This lawyer manqué rarely gets to cite Supreme Court decisions so when I read in Corp. Counsel, Almanac 2010 at 13, about a February decision, I seized the opportunity. The Court clarified a conflict among the federal circuits as to how to define a company’s “principal place of business” for purposes of jurisdiction. Unsurprisingly, at least when you see all things through the lens of the internal legal staff, the high court held that judges need to look for the corporation’s “nerve center” – typically the location of its headquarters.

A few companies have so globalized their operations and the locations of their executives that the nerve center may be brain-like – distributed all over but coordinated. Overwhelmingly, though, companies do have a geographic nerve center, where most of the executive neurons fire, and it is there that a large portion of the senior lawyers should be based.

Thank you, all nine Justices, for ruling on this important issue of law department management.

In the spirit of court decisions, let me cite my blog posts that have referred to the US Supreme Court (See my post of Feb. 16, 2006: data visualization and Supreme Court citations; April 1, 2007: straight from clerking for a Supreme Court Justice to General Counsel; May 8, 2007: Charles James and Chevron’s US Supreme Court argument; May 21, 2007: decision on novelty of patents; Nov. 10, 2007: Bradwell v. Illinois; May 3, 2008: Justice Thomas worked in-house at Monsanto; June 15, 2008: Supreme Court decisions that significantly affect law department workload; Feb. 24, 2009: power law distribution of cases cited by the Court; June 30, 2010: allowance rates on patents plummeted after decision; and Nov. 3, 2010: amicus curiae briefs by law departments.).

Previous posts a month ago explained my ranking of eight countries and 20 industries by “legal intensity.” The ranking accumulated the relative standing of each country’s or industry’s median for four key metrics of staffing and spending (See my post of Nov. 30, 2010: USA in the middle of the pack; and Dec. 1, 2010: industry ranking.). The indices may be crude, a first attempt at a methodology, but they point toward substantial differences in the factors that drive headcount and budgets.

My next investigation will be to explore whether the relative number of participants in the General Counsel Metrics global benchmark survey – with 806 participants – correlates to legal intensity. It seems quite plausible to me that general counsel in countries or industries that are buffeted by more legal issues – as reflected in their personnel rolls and total legal expenditures – feel compelled to pay more attention to management benchmarks.

Very little, I believe. Others disagree with me.

In her discussion of offshore legal outsourcing, Cassandra Burke Robertson, A Collaborative Model of Offshore Legal Outsourcing, Case Western School of Law Working Paper 2010-35 (Nov. 2010) at 14, discusses the lack of publicity by law departments surrounding offshoring. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1705505 Robertson writes that “Corporations choosing to send work offshore will rarely publicly announce that they are doing so.” One of the two reasons given is that “there is a risk that competitors will follow suit, thus diminishing any competitive advantage gained from outsourcing.”

It has not been my impression that general counsel conceal their management efforts and experiences from each other because of a concern for proprietary value or a competitive edge. When general counsel talk among themselves in trade groups or at other gatherings, they seem willing to share openly and completely. They may decline to speak on public panels, but that reluctance probably has more to do with tight schedules and low perceived value to them than with recalcitrance about disclosure.

Even so, despite the best efforts of journalists, consultants, and service providers, incubators of good ideas may sometimes seal them from the world. Possibly, but not likely.

So controversial has writing history become, so clotted with attacks on objectivity of historians in the past, that a special discipline has arisen – historiography. Historiographers situate historians and their writings in their governing milieu, where limits on their tools or awareness or freedom affected their topics, assumption, research and interpretations. Ideologies that prevailed in the society of the historian, not to mention personal belief systems, warped the findings and conclusions. Financial and reputational considerations hung heavily over any historian. None of us can achieve full objectivity.

For example, from the remove of decades, historiographers of the legal industry may note that those who write about law departments now were strongly influenced by what sells magazines or induces readers to sign up for conferences and webinars. It may be recognized that the ascendant market ideology skewed most writing to a competitive, market view. Or, historiographers may say we all over-rated or under-rated technology. None of us can escape the pull of our culture and mindset.

Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood, Superconnect: Harnessing the power of networks and the strength of weak links (Norton 2010) emphasizes the potential power if we reach out to of our so-called “weak connections.” Weak connections describe our acquaintances as compared to “strong connections” who are our close friends, family and workmates we see most days. Your strong connections are more likely to be similar to you in background, knowledge, and beliefs. Weak connections are former colleagues, classmates, members of the same club or religious group, sorority buds, the lawyers you met at the conference or the vendors you spent time with at LegalTech. The variety of viewpoints and knowledge available through weak ties confers advantages for you if you consult them over the more homogenous knowledge of your strong ties. For example, more people find jobs through their weak ties than through their strong ties.

The authors refer to “hubs” as the junction of strong and weak ties. Your pilates pals, the monthly poker group, members of your reading club, the Parent-Teacher Association leaders, your neighbor with the Collie dog…. The more weak ties you maintain and the more and varied hubs you belong to, the more resources you can draw on.

All this time writing mostly for lawyers, being a lawyer myself, trying to improve management for lawyers, it struck me as ironic that I haven’t drawn on fundamental concepts from the law that might help explain what general counsel deal with as managers. A number of legal precepts apply, and in fact touch on hugely important topics. Consider rights and obligations. A mainstay of all legal systems, these complementary concepts also have significance for law departments, as in the scope of a general counsel’s responsibilities (obligations) and the power to intervene where legal or ethical wrongdoing appears (rights). A law department has an obligation to pay for services dlievered and the right to direct how those services are rendered.

Proximity, intention, negligence, and agreement also serve as building blocks of jurisprudence as well as of law department managers. Blame and praise for performance implicitly accept a proximity framework. Intention undergirds any assessment of someone’s performance if the assessment is not solely outcome based (See my post of Dec. 26, 2010: move away from outcome based evaluations.). Negligence concepts apply to sloppy work as well as to sloppy firms and contractual agreements are the lifeblood of internal lawyers. My point: several of the fundamental concepts of the law also bear on the effective management of lawyers.

Gaston Bilder contributed a thoughtful comment on my post about claimed innovations that in fact assemble and build on many component parts (See my post of Dec. 28, 2010: using as an illustration DuPont’s convergence.). Gaston wrote, in part: “The next step - which is also critical from my point of view - should be the continuous improvement of this bundle of ideas, i.e. testing new additions (call them innovations if you want) and weeding out what doesn't work.”

He is right. In my mind, a steady series of improvements to a process has as much or more clout as a light bulb idea. Visit Gaston’s blog for more insights, especially on corporate social responsibility. (See my post of May 15, 2009: continuous improvement with 6 references and one metapost.).

This year, with my burrowing into benchmark metrics for law departments, I have unearthed a number of clues to the total number of law departments around the world (See my post of Feb. 8, 2010: UK had approximately 130,000 lawyers; Commerce & Industry has 11,000 members; Feb. 16, 2010 #2: extrapolation from Belgian figures; Feb. 17, 2010: possibly 10,000 law departments in Europe; Feb. 19, 2010: some data on the number of in-house counsel; March 2, 2010: presumed even distribution of number of departments across industries after adjusting for size of industry; April 30, 2010: Bureau of Labor Statistics data; May 10, 2010: estimates based on GDP calculations; May 12, 2010: traded companies and tax returns; June 18, 2010: some numbers from the UK; Oct. 7, 2010 #1: US has 30,000 companies with 100+ employees; Oct. 14, 2010: 70,000 transnational companies in the world; Oct. 20, 2010: estimates based on lawyers per thousand employees; Oct. 22, 2010: state-level data; Oct. 31, 2010: ISO 9000 certificate awards; and Nov. 19, 2010: 45,000 publicly traded companies worldwide.).

Before the surge in 2010 I had accumulated a number of other references to the law department population of countries or the world (See my post of Sept. 25, 2005: ACCA estimate of 71,000 non-governmental in-house lawyers; Oct. 19, 2005 #2: in-house lawyers in China; April 13, 2006: estimates in the UK of 14.5% inside solicitors; Aug. 26, 2006 on large law departments in France; Dec. 3, 2006: possible Fortune 500 staff figures; Dec. 11, 2006: ratios in the State of New Jersey; May 13, 2007: mid-size companies in Europe with law departments; Feb. 9, 2008: 60% of legal departments in the US have fewer than 5 lawyers; Dec. 31, 2008: oblique data suggests about 21% in-house; March 9, 2009: ABA data and 8%; April 2, 2009 #2: data from 1961 to 1991; and June 15, 2009: almost one out of five lawyers in a large survey had gone in-house by their seventh year of practice.).

Here I will light two more dim candles in the dark. First, subscribers to legal department trade journals. Corp Counsel, Nov. 2009 stated in its Statement of Ownership that its average number of paid/and or requested subscriptions during the preceding 12 months was 25,919. A year later, in the Nov. 2010 issue at 94, the corresponding number had dropped about 5 percent to 24,627. Would those subscribers be 60-70 percent law department lawyers, like the readership of my blog?

Second, consider listings of lawyers in the US’s largest legal departments. The total number of lawyers in the Corporate Legal Times listing of 200 largest law departments in 2000 was 25,836. Four years later that same listing, admittedly with somewhat different companies in it, reached 27,420 attorneys, which means the group had grown by six percent.

Many in-house counsel spend more hours in their office than they do anywhere else awake. How they fill, design, and maintain their little plot tells much about them. Those individual – or mandated – features of an office, such as desks, chairs, cabinets, also shackle or enable productivity. Workspace design as a topic sprawls far beyond this sparse post, but I have pulled together what I could locate on this blog about various accoutrement of individual offices (See my post of Dec. 16, 2005: ethnography; June 24, 2007: how people decorate their offices and walls; Sept. 27, 2009: the calming whisper of flowing water; and Sept. 30, 2009: a lawyer’s individual office .).

Desks: (See my post of Nov. 8, 2005: SEI Investment’s completely mobile desks; Feb. 2, 2008: piles; Feb. 13, 2008: the messiness or orderliness of a general counsel’s office gives clues; and Nov. 17, 2008: piles on desks and procrastination.).

Bookshelves and cabinets: Hard as it may be to believe, in 6,006 posts there is not a single reference to bookshelves or cabinets.

Chairs for desk and table: (See my post of Sept. 17, 2009: ergonomic chairs; July 29, 2007: to speed up meetings, do away with chairs; Feb. 7, 2008: infrastructure includes chairs; Nov. 23, 2008: thermogenesis on a treadmill; and Sept. 19, 2009: chairs and ergonomics.).

Lights and lamps, both office and desk: (See my post of Dec. 26, 2007: lights and energy-saving; Aug. 4, 2008: better lights for older eyes; and Sept. 22, 2009: dimmers and other light savers.).

Computers and keyboards, laptops in docking stations or desktops: (See my post of Nov. 22, 2010: virtualized computers; April 23, 2006: ergonomics, including keyboard ergonomics; Dec. 24, 2010: three new features of keyboards.).

Monitors: (See my post of Nov. 30, 2009: dual monitors to increase workspace; Feb. 19, 2010: productivity boosts from dual monitors; Nov. 30, 2010: myth of productivity increases; and Sept. 30, 2009: monitors with 6 references.).

Speakers, headphones and webcams: (See my post of Feb. 15, 2010: webcams; and Jan. 18, 2008: headphones.).

Telephones: (See my post of Feb. 24, 2007: dictation to a telephone.).

Printers and multipurpose devices: (See my post of July 7, 2009: printers with 6 references.).

Memorabilia: All the chotchkas, schwag, lucite tiles, trinkets and doodads we treasure, many fragrant with memories (See my post of Dec. 17, 2005: comments on paintings; and July 29, 2007: ambient orbs.).

At the Consero 2010 Corporate Counsel Forum, one panel put up a slide with data from the ACC Chief Legal Officer Survey in 2008. The slide showed a dozen outcomes desired by legal departments, which participants in the survey ranked in decreasing order of importance from 12 to 1, the least important. “Discounted fees” (8.7 average rating), “Increased responsiveness” (8.5), “Optimized staffing models” (8.4), and “Understanding of our business” (8.3) rose to the top of the chart.

The survey likely took place in the teeth of the economic collapse. In the last few months of 2008, with the upheaval in our economy and revenue collapsing, legal fees were top of mind so discounts – the easiest tourniquet to apply – came in first. Surprisingly, the next three concerns turn not on dollars but on quality of representation, although staffing models certainly affects the amount of bills also.