A well-known consultant in Austria to law departments, Dr. Franz Brandstetter, has published a book on law department management. He provided me with this short description of his book.

“The objective of Rechtsabteilung & Unternehmenserfolg - a management book - is to provide support for in house lawyers and legal departments work. It helps to identify value driven core competences, to develop a legal departments strategy and to optimise business processes and quality of work. The book is supplemented by about 20 examples written by experienced general counsels from Germany, Austria and Switzerland.”

All of us who care about management in legal departments are grateful to learn what specific departments have done to address specific issues. From “YYY Company hired partners who are twins because it is easier to figure them out,” to “ZZZ Company put shredders next to each paralegal’s desk to gain 15% productivity,” all real-life examples help us learn, but not a whole lot.

Single instances of something, or even a “trend” of two or three instances touted by a journalist or consultant, can give little confidence in the underlying explanation. We can’t rely on the accuracy of descriptions, the objectivity of authors, the fullness of context, or cause-and-effect conclusions. Only if we can study the phenomenon broadly can we hope to generalize learning.

A theory about management needs to be testable: “the theory must make predictions which, if the theory were false, could be contradicted by the outcome of some possible observation.” This comes from David Deutsch, in The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (Viking 2011) at 13.

Enter benchmarks. If a group of twin-hiring departments have better results or lower costs than a comparable group of law departments that ignore Gemini, a prediction of benefits would be supported. If benchmark metrics shred, shall we say, the practice of shredders at deskside, then that touted advantage fails.

Without predictions and empirical data, we meander with a grab-bag of notions conveyed to us by self-promotion, trade-press fodder, blinkered ideology, reputation burnishing, and chance.

After I noticed several visitors who reached this blog from Linex Systems, I looked at its website. A law department case study caught my eye and gives some background on a productivity tool for law departments. David Byrne is Head of Knowledge Management for BT Group’s legal department. Working with a team of 130 lawyers, he is always searching for “ways for our people to do more with less effort.”

With a distributed workforce, BT Legal relies on technology to make up for the lack of face-to-face contact. For example, the company became one of the first to adopt Linex Smart Alerts.

At BT they see Linex Smart Alerts as an important business tool: “We use it to share knowledge and work together. The system allows the company to monitor content from its panel of law firms, as well as tracking information from thousands of other sources." BT has integrated the system closely with its own SharePoint site. Information appears there directly, so lawyers do not have to log in to Linex themselves.

Informal get-togethers at lunch, sometimes known as brown bag lunches and sometimes referred to as lunch-and-learns, can serve a variety of purposes. Low cost, convivial, flexible, they offer many pluses, although they also impinge on people’s personal time.

My previous posts have touched on them in terms of improving morale, training and educating, communicating policies, and helping interns feel at home (See my post of April 14, 2005: boost morale with brown bag lunches; May 1, 2005: spread CLE knowledge to the rest of the law department; July 9, 2007: technology Lunch & Learns; Jan. 2, 2009: knowledge management with lunch-and-learns; Dec. 7, 2009: interns at Bristol Myers Squibb; and Dec. 17, 2010: Shell and learning lunches.).

Amy Fox holds the title of Lead Knowledge Management Counsel in the Legal and Corporate Affairs department at Intel. We learn that because Fox will be speaking at an upcoming Ark conference, Knowledge Management in the Legal Profession on October 26-27 in New York City. Four observations result.

One: Fox is the only representative from a legal department among the many law firm and consultant speakers. The role is unusual.

Two: That Fox is Intel’s “Lead” knowledge management lawyer suggests there are others.

Three: Fox would be categorized as a practice support lawyer (See my post of July 11, 2011: PSL’s as an opportunity for law department collectives.).

Four: Fox’s position is cost justified in part because Intel has a very large law department (See my post of April 23, 2006: sabbaticals; Feb. 9, 2006: at Intel HR controls its lawyers; Dec. 9, 2008 #4: online auction by Intel for patents in 2006; July 7, 2010: named in IP software lawsuit; Sept. 20, 2010: R&D spending is high; and Nov. 3, 2010: filed amicus brief in Supreme Court.).

A corporate lawyer at Brown Brothers Harriman, Florian Feder, has created a legal wiki,Standardforms.org. It provides a free depository of sophisticated legal documents. According to Robert Ambrogi, who wrote about this resource on June 3, 2011, “Notably, the site is not intended to serve as a cache of ready-to-use legal forms. Instead, its founder hopes that the wiki feature — which allows anyone to add and edit forms — will provide a vehicle for lawyers to improve the forms and lead to a consensus of what they should say.

The wiki has fewer than 10 forms posted so far, including some often-used agreements. Feder describes himself as “interested in the art (science?) of contract drafting and in ways of making this process more efficient with the help of new technologies.” I am grateful to Vince Polley and KnowConnect PLLC for bringing Ambrogi’s post to my attention.

Four general counsel who have had distinguished careers have come together through a law firm’s efforts as an advisory group. In January of this year, Rees Smith encouraged Carl Krasik, Lawrence Stein, William Mutterperl, and Michael Bleier to offer no0cost advice to any executive of a client of the firm. The article that describes this in Corp. Counsel, June 2011 at 18, explains that some of the questions members of the quartet have answered have to do with law department operations and management, such as outside counsel cost control.

This initiative of Reed Smith marks an innovation and a welcome addition to the wisdom of management. I wonder whether these experienced resources will continue to restrict their guidance to clients of the firm.

Danette Galletin, the law department administrator at The Williams Companies, sketched at Mitratech’s Interact some things that department has done to accumulate and disseminate knowledge. One is to start a law department blog, which they use mostly to post communications to the group of 70 lawyers and 31 support staff. Another is the template library which contains best-practice forms that a group picked. Lawyers are not required to use the forms but they are a resource.

As a third tool Galletin added that the Williams law department hosts a wiki. The way she described it made it seem like an intranet site that anyone can add to fairly easily. It has all sorts of pages that have accumulated knowledge. Some are links to law firms the company uses; others to useful blogs; some have annotated agreements; a portion is devoted to Legal Aid; and others house all manner of nuts and bolts about how to do something.

Each page (subject) has a moderator and they use garden gnomes as a motif: everyone has to tend it for the knowledge garden to flourish. They thank solid contributors with a “Gnome of the Month” award. There’s no place like gnome!

Every law department that tries to institute a knowledge management program thinks of department-wide efforts. “Let’s set up an intranet for the legal department!” “Let’s put in document management!” “Let’s create a memo repository!” Those across-the-board efforts almost always peter out, lead to spotty participation, and usually languish (See my post of May 19, 2011: collective action problems.)

If a department has several lawyers who handle similar problems, such as government contracts, that group will have a far better chance of implementing some kind of knowledge capture and dissemination. They have more reason to pitch in for the common good. What they collect is more tailored to their needs, and peer pressure operates more acutely (See my post of July 25, 2005: knowledge management and communities of practice; Sept. 10, 2005: practice groups and communities of interest; and Jan. 2, 2009: grass roots knowledge management.).

It is a red-letter day for me when someone publishes a book on law department management. So, I celebrate by quoting from promotional material I just ran across from the International In-House Counsel Journal (IICJ). The book is 160 pages, it costs $200 and I believe quite a bit of its contents come from articles previously published in the Journal:

“IICJ are delighted to announce the publication of a new book written specifically by leading commercial lawyers for commercial lawyers covering all the key issues presently relevant to the in-house counsel function. The book contains 29 in-depth articles written by leading global counsels and topics range from negotiating external fees to running the in-house department as a profit centre. Click here for more information and how to secure a copy.”