Corp. Counsel, Dec. 2011 at 76, reports on a survey of 107 senior in-house lawyers that was conducted late last year. Many of the respondents complained that clients perceive the legal department to be reactive at best and a roadblock to be avoided at worst. To overcome the negative perceptions, the respondents plan to meet more with heads of business units. “And 27 percent said they would conduct regular surveys of the businesses to find out their level of satisfaction with the legal department.”

Dream on. I do not think that anything like one-quarter of U.S. law departments survey their clients each year regarding opinions they hold of the department. A few years back I published a book on client satisfaction for law department managers and didn’t estimate the frequency anywhere near that. It is easy to say you will do something; in the morning, resolve flags.

Having done one metapost on client satisfaction back in 2008, here is an update (See my post of Jan. 21, 2009: three ways to measure client satisfaction; March 25, 2009: assessing penetration of client areas; July 29, 2009: organizational capital and satisfaction of clients as an element; Sept. 24, 2010: comparisons to benchmark surveys; Aug. 6, 2010: Cronbach’s alpha to test questions; Oct. 3, 2010: free, online software to conduct surveys; March 18, 2011: client satisfaction may rise with seniority of clients and distort company-wide impressions; April 5, 2011: quota system for in-house lawyers to obtain client satisfaction e-feedback forms; March 27, 2011: badgering clients for matter reviews; and Nov. 4, 2011: a quantification of RHIP.).

My writings on over-hyped “bet the company” litigation mostly has made the point that they are black swans (See my post of Oct. 27, 2011: bet-the-company with 8 references.). Which rare lawsuits fall into that cataclysmic category, where expense management flees, general counsel quake, and corporate futures hang in the gavel, is a journalist’s favorite joust, but a bit like defining obscenity.

Then I read in a two-part definition of “material cases,” (1) those that your company would consider significant – too loose a definition for me, or (2) those that would “impact an investor’s decision to buy, sell, or hold the company’s securities.” That second definition creates a standard that resonates with lawyers, at least with securities lawyers, makes sense, and pitches the significance of a case at the right level of major fiscal risk (or gain).

This blog has referred to hotlines a moderate number of times (See my post of Sept. 21, 2011: hotlines with 6 references.). Those anonymous reporting tools would seem to account for many of the disclosures of potential wrongs. Nevertheless, an article in Met. Corp. Counsel, Dec. 2011 at 38, draws on an informal study done by an in-house lawyer. That lawyer looked at reporting processes and discovered that “a majority of useful tips actually were communicated to the supervisors, not to the hotline.” Obviously, to tell your supervisor about a concern means that the supervisor is not the culprit and anonymity is not desired.

This question, asked of the chief legal officer of the Mayo Clinic, John Oviatt, elicited an interesting reply: “Very much so. Legal services are just one more of many shared services within an organization. That's how the C-suite views it, and so I think having a close working relationship with purchasing is very important. There are numerous examples of law departments that have actually had an assigned purchasing employee who assists them on their work. It's the purchasing folks' bread and butter, but it's often foreign to lawyers. It's not that we can't learn; it's just we've never had any reason to be trained in those things before.”

“Numerous examples” may not rise to a trend. And what are these procurement people doing other than assisting with competitive bids? Are their inputs to the law department making a difference?

In this regard, readers may be interested to know that Professor Silvia Hodges, Adjunct Professor at Fordham University School of Law, has been researching and writing regarding procurement and legal departments. Earlier this month she spoke on Power of the Purse: How Corporate Procurement is Influencing Law Firm Selection at Harvard’s Program on the Legal Profession.

Having put another notch in my belt of legal risk posts (See my post of Dec. 5, 2011: three observations on legal risk.), I looked for other risk-related metaposts. As my previous one covered through mid-August of 2009 and yesterday’s covered from mid-2010 through now, I updated my posts during the gap period on the topic (See my post of Dec. 21, 2009: a "risk management checklist"; Jan. 19, 2010: shallow recommendations about legal risk and compliance; Jan. 19, 2010: methods to identify, measure, and review legal risks; Jan. 19, 2010: legal risk management by UK heads of legal; Jan. 19, 2010: too easy to prescribe risk reduction measures to take; Jan. 25, 2010 #2: more than 80 risk management frameworks; Feb. 16, 2010 #4: study of legal risk and compliance; June 25, 2010: move inside shifts from risk avoidance to risk management; Aug. 2, 2010: clues to seven koans on "legal risk"; Nov. 30, 2010: my column on legal risks avoided but never to be measured; and Dec. 7, 2010: ascendancy of risk management in innovative group of UK departments.).

Hence, with today’s, this blog has delivered five general metaposts on legal risk (See my post of Nov.15, 2005: legal risk with 7 references; March 23, 2008: risk management with 18 references; Aug. 17, 2009: controlling legal risks with 13 references; and Dec. 5, 2011: recent risk posts with 7 references.).

With some overlap from the general metaposts, there have been three more metaposts related to aspects of legal risk (See my post of Aug. 24, 2008: lawyers and risk averse behavior with 11 references; June 2, 2010: portfolio and risk notions with 7 references; and Nov. 28, 2010: risk or control functions – compliance, audit, risk management, and legal with 7 references.).

Economists would distill the corporate legal market into the DEMAND by corporations for legal services and the SUPPLY of those services.

Demand, what drives legal services, has been a topic returned to more than a few time on this blog (See my post of July 2, 2007: what drives a company to hire its first in-house lawyer; and Dec. 7, 2010: six primary drivers of total legal spending. Many topics reflect changes in demand for the advice of lawyers: global spread of business, regulatory requirements, complexity, intellectual property’s ascendance.

Supply, what meets the demand for legal services, has many forms. Foremost for organizations with a legal team of employees are inside lawyers followed by external counsel. Recently, LPOs have muscled in, along with educated clients who practice self-serve. Increasingly, online resources will be available to dispense legal guidance and documents (See my post of Oct. 31, 2005: online legal resources; Nov. 15, 2005: online resources; Jan. 10, 2006: lawyers and research online; Jan. 13, 2006: free online information; March 9, 2007: the price of legal information is being driven to zero; April 27, 2007: the internet and four generations of resources; Jan. 25, 2008: Martindale-Hubble and shared evaluations of law firms; Sept. 9, 2008: economics of information; and Jan. 11, 2010: Ning with 600+ IP blogs.).

Notions of supply and demand have shown up together on this blog in specific contexts (See my post of Feb. 1, 2006: auctions; March 20, 2008: in-house compensation; Sept. 22, 2008: social networks for lawyers, a metapost;; Nov. 17, 2008: without fungible sellers, legal economy violates standard economic assumptions; May 11, 2009: Say’s Law that supply creates its own demand; and April 29, 2010: no gap between supply of value by law firms and demand for it according to classical economists.).

In Charles Seife, Proofiness: How you’re being fooled by the numbers (Penguin 2010) at 108, a point is made that has bearing on the survey instruments in the header and their findings. “When surveys and polls depend on voluntary response, it’s almost always the case that people with strong opinions tend to respond much more often than those who don’t have strong opinions. This introduces a bias: the poll disproportionately reflects extreme opinions at the expense of moderate ones.”

Worse, “People are relatively silent when they’re reasonably content, but if they’re angry they tend to shout it from the mountaintop.” What might this phenomenon say about data on dissatisfaction with law firms, with law departments or with software vendors (See my post of May 3, 2009: data that belies this claim; and June 26, 2008: CEOs and their views of law departments.)? We hear from the loudmouths, not the silent majority.

“We’re not buying pencils!” the implication being that Procurement may know how to buy trivial objects by bullying fungible providers, but sophisticated legal brains far overmatch their petty purview.

“Costs matter less than quality and results!” Procurement wants cheap; law wants brilliance and victory, and the twain can ne’er o’erlap.

“They aren’t lawyers!” so how could they possible understand the subtle mysteries of the Most Great and Noble Profession.

“Law is Art not bricklaying science!” and so creativity, judgment, professional experience, as well as the arcane of case cites and contract exegesis, rejects petty discipline and spreadsheets.

“Stay out of my ‘hood!” since anything conceded to Procurement diminishes our fiercely protected privileges and powers. We’re Sharks and you Jets stay offa our streets.

“Lawyers are smarter and more capable!” and if we with LSATs of 695 weakly open ourselves up to disclosure and concession, well the slippery slope goes all the way down to disbarment.

I have previously collected posts that are more positive on legal departments and Procurement (See my post of March 1, 2008: procurement with 17 references; and Aug. 6, 2010: procurement with 7 references.).

Paraphrased in a recent profile, the General Counsel of AOL, Julie Jacobs, “sees the role of corporate counsel as establishing trust both inside and outside the company.” She makes other points in the long piece about expectations for inside counsel, but this one made me sit back and try to figure out what she meant.

No doubt, if an executive doesn’t trust a lawyer, either for the accuracy of advice or fundamental loyalty, directness, and ethical compass, then the attorney-client relationship collapses. Essential trust missing, all is lost, but presumably such doubts arise rarely (well, execs may wonder about the sharpness of their internal lawyers but hopefully not their bona fides).

Jacobs may have said something regarding her expectations of her 50-lawyer team about respect and reliability or professional integrity, which got boiled down by the journalist to “trust.” You can decide for yourself from SuperLawyers, Bus. Ed. 2011 at 143. For everyone, your word should be your bond.

A recent book states that “when counsel does not act as counsel there are potential issues around professional indemnity insurance and whether or not the indemnity policy will respond.” The quote comes from Benny Tabalujan, ed. Leadership and Management Challenges of In-House Legal Counsel (LexisNexis Australia 2008) at 11. That poses a provocative question for which I wish there were some feedback and input (See my post of April 25, 2009: malpractice and in-house lawyers with 6 references.).

If readers can enlighten me on this subject, I would appreciate it. One part of my ignorance is how many in-house lawyers are covered by professional indemnity insurance (and, the metrics guy in me wants to know what that coverage costs and who pays for it). Another desire would be for some facts and figures about know how often the issue has arisen in recent years.