyer who aspires to become a Representative is Richard Baker, the director of IP licensing at 3Com Corporation. Running to represent a Congressional District in Massachusetts, according to IP Law & Bus., Vol. 6, Sept. 2008, at 12, Baker hopes to become perhaps the first in-house lawyer to serve in Congress (See my post of Dec. 3, 2007 #3: in-house lawyer as novelist.).