Three authors (Brian Uzzi, Ryon Lancaster and Shannon Dunlap) present tabular data in Laura Empson, ed., Managing The Modern Law Firm: New Challenges New Perspectives (Oxford Univ. Press 2007) at 99. The table shows data for five groups of 133 law firms during 1989-95 organized into quintiles by number of lawyers. For each quintile of size, a column shows the average number of in-house attorneys at their major clients based on National Law Journal league tables.

Starting with the largest quintile, the in-house client average was 53.3 attorneys; the next quintile down had clients with an average of 43.9 attorneys; then up to 49.3; followed by down to 43.5 and the smallest quintile of firms had clients with the smallest average, 34.4 attorneys. The F-statistic for those attorney averages was 5.32. A fairly steady decline, which suggests the intuitive circumstance that bigger law departments retain bigger law firms.

If I were a general counsel, when I look at billing rate increases of my favored incumbent firms (See my post of April 16, 2009: incumbent firms with 11 references.), I would want to see two trends. One trend should be a lower pace of rate changes than in general for my pool of firms (See my post of March 23, 2007: moments in statistics to describe different measures of variance.).

The second pattern I would look for is whether the rate increases by the much-used lawyers at that firm are less than the increases for others in the firm. That implies there is no lock-step rate increase in the firm and I am getting the considered regard my loyalty deserves.

Across the table, if I were the responsible partner at one of those go-to firms, I would argue the opposite effect. If my lawyers have invested time to understand the client and become more skilled regarding its legal issues and more knowledgeable about its business, then since their productivity and effectiveness have probably increased, their rates could increase FASTER than for other clients.

Environmental nudges on e-mails. I like this message at the bottom of emails (See my post of Dec. 26, 2008 #4:: huge, wasteful disclaimer in the footer of every e-mail from a company.). “Please consider the environment before printing this email or attachments, and print double-sided in draft mode when printing is necessary.”

A good statement of what revenue should mean in benchmark studies. For its Fortune 500 issue, the magazine defines “revenue” this way. “Revenue figures include consolidated subsidiaries and reported revenues from discontinued operations but exclude excise taxes. For banks, revenue is the sum of gross interest income and grows non-interest income. For insurance companies, revenue includes premium and an annuity income, investment income, realized capital gains or losses, and other income but excludes deposits." These definitions come from Fortune, July 20, 2009 at F-8 (See my post of Aug. 21, 2008: total legal spend as percent of revenue with 9 references and one metapost.). Benchmark studies of legal departments should adopt a similar, consistent definition.

Massive legal department at Homeland Security. According to Corp. Counsel, July 2009, at 16, Ivan Fong, the new general counsel at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, will oversee 1,700 attorneys (See my post of Nov. 6, 2005: large legal groups in government agencies; and Feb. 16, 2009: FBI has 180 lawyers.).

Z-scores to standardize attributes. When you use this procedure, you ensure that simple differences in metrics do not lead to certain attributes overwhelming others and potentially masking differences among firms when you do a cluster analysis. A Z-score analysis compares different metrics in terms of standards of deviations (See my post of July 30, 2009: cluster analysis.).

Garnishment. Having written nothing about garnishment, I resolutely step in and assert that legal departments should not deal with garnishments (See my post of April 9, 2008: quasi-legal tasks with 14 references.).

Included in this overview are metaposts and comments that have to do with process improvement. It includes two metaposts on Six Sigma, as well as one each on process mapping, kaizen and cycle time (See my post of Feb. 13, 2008: Six Sigma with 18 references; July 24, 2009: Six Sigma in law departments and the firms they use with 11 references and 1 metapost; April 9, 2009 #2: process maps with 6 references; May 15, 2009: kaizen and continuous improvement with 6 references and one metapost; and March 5, 2008: cycle time with 18 references.).

Other posts have added ideas (See my post of March 23, 2006: poka-yoke or mistake-proofing; April 9, 2009: takt time; and July 14, 2009: Toyota’s A3 technique.).

Here are the ten best from my 99 posts in June 2009. If the brief description of the post entices you, click on the post title to read it all. If you would these posts in a file, email me and I will be happy to send them to you in Word.

A calculation of value added by a law department (June 29, 2009)

One legal department’s calculation of how it saves its client corporation millions of dollars every year.

Two domestic firms for every foreign firm retained? (June 28, 2009)

A recent survey found that average US firms retained were twice the number of the average foreign firms retained.

Discounts that rise with volume suggest holdback percentages might also increase (June 26, 2009)

The approach of holding back higher and higher percentages as total fees paid to a firm on a matter increase.

What if a law department gave each attorney an allowance to pay for support? (June 24, 2009)

The possibility of creating a market for secretarial support services, where what a lawyer doesn’t spend stays with the lawyer.

How much fee detail should law firms be asked to divulge if they work on a fixed fee? (June 18, 2009)

Back and forth on billing data that a firm should disclose during a fixed-fee engagement, but my conclusion: provide it.

General counsel resoundingly feel they should also be considered the chief ethics officer (June 18, 2009)

Three-quarters of general counsel in a survey believe they should be the chief ethics officer.

A definition and short discussion of “incumbent firms” (June 14, 2009)

Three factors define incumbency: extended time of use, wide range of services, and major fees.

A daring idea regarding a periodic alternative to hourly billing – department decides payments periodically (June 14, 2009)

At agreed intervals, a legal department decides what it wil pay for the previous month’s work of a law firm.

More collective actions by law departments (June 10, 2009)

More than a dozen instances of joint efforts by legal departments to share collectively in some activity.

Reverse brainstorming stimulates creativity (June 1, 2009)

Reverse brainstorming stimulates people, lets them percolate, and collects their ideas afterwards.

The authors of a chapter in Laura Empson, ed., Managing The Modern Law Firm: New Challenges New Perspectives (Oxford Univ. Press 2007) at 104, wanted to operationalize quality for the law firms they were studying. To operationalize is to devise a metric that represents some soft attribute (See my post of Dec. 9, 2005: operationalize client-satisfaction questions and write them unambiguously.), such as law firm quality.

They measured what percentage of the firm’s partners received their JD from one of the country’s top eight US law schools (Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Univ. of Chicago, Univ. of Michigan and Yale). The higher percentage of elite graduates, the higher the presumed quality (See my post of Nov. 28, 2005: percentages in departments of graduates of elite law schools.).

If we had data from a collection of law departments on the percentage of their lawyers who graduated from one of those eight schools, we might expect to find correlations. For example, might those departments have fewer lawyers per billion? Might their total legal spend per revenue be lower than departments less endowed with elite graduates? Might their structures be flatter? Would they use a different mix of law firms?

In other words, assuming intelligence matches to some degree the presumed quality of the law school someone attended, does a relative abundance of intelligence change the operational characteristics of a law department?

Just as this blogger does not try for encyclopedic pieces or comprehensive treatments of topics, he no longer writes traditional book reviews. But he will plunder thoughtful points from a book, and has done so abundantly with Leigh Dance’s stimulating book, Bright Ideas: Insights from Legal Luminaries Worldwide (Mill City Press 2009). Each of its 26 chapters are 3-5 pages or so, easy to read, and informative. About a third each of them come from senior inside lawyers, partners at major firms, and others such as consultants and journalists.

My extracts from Leigh’s book have covered many topics (See my post of July 7, 2009: GCs urged to be decisive; July 16, 2009: three-way distribution of responsibilities in a global legal department; July 16, 2009: soft skills for in-house attorneys; July 16, 2009: SharePoint application at Hilton Hotels; July 16, 2009: general counsel need stamina if they travel much; July 16, 2009: the demands for travel on general counsel; July 29, 2009: be fair to outside counsel and keep in mind what they go through for you; July 30, 2009: professional management in law firms percolates to law departments; and July 30, 2009: the drip-drip of law firm rainmakers.).

General counsel may feel besieged by solicitors – a pun lurks there on the English term for non-litigation lawyers and the common meaning of those who solicit. One view, however, is that “In many firms, regardless of size or reach, the ratio of rainmakers is low, estimated by firm leaders at 8-12% of all lawyers in the firm.” That is the claim by Deborah McMurray in her chapter in E. Leigh Dance, Bright Ideas: Insights from Legal Luminaries Worldwide (Mill City Press 2009) at 146.

I started thinking. General counsel may feel themselves preyed upon by partners who yearn for their business, but in fact only a small portion of partners try to do so. Although to be more precise, the term “rainmaker” implies a partner who is successful at selling more work; others, and perhaps many more than the approximately 10 percent estimated to be rainmakers, may aspire to sell, but only be “droplet makers” at best (See my post of Feb. 20, 2009: cross-selling by law firm partners with 7 references.). The bombardment of general counsel may feel like a flood.

The consequences of this change to legal departments occurred to me as I read E. Leigh Dance, Bright Ideas: Insights from Legal Luminaries Worldwide (Mill City Press 2009) at 161. Simon Slater of First Counsel expressed this view.

Assume Slater spotted the movement correctly, and further assume that something similar happened around the same time in the United States. After a decade or so, the partners from those firms, more enlightened in ways managerial, move in-house and import their new-found ideas about management. Thereafter, presumably, law departments improved their levels of management. Along with in-house attorneys enhancing their management skills on their own, the importation of experience and a mind-set to run the operation smoothly would certainly complement it.

Back in the day, companies thought of their international operations on a country-by-country basis and it made sense to have a local lawyer or two in-country report to the general manager of that country.

Times change, as pointed out in E. Leigh Dance, Bright Ideas: Insights from Legal Luminaries Worldwide (Mill City Press 2009) at 91 in a chapter by Paul Smith, a partner at Eversheds. Global companies have reorganized into larger regions of oversight. “We saw that companies were organizing themselves on bigger geographies, such as Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).” That shift at the client level has caused shifts in legal departments in several respects.

Generalizing very broadly, the business shift to larger geographic regions has been followed in legal departments by shifts in at least six management phenomena. We have seen more:

1. dispersion of lawyers away from the “headquarters” as business executives disperse (See my post of Jan. 16, 2009: physically decentralized law departments with 13 references.);

2. locations of lawyers in hub offices (See my post of Sept. 16, 2008: foreign locations of in-house counsel with 11 references.);

3. centralization of reporting by practicing lawyers (See my post of Aug. 5, 2008: decentralized reporting with 7 references.);

4. matrix reporting (See my post of July 24, 2009: IBM’s reporting structure; and July 4, 2009: solid line and matrix with 11 references and 3 metaposts.);

5. travel by leaders of the department (See my post of July 16, 2009: globe-trotters need stamina; and July 17, 2009: frequent flyers and global management.); and

6. efforts at integrating the members of the dispersed departments (See my post of March 1, 2009: creating a one-department culture with 7 posts and 5 metaposts.).