Many law departments host a site on their company’s intranet and this blog has noted several of them (See my post of March 1, 2007 #2: Honeywell’s legal intranet; June 24, 2007: Cadbury Schweppes’ intranet; June 6, 2006: traffic on the Office of Legal Affairs, Univ. of North Carolina; and Sept. 25, 2008: LexisNexis group and its intranet patent information.).

Some innovative ideas have surfaced regarding corporate web sites by lawyers, such as to put a small legal window on business sites (See my post of March 13, 2007: mini-intranet sites at Bank of Montreal.), push clients to search for answers on the site (See my post of Sept. 10, 2005: charge time to clients if answers are on intranet.), and cutting-edge capabilities (See my post of March 27, 2005: artificial intelligence software on intranet.).

Items on this blog address still other aspects of legal department intranets (See my post of Feb. 7, 2008: track client usage of your intranet site; March 5, 2005: altruistic information sharing; July 21, 2005: PDF manual on the intranet; April 5, 2005: law firms might contribute material; and Dec. 21, 2005: disappointing levels of contributions to intranets.).

If any reader feels like enlightening me on vendors of encryption software that law departments might use, I would be grateful. I mention this because I have been consulting to a company whose legal group encrypts its computers with PointSec. They also use PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) to encrypt confidential documents; company proprietary material, and personal data that needs privacy protection.

Law departments in the United States undoubtedly use software from an entire thicket of encryption companies, but I have little to add about this cottage industry (See my post of Jan. 25, 2007: encryption of data transferred to matter management system; Oct. 1, 2006: BoardVantage’s built-in protections; April 22, 2007: e-billing data; and Aug. 15, 2008: encrypted email.).

Offers of judgment under FRCP 68. Warning: I stopped practicing law years ago, so take the following comment as a lay understanding. If a party offers to pay an amount to the other side in settlement, and the other side refuses, then if the eventual award comes in at less than the amount offered, under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 68 no attorneys’ fees are available to the other side. I am sure there are many complexities to offers of judgment, but they sound like a potent tool for inside lawyers (See my post of July 21, 2006: parallel settlement and litigation counsel.).

Reactions to my views on large firms and their discontents. My article on why very large law firms have unremarked downsides has garnered a bit of attention. Carolyn Elefant on Legal Blog Watch notes the article approvingly. JD Hull, in his blog What About Paris, says that I “nailed” the points. Click here for a PDF of the article.Download 08-10-16 Rees Morrison big law firm downsides NYLJ

Russian Corporate Counsel Association. The Martindale-Hubble website announces that the Russian Corporate Counsel Association has more than 300 in-house counsel members, from 93 different companies – both domestic and international. Membership is restricted: “While the association is happy to work alongside lawyers who belong to legal, consulting or accountancy firms, such individuals are not permitted to become members of the RCCA” (See my post of Aug. 13, 2008: 10 other national organizations for inside counsel.).

Productivity on this blog. Forty-six months ago I started posting to this blog. As of November 20th, I had put up 3,700 posts, of which I have written all but about 12. The average pace has been 80.4 posts every month, including the partial months of February 2005 and November 2008. The median has been 85 posts per month, with a high of 124 in May 2007 and a low of 17 in June 2005. The standard deviation of posts for my complete months, since you are really eager to know, is 26.3 (See my post of Nov. 16, 2008: analysis of header words.).

During a Counsel to Counsel forum held in Madrid, Spain on Feb. 26, 2008, one of the attendees spoke about two kinds of compliance functions. I quote a summary of the meeting from the Martindale-Hubble website.

“Here, one speaker recalled that, in their company, general compliance is handled by the internal audit department, while regulatory compliance was run by legal. The two departments are run separately, but form part of the same general process within the company.”

I have not encountered such a bifurcated compliance function.

Should you have your employment lawyer, who advises clients on how to minimize litigation, also handle employment lawsuits? Should your patent lawyers prosecute in the morning and litigate in the afternoon? How about your environmental lawyers likewise playing offense and defense?

And then the ultimate. Should transaction-oriented business lawyers, generalists who mostly handle contracts and the range of legal issues that arise for a business unit, also handle the litigation that arises for the client?

I think not. Litigation is a specialty and a very expensive one, sometimes played for high stakes. An anti-trust counselor, or indeed any other non-litigation lawyer, may be a very poor manager of litigation. Even worse is a situation where the lawyer’s earlier efforts led to the lawsuit, since they could hardly remain objective.

It seems extravagant (of time) and duplicitous (of integrity) at the end of a competitive bid to negotiate simultaneously with more than one law firm. Yet the ACC Docket, Vol. 25, Sept. 2007 at 43, offers some language to enable your department to do so, albeit in the context of contractual negotiations. “While we would very much like to seriously consider moving forward at this time with you, we are also pursuing a similar form of contract with an alternative vendor in order to receive their reaction as well." If competition is the goal of an RFP process, have at it!

Tracing a visit to this blog from the ABA’s website and its compendium of blawgs, I took a few minutes to see how many of its categories pertain to law department management. Amidst the surfeit of substantive law blogs, here are the 17 categories I noticed that might pertain to my bailiwick and the number of blawgs purportedly in them.

Law Practice Management (268) Legal Information (240) Legal Technology (100) Careers (97) Legal Marketing & Consulting (83) Work/Life Balance (59) ADR (49) Economics (26) Corporate Compliance (23) In-House Counsel (23) Verdicts & Settlements (17) Legal Research & Writing (16) Women in the Law (15) Outsourcing (12) Attorney fees (7) Diversity (5) Pro Bono (2)

That there might be 1,042 blawgs on legal management topics blows me away. Certainly, many of these blogs may be inactive. Most cover only law firms. Some may be counted in more than one category or inappropriately categorized. That said, I doubt that the collection is complete even among these 17 categories (See my post of Nov. 16, 2005 #2: blawg on a single lawsuit; April 13, 2007: Blawgsearch directory; March 2, 2008: IP Updates and Patry Copyright Blog by in-house counsel; Feb. 20, 2008: listing of 6 law-department related blawgs; Aug. 18, 2008 #2: Alternate Fee Lawyer blog; and Sept. 22, 2008: estimated 20,000 law-related blogs in the United States. Even so, much material nestles among these blogs that could guide or stimulate a general counsel.

My friend Ron Friedmann, of Integreon, was talking about offshoring legal services. He stressed that cost economies are not the only benefits of using resources in lower-cost locales to handle legal-related services. Ron made the point that when a competent LPO (legal process outsoucer) takes on a set of tasks it is likely also to think through how best to accomplish not only the task but also the handoffs.

Reorganization of tasks can bring more efficiency and quality control. Who does what, and when, goes to the heart of process improvement. As to handoffs, those are the key junctures where information or deliverables go from one group to another. An adept LPO can save money while it streamlines processes.

General counsel can legitimately fret that a process to select outside counsel through their responses to a Request for Proposal can careen off the tracks. The team that develops the RFP has a tendency to Christmas-tree it with lots of steps, controls, and questions. Too many cooks spoil the broth; too many law firms get invited to the feast. The cumbersome procedures and burdensome requests for content are then magnified by a bureaucratic nightmare of evaluations, reviews, presentations and negotiations of contracts. Everything about the RFP takes on a Frankenstein life of its own.

RFP processes should be surgical: get in quickly, remove what you must, and stitch the incision (See my post of March 30, 2008: RFP with 22 references.)

The Economist, Nov. 15, 2008 at 78, speculates that with the current torrent of downsizing will come trimming of headquarters staff. It cites Nortel, which is “handing over activities such as marketing and R&D, which were previously run from the centre, to business units.” Although not mentioned, legal functions may follow suit. Sarbanes-Oxley supposedly pushed companies to report all lawyers to the general counsel; financial stress may push some of them to report legal groups back to business executives (See my post of March 11, 2005: SOX and reorganizations.).

No research that I have encountered suggests that companies with decentralized legal groups encounter more legal shortcomings than single-reporting-line departments, such as failures to spot issues, escalate them if appropriate, or prevent wrongdoing. Anecdote and subjective opinion do not prove that situation (See my post of Aug. 5, 2008: decentralized reporting with 7 references.).

Even to raise this reporting possibility ranks for me as apostasy, because I strongly advocate that all practicing lawyers in a company report (even if up a chain) to the top lawyer, who should report to the CEO. I believe that if the CEO holds the general counsel accountable for the legal affairs of a company, the general counsel should have managerial control over all inside and outside lawyers of a company. If there were a clean way, however, to divide the accountability, or to live comfortably with gaps in the accountability – the decisions of practicing lawyers who report to a business executive – then so be it. Many reputable companies have decentralized reporting of their lawyers.