Some general counsel would simply like to talk about a situation and get some expert advice, immediately and in flexible doses. They can’t afford a big, expensive consulting project; they don’t want to wade through endless pages of reading.

To meet that occasional desire for advice specific to a particular law department, I offer Corporate Counsel Consulting on Call. Your fixed fee is $1,500 for any month you call, no matter how many or how long your calls or how numerous the topics. Whoever undertakes the arrangement, however, must be on the calls. I will share my experience and thoughts for as long as you want to discuss your situation and offer my recommendations and solutions for how best to address it. (See my post of Feb. 25, 2009: fixed fee for benchmarking projects.).

Paul Boynton Esq. of In-House Legal, a production of Legal Talk Network, recently interviewed me for a podcast. I spoke for about ten minutes about offshoring, competitive bids and secondments. Those topics, Paul and I had agreed, are among the leading-edge ideas in law department management.

For your listening pleasure, here is the MP3 link for the podcast.

It's been quite a series of recent firsts for this blogger: first YouTube exposure (See my post of Feb. 3, 2009: LegalTech NY debut on YouTube); first blog poll (See my post of Feb. 26, 2009: first survey on this blog.); my first Legal Talk Network program (See my post of Feb. 24, 2008: Corporate Counsel Network podcast.); my first interview program with questions from readers (See my post of Feb. 20, 2009: interview for a program.); and my first unleashing of Twitter (See my post Feb. 1, 2009: one month on Twitter.).

As I understand a recent article, heavy hitters in the banking world have agreed some conflict of interest rules that more realistically adapt to current realities. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, March 2009 at 62, explains that Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, UBS and JPMorgan Chase, among other banks, “are offering waivers allowing their external legal providers to act against them in certain disputes between financial institutions, in a bid to quickly resolve issues arising from the current economic turmoil.”

For example, a law firm that represents one of the banks could handle a mediation against it on a simple dispute, but still could not represent a plaintiff in a significant law suit.

The financial collapse has spurred this collective action to loosen conflicts rules. In part this will reduce legal costs because alternative dispute methods will be able to resolve more claims involving the banks.

It is not hard to imagine more holes being poked in traditional conflicts rules, especially if the law departments of industry leaders agree to a framework, so that a pragmatic easing saves money for everyone (See my post of Feb. 18, 2009: blanket waivers of conflicts of interest.).

What has happened since InBev mixed its law department with Anheuser-Busch’s? We know from Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, March 2009 at 61, that a few months after the November 2008 merger the legal team had stirred together 250 lawyers. The acquiring company’s general counsel, Sabine Chalmers, was named for the new role (plus complilance), although the ci-devant general counsel of the American company leads the North American arm of the department.

The article mentions that since the merger, ten Anheuser-Busch lawyers have left the company. Based on departures from other merged law departments, it is likely there will be more (See my post of Jan. 16, 2009: layoffs after mergers with 9 references.). “The legal team is now dominated by InBev lawyers, who outnumber those from Anheuser-Busch 4:1.” But that may have been the ratio before the merger, if you get my pint.

Someday we will be able to describe with numbers most of the primary characteristics of any law department. Such “descriptive metrics” are numbers that convey something about how a law department operates. For example, concentration of spending on law firms: 75 percent of all spend in a year went to 10 percent of the firms paid. If many law departments use the same cutoff (75%), then we will all have a standard descriptive metric to describe one operating characteristic of all law departments. Another is the average years of a department’s lawyers since graduation from law school.

Benchmarks are descriptive metrics, but I believe there are many, many more. As with XML coding, we need standard ways to define and calculate descriptive metrics. Accordingly, this post begins a series of six posts that explore law department descriptive metrics.

Once descriptive metrics are defined and generally accepted, the next step will be to benchmark them. The final step will be to study the correlations of descriptive metrics with practices and performance indicators (See my post of Feb. 12, 2008: surveys ought to correlate metrics with practices.).

Alarmists should not jump to the conclusion that I believe all or even most of what law departments do can reduce to digital description. Much of what happens in law departments evades quantification, such as creativity, judgment, and desk-side manner. Other aspects, however, we can describe with mathematical tools in the form of descriptive metrics.

Snarky writing cleverly spoofs the powerful and respected. It pokes sophisticated fun at those in high positions and cleverly mocks them. But there is no snark in law-department land. No general counsel gets lampooned. Why?

Money muzzles snark. Simple. Service providers want to sell to general counsel; vendors want buyers; outside counsel peddle billable hours; consultants chase projects for general counsel; journalists sell ads and nurture sources; conference promoters seek panelists and paying bottoms in seats. No one bites the hand that feeds them, so we read nothing that roasts poor decisions, ineptitude, Dilbertiness, or blatant stupidity.

Snark isn’t underground, a samizdat. Snark would be business suicide for the writer. Even bloggers play the game and do not want to offend general counsel they wish to impress or quote.

So snark is never unsheathed.

I don’t wish for scathing exposes, ironic beard pulling, or vicious satire. I do wish, however, that we had more ventilation of poor management and tactics in legal departments.

You are all invited, at least those of you who review and approve legal bills, to test drive my new polling capability. The question is on the upper right, below my blook notice. Pick your answer from the choices and we can all see instantly how the results shape up. By the way, the polling software discloses nothing about you. I see the same results, and only those results, that you see.

If polling works, I plan to ask questions periodically and then write about the results. If you have a question about law department management that you would like to ask, email me rees@reesmorrison.com and I will try to include it in a poll.

There is no way for me to tell if someone is legitimate or if someone votes more than once, so I will assume every one of my readers is on the best behavior.

Brian Daley, the author of an article I cited (See my post of Feb. 22, 2009: software to depict and quantify decisions.), was kind enough to email me with some additional explanation. I have slightly edited the following excerpts.

“I have only used TreeAge software.

I find sensitivity analysis relatively easy with TreeAge. I will say, however, that you have to use the software frequently to stay comfortable with it.”

Thank you, Brian.

My aim has always been to keep marketing out of this blog, so I down-play the fact that I am without doubt the universe’s absolutely greatest consultant to general counsel. OK, well, my mom agrees.

But it is only fair to break my vow of modesty to announce the first-ever fixed-fee offering by a consultant to obtain and analyze comparative benchmarking data. Walk, don’t run, to the nearest click here to find out more.

A month ago this blog dropped the bombshell that facilities costs for US law departments range around $25 per square foot (See my post of Jan. 29, 2009: based on US office rates nationwide.). That post left room to ask: “What is the typical square footage used by a US in-house lawyer?”

Glad you asked. Data from the Altman Weil 2008 Law Department Metrics Benchmarking Survey at 144, tells us that median “occupancy expenses” per lawyer range around $16-$18,000 per year. The upper quartile figures climb 50 percent above that range. So, if $25 per square foot is a reasonable figure for office rent and if $17,000 a year is the occupancy cost of a US lawyer, that means the lawyer enjoys has an office (and appropriate allocation of hallway, conferences rooms and other spaces) of about 700 square feet. The office itself is likely to be the major portion of that expense.