A game created by two professors pitted teams against each other to create a strategic plan for a mythical law firm. Why not do this for a legal department?
According to Strategies: The J. of Legal Mkting., Vol. 11, July 2009 at 20, Indiana University’s Mauer School of Law Associate Professor William Henderson and Anthony Kearns of Australia’s Legal Practitioners Liability Committee created a game that "pitted teams of law firm partners, clients, law students, and consultants against each other to create a strategy that would allow [a fictional law firm] to live another decade." Over the course of two days, these 44 players embarked on role-playing exercises to save a fictional, struggling law firm. They extracted many lessons from the exercise.
It would be fascinating to play a comparable game for a fictional legal department that has to slash its budget (See my post of Nov. 18, 2007: massively multi-player online role playing games; and Dec. 12, 2007: snakes and ladders.).
Johan Åhr’s article about Primo Levi in the J. of the Historical Soc., Vol. 9, June 2009 at 161, discusses historicism and broad statements. Historicism is “a theory that events are determined or influenced by conditions and inherent processes beyond the control of humans.” Marxism, for example, espouses a dialectic of class struggle that transcends trifling humans.
Levi opposed historicism and its grand pronouncements of what drives change. He focused on smaller observations. “Imagining himself a flâneur and ragpicker, he saw meaning, essences, in fragments – catching colorful but transient hints of society’s dialectical intricacy … in the windows and topography of commercial Paris.” His contemporaries, Michael Polanyi and Karl Popper, also loathed reductionism; they favored actual specifics.
I too belong in the anti-historicist camp and believe both that people make a difference and that transcendent themes are over-stated (See my post of May 5, 2008: “I am a freebooter”.). Like Balzac with his 90 novels on the human condition; like writers of feuilleton in Parisian newspapers, or like Emily Dickinson’s lapidary poems, my blog posts accumulate wisdom in small points and trust that the larger picture will emerge. As a bricoleur, my guiding principle is to write practically at all levels about “what might help in-house counsel out there as they manage themselves and the legal function.” Even small topics have significance (See my post of Aug. 10, 2007: even tiny or minor topics invoke significant considerations.).
Suspicion fills me when I hear about immense diachronic forces that shape how legal departments operate, the dubious likes of “economic development,” “cultural values,” “globalization,” “professionalization,” “generational differences,” “technology,” or “the environment.” Post modernist leanings hold me back from broad statements (See my post of Sept. 22, 2008: post-modernism and law department management.).
I dislike grand generalizations, vacuities such as “Today’s general counsel are taking on more strategic roles.” Headline writers love those sound bytes, journalists crave magisterial quotes, consultants succumb to offering them, but sweeping assertions should be swept aside.
Of the dozen “strategies” ranked by legal managers in terms of frequency, no unusual actions stand out, until the final three. As expected, the LexisNexis CounselLink study, entitled “Effects of the Current Economic Downturn on U.S. Law Departments” 2009 at 9, found that its 191 in-house respondents in-source work, ask for non-hourly billing, re-negotiate rates, and review invoices more carefully.
What stood out for me was that 10 percent of the respondents selected “Outsourcing Legal Work to Offshore.” Since nearly half of the respondents work in small legal departments, the percentage strikes me as unexpectedly high.
Also notable are the final two choices: 8.4 percent chose “Upgrading Commercial Payment Systems” and 7.3 percent chose “Upgrading Internal Payment Systems.” It’s hard to figure out what these strategies mean, other than efforts to obtain prompt payment discounts.
I keep wrestling with how to differentiate “tools” from other management ideas for general counsel, such as “concepts,” and “processes.” While pondering the distinctions, I realized a fourth category exists, which I have come to call “concept toolboxes.” A concept toolbox comprises many aids and instruments – tools in the toolbox – that accompany and give usefulness to a broad management concept. Examples of concept toolboxes include benchmarks, business process re-engineering (BPR), change management, financial calculations (Net Present Value [NPV], nominal changes, Return on Investment [ROI], and compound annual growth rate [CAGR]), Organizational Development (OD), project management, Six Sigma, statistics, surveys, and Total Quality Management (TQM).
Each of these concept toolboxes boasts many tools that translate the breadth of the idea into operational usefulness. For each of them, specialists write books, teach courses, offer accreditation, and extend the toolbox. This blog offers supplemental comments on each of them (See my post of May 29, 2008: benchmarks other than individual metrics with 28 references.).
A few posts have mentioned BPR in passing (See my post of Nov. 2, 2006: "ratio of law department business processes undergoing automation/business processing reengineering/Six Sigma -- TQM -- other quality improvement"; Aug. 28, 2005: future state of a reengineered process; Aug. 31, 2005: reengineering leases at Food Lion; May 11, 2008: whether e-billing leads to reengineered processes; Aug. 16, 2006: end-to-end process for contract management; and May 18, 2008: process re-engineering as one of a dozen cost-control tools.).
The other concept toolboxes mentioned , covered in varying degrees here, are cited in alphabetical order (See my post of Dec. 21, 2008: change management with 16 references cited; Sept. 25, 2006: distinguishes performance management, training, coaching, mentoring and organizational development (OD); June 24, 2007: project management with 5 references; Feb. 13, 2008: Six Sigma with 18 references; Jan. 20, 2007: statistics with 28 references; May 31, 2006: statistics; July 21, 2008: survey methodology with 40 references and 25 internal references; and March 7, 2006: TQM tools such as cause-and-effect diagrams, fishbone analysis, logistic regression, process mapping, root cause analysis, and value-added analysis.).
A recent piece in the Daily Report, June 12, 2009 by Katheryn Hayes Tucker, provides four items that add to our understanding of Six Sigma principles deployed in corporate legal departments (See my post of Feb. 13, 2008: Six Sigma with 18 references.).
The Home Depot and ING are adherents to Six Sigma. Later, the article mentions Gulfstream Aerospace.
Six Sigma tools are most applicable to “high-volume, time-consuming and expensive legal work such as document review and electronic discovery." I would think that contract management would be a good candidate.
A white paper on "Six Sigma, The Discovery Process In The Corporate Legal Department" presented to the ABA Litigation Section earlier this year.
Many people think of Six Sigma as a method to root out defects but it is also a technique for project management (See my post of June 24, 2007: project management with 5 references.)
Some 14 referral sources are mentioned and thanked in a previous post (See my post of June 17, 2009: 14 referral sources in two days). Since then I have been collecting additional ones, and I also am grateful to them.
adriandayton.com (Adrian Dayton)
inhouseaccess.com/ (ACC)
ip-info.blogspot.com/ (Toy-san)
www.integreon.com/blog (Integreon, Ron Friedmann)
law21.ca/2009 (Jordan Furlong)
kevin.lexblog.com (Kevin O’Keefe)
paperchace.com/about-paperchace.html (Jacob Ruytenbeek)
patrickjlamb.com (Patrick Lamb)
prismlegal.com/wordpress/ (Ron Friedmann)
spendmatters.com/ (Jason Busch)
blogs.findlaw.com/in_house/tales-from-the-legal-department/ (Kevin Fayle)
“I conclude that I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe but because I want to know.” The quote, with the italics, is from Michael Shermer, the columnist in Scientific Am., Vol. 301, July 2009 at 33.
As a kindred skeptic who wants ever so much to know what works for legal department operations, I mistrust many claims about the efficacy of legal department practices. I march arm in arm with Shermer, who writes that “Science begins with the null hypothesis, which assumes that the claim under investigation is not true until demonstrated otherwise.” For instance, people claim that partnering benefits a law department. Show us metrics that compare departments that partner with those not coupled. Convergence is claimed to be best? Where are the metrics that demonstrate the null hypothesis is untrue, that show total legal spending declines in step with declines in the number of firms retained.
Shermer makes the point that the “burden of proof is on the person asserting a positive claim, not on the skeptics to disprove it.” You say that document management software has saved bundles? Such a positive claim needs support, or others can only say – as with all the practices that are asserted as beneficial – that they may well work but we do not have proof. Anecdotes and assertions do not prove a claim; at best they depict it. Benchmarks need to show correlations we skeptics can trust (See my post of March 11, 2009: correlations, missing in action.) or other forms of demonstration need to be adduced.
General counsel out there, think of blog posts as a way to spread your gospel! I volunteer to publicize the specific messages of any general counsel. Even more, if you mention specific firms, either with praise or with scorn, those firms will prick up their ears and hear your message in a way far more effective than print.
Here is a striking example. At 11:00 AM yesterday I published a post about a ranking of US corporate law firms (See my post of June 17, 2009: 240 general counsel rate leading corporate law firms.). I observed that sheer numbers of lawyers help catapult firms to the top of such lists, simply because many general counsel have either retained them or heard of them. In passing I mentioned that Wachtell Lipton was much the smallest of the group of 20 behemoths, to its credit.
Wachtell monitors references to itself on the Internet, including blogs, and someone must have picked up my reference, visited my site and read the post. Whoever first read what I posted circulated something about it inside Wachtell and invited the lawyers, paralegals and staff of the firm to click on the URL and read the full post. They did, in droves.
Between that first visitor, fourteen minutes after I posted – fourteen minutes! – and the last one, at 9:48 PM last night, 106 people from Wachtell’s main page came aboard (I cannot know anything more than that they came from the firm’s main page.). A law firm with slightly more than 200 lawyers generated in less than a day 106 hits on a blog!
This one example demonstrates that firms pay attention to blogosphere comments, can act quickly to share internally what is relevant, and lawyers and staff pay attention if they find out, meaning they are comfortable with blogs. The blog medium can be fast, pointed, and on target.
Having just railed at “win-win” fee arrangements, I might as well lash out at another empty slogan. This one slithers out of a profile in Corp. Bd. Mbr., Vol. 12, 2nd Quarter 2009 at 46, where a general counsel touts her “efficiency strategy.” Under that strategy, the legal department “make[s] sure the right people are doing the right job, so that senior lawyers don’t do work junior lawyers can do or outside counsel doesn’t do work in-house counsel can do.”
After your applause dies down, stop and think how you would make sure that salutary tango happens in your law department? How do you figure out whether the “right people are doing the right job” and what do you alter when you find it is not true? Your complement of people and their skills doesn’t change often; your work coming into the department has the same general characteristics.
My point is far from a criticism of “right work-right person”; indeed, that is an admirable goal. My objection is that how you implement the nostrum presents boatloads of difficulties.
High-sounding aspirations, such as “do things right the first time,” “don’t reinvent the wheel,” “think hard about long-term implications,” and “do the right thing,” all glitter with grandeur and catchiness, but such glib truisms of management are all infinitely harder to do than to say (See my post of Jan. 18, 2007: platitudes don’t give useful advice; Aug. 3, 2005: “alignment with clients” is glib; June 20, 2008: muddled platitude about clients and value; Feb. 22, 2009: action and achievement verbs; and March 20, 2008: mission statements with 17 references.).
From Ron Friedman’s post about Juridica and other groups that invest in lawsuits, I read a comment by Jacob Ruytenbeek, host of the blog Paper Chace. Ruytenbeek offers another choice in the world of decision-tree software and services. It’s but a small grove, not a forest, but I have written before about decision-tree opportunities (See my post of Oct. 24, 2005: decision analysis and Bruce Beron and Marc Victor; June 18, 2007: belief nets as an improvement on decision trees; Jan. 17, 2006: other aspects of decision trees; May 15, 2005: Monte Carlo simulations; April 2, 2006: Predix; April 22, 2008: limitations on quantitative analysis of litigation; and Feb. 22, 2009: a simple explanation of decision trees.).
