In a recent article, Scott Giordano of Mitratech credited Ben Heineman (General Electric’s former general counsel) with an observation he and others must believe to be profound. “The greatest challenge for the GC is to reconcile the dual and sometimes contradictory role of being a partner to the business and a guardian of its reputation and integrity.” This appears in Met. Corp. Counsel, June 2011 at 9. My question is, Why single out the top lawyer as a guardian of reputation and integrity, as if that lawyer has more of a moral guardian role than do other top executives?

Later, Giordano cites the cop on the beat obligation. He writes “There is a conflict, for example, when the GC’s compensation package is tied to company profitability and stock options. It raises questions of impartiality when there is a personal incentive to disregard playing the corporate cop and maximize payouts that might be a result of manipulated financial numbers.” The top lawyer not only cleanses moral turpitude and preserves the good name of the company, but walks the beat and swings the billy club. Why the heightened ethical burden on lawyers (See my post of Dec. 22, 2005: ethics with 5 references; Oct. 7, 2008: ethics with 29 references; March 11, 2010: ethical behavior and in-house lawyers with 15 references.)?

It must be flattering to view oneself as the bulwark against lapses: the purer-than-thou lawyer calling ethical balls and strikes. But that could be myth-making and self-aggrandizement. Everyone in a company ought to be concerned about the public perception of that company – its brand and reputation – and everyone in a company ought to act honorably – show integrity.

IT professionals don’t want data breaches, server failures, and flawed software. They are guardians of important parts of a company’s reputation and integrity. The CFO certainly tries to avoid violations of GAAP or rules of exchanges, and certainly doesn’t want embarrassing restatements or disclosures. Do CPA’s ignore corporate reputation and integrity? Human Resources staff care deeply about whether employees admire the company they work for and whether it treats employees with dignity and respect.

Why are lawyers placed on the pinnacle of punctiliousness? The crackerjack tax lawyers at GE have done their job so well that GE has been under the glare of publicity for paying such a low corporate tax rate. Is that reputation building? Can legal guns be paragons of morality and good behavior?

An e-mail arrived from Thomas G. Oakes Associates about their services and software to support trial presentations.

Oakes’ spiel is that trial presentation technology can help the judge and jury visualize and understand your story. It lets you compare items, such as documents, photographs, or videos. You can retrieve and display impeaching testimony or documents at a moment's notice. The firm can maintain depositions, exhibits and streaming video servers for your convenience. They can create Trialbooks, TrialDirector Indexes, Bates Stamped files and tabulate your presentation binders. For massive cases, or massively important ones, resources such as these can be invaluable.

Given the huge costs of trials, the scarcity of posts here on this blog regarding the topic seems odd. Or not odd, since trials happen rarely (See my post of Oct. 27, 2005: Fulbright & Jaworski notes 60% of cases settle during trial; Oct. 27, 2005: percentage of trials that go to verdict; and Dec. 17, 2008: roughly half of cases that go to trial settle during the trial.).

Even more rarely are they crucial enough for law departments to invest in unusual management approaches (See my post of May 20, 2005: burn rate jumps during trial; July 4, 2006: trial consultants; Dec. 12, 2007: shadow juries and their costs; Feb. 4, 2008: alleged unwillingness of in-house counsel to go to trial except for very important cases; May 6, 2009: costs do not rise linearly as a case nears trial; June 14, March 2, 2010: trial graphics department at Weil, Gotshal; and Jan. 30, 2011: national coordinating counsel help pick which lawsuits to take to trial.).

A survey last month by Legalbill, a provider of cost-management software for legal departments, obtained data from more than 600 U.S. law firm lawyers about their use of UTBMS codes. One survey question asked “To what degree have you changed the amount of attention given to selecting the most appropriate UTBMS code as a result of client feedback?”

Two-thirds of the lawyers said not at all or to a small degree. That could be because their clients agreed already that the codes the firms selected properly characterized the services billed for. If the firm does it correctly, no feedback from the client would be needed. Or, in a darker interpretation, it could mean that clients don’t say anything to the firms about their bills and coding. Feedback is meager to non-existent.

If you would like the fuller set of the data results, write Legalbill’s Managing Partner, Stephen French.

During a recent consulting project, the general counsel said that about two years ago he had systematically met with nearly two dozen of his department’s major clients. He had asked all them basically the same questions – “How are we doing?” and “How can we do better?” – and compiled the results.

I commend this practice. It’s all well and good for a general counsel to pick up comments here and there from clients. Such remarks have immediacy and value. Far better, a deliberate effort reaches key constituents, tells them ahead of time what you want to hear about so they can prepare, compiles a fairly comprehensive picture of client opinion, and thinks about it as a whole -- a far superior practice.

A survey conducted in the past month by Legalbill obtained data from more than 600 law firm lawyers about their use of UTBMS codes. The survey asked them “To what extent did the clients' requirement of your use of the UTBMS codes change your billing behavior?” My presupposition was that tasked-based billing should not change a firm’s billing patterns: timekeepers simply avoid block billing and choose the most appropriate code for the activity.

According to the survey findings, four out of ten of the lawyer respondents said that the code requirement changed their billing to a moderate or large degree; the remainder said that it made no difference or only a small difference. Perhaps for those firms that had not previously had to do even that much responded that, yes, they had “changed their billing behavior.” I think of that as an administrative change in behavior. As for more profound “billing behavior,” we can’t tell from the wording of the question whether code usage changed what was substantively done by the firm, who did the work, or how much the firms billed. Those would be practice changes, and much more telling.

If you would like the fuller set of the data results, write Legalbill’s Managing Partner, Stephen French.

The Council on Litigation Management (CLM) has teamed with Columbia Law School to host the Litigation Management Institute. According to a press release, “The Institute is the first certification program specifically designed to provide attorneys a comprehensive understanding of the business of litigation management.”

The Institute, to be limited to 100 participants, will start October 28th. Nine courses will cover topics such as case evaluation and assessment, reserving, data management, resolution strategies, fee arrangements, and the fundamentals of insurance coverage and risk transfer. Upon completion of the program, attorneys will receive the Certified Litigation Management Professional (CLMP) designation and be awarded the Litigation Management Institute certificate. Additional details are available on the CLM website.

Should you expect your law firms to scrub their invoices electronically to match your guidelines?

We learn from the Orange Rag, June 2011 at 3 that “Wilson Legal Solutions has partnered with Invoice Solutions to develop the Invoice Optimizer system. Compatible with LEDES (Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard), it prescreens law firm invoices and flags entries that don’t comply with client guidelines, so firms can streamline and improve ebilling processes. Invoice Optimizer integrates with Elite software.”

Part of me admires law firms that invest in software so that their invoices comply with the complicated and obnoxious dictates of their clients. Both sides benefit from invoices done correctly.

At war with that obliging picture is a more cynical worry: the software fixes things so that invoices comply with the letter of the law, the guidelines for billing, but do nothing about the underlying efficiency with which the firm handles the matter or the value delivered. Law departments don’t want all the math write, the disbursements in neat rows, and the billing rates at current approved levels if there is still over-staffing, over-working, and over-billing. Cosmetic polishing by software only goes so far.

A piece in Met. Corp. Counsel, June 2011 at 12, concerns Enterprise Risk Management (ERM). Aimed at a company level, I tried to bring it down to the legal department level and apply one of its teachings. The authors write that “Linking your risks to strategic objectives is the most powerful tool for prioritization [of risks].”

Let’s reflect on that seemingly innocent bit of advice. Your law department knows your corporation’s strategic objectives. If they are “organic growth,” “new product development,” and “targeted acquisitions,” let’s say, just how useful is it for the department to identify the major legal risks that lurk around each goal? “Organic growth” – hmmm, that could stretch to involve a class action suit over wages and hours? “New product development” – you could fail to patent a good idea or allow an unsubstantiated claim in an ad? “Targeted acquisitions” could lead to a shareholder derivative suit or breach of a lockup provision? None of these legal risks seem either probable or very threatening.

My point is that lawyers can tag any corporate goal with some conceivable legal risks, even potentially major ones, but that exercise hardly seems useful. What comes from a nice chart with colored bubbles that links legal pitfalls with high-level company objectives?

Of the 97 lawyers in WellPoint’s legal department, 27 of them make up its litigation department. That nearly one out of three lawyers in that department litigate puts it at the very highest end of the range of litigation lawyers as a percentage of all lawyers (See my post of Aug. 27, 2005: litigation staff as a proportion of law department staff.).

Last year the department spent approximately $48 million on outside counsel, about 55 percent of its total legal spend. That ratio is completely typical of large U.S. companies. What proportion of it goes to litigation is not disclosed (See my post of Oct. 24, 2007: cascade of 60% for components of legal spending.).

All the above we learn from Corp. Counsel, June 2011 at 73, plus “Half of WellPoint’s litigation matters are handled internally.” That is very unusual (See my post of Feb. 27, 2008: litigation loads and handling cases in-house through trial; and June 30, 2010: number of cases handled and number of outside counsel managed per inside litigation lawyer.). The article quotes the head litigation lawyer, Deputy General Counsel Ray Umstead: “Last year the litigation department was able to achieve at least a partial dismissal in more than 100 cases.” Here we have an example of a key performance metric.

Finally, the Wellpoint litigation group has 14 or 15 go-to firms across the country, three of which are designated as national panel firms (See my post of Dec. 7, 2010: coordinating counsel with 8 references.).

The matter cost-control firm Legalbill surveyed some 16,000 lawyers who use its matter management software at one or more of his law department clients. More than 600 responded. One question described a typical invoice and asked the lawyers: “On average how many different UTBMS litigation codes will you use?” Roughly speaking, the distribution of responses fell evenly in the four buckets of 1-4 codes, 5-8 codes, 9-12, and more than 12.

This survey has developed very interesting empirical data about UTBMS codes. Legalbill’s Managing Partner, Stephen French, is still processing the results, but he was kind enough to let me see some of the early data. Reach out to Steve if you are interested.

On this one particular finding, I was surprised. I would have thought that fewer codes were necessary for a given case during a normal month, since how many different tasks of a law suit take place in that narrow window? Nor was the average size of the invoice very large, which might have accounted for the wide distribution of task codes used. The distribution and amount of codes used tells me that law firms pay attention to their time records and draw on the full range of UTBMS codes even for a typical, relatively modest invoice.