Law Department Management

Rees Morrison’s Morsels #75 – additions to earlier posts

Surely no sip of the tongue on coffee and cognitive ability. From Fast Co., June 2008 at 39: "A decade-long European study found that men who drink three or more cups a day suffer less mental decline in old age than nondrinkers." I trust this finding applies to women also. Law departments, fire up your espresso machines for your veterans (See my post of Dec. 19, 2007: grounds for insight.)!

Consolidate through one firm management of overseas IP firms. Tampico Beverages uses one law firm to manage its trademark specialty firms in more than 50 countries. The US-based law firm is responsible for engaging and managing those firms and Tampico receives a single consolidated invoice, according to ACC Docket, Vol. 30, June 2008 at 48 (See my post of Dec. 3, 2006: national coordinating counsel and their benefits.).

Benchmark for patents as a function of R&D spend. An article in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 85, June 2008 at 132, gives advice to companies that want to repulse patent trolls. The fifth piece of advice is that “Companies must stop flooding patent offices with insignificant inventions.” The authors state that the number of patents per R&D dollar spent is increasing. Sounds like a useful benchmark for law departments (See my post of July 10, 2007: metrics that patent counsel should know.).

MS in Legal Studies. Kaplan University offers a new Master of Science In Legal Studies, designed to give non-lawyers more in depth knowledge of the law, according to GC Mid-Atlantic, March 2008 at 13 (See my post of March 19, 2006: paralegal degrees.).

The commonness of some of the common words related to law-department management

A fascinating website, for peculiar people like this blogger who revels in words, is Word Count. Based on a massive archive, the website tells you the frequency with which 86,800 English words have been used in print.

Naturally, I tried out several of the nouns that appear frequently in these posts.

321 Law
428 Management
544 Department
750 Legal
2022 Partner
4001 Lawyer
5888 Counsel
8018 Litigation
9157 Attorney
27190 Lawsuit

Several of these words have very broad meanings and usage and several serve as more than nouns. Also, not tracked in the archives are “paralegal” or “settlement.”

My challenge, therefore, is to use all these ten common terms in one sentence. For legal departments, the management of law partners by counsel in litigation means that one lawyer directs another attorney in a lawsuit. Feels like “The quick brown foxy lawyer jumped over the lazy..."

Tools, processes and concepts related to managing law departments

Many posts on Law Department Management Blog discuss “tools” – discrete techniques or practices that help people in a law department accomplish something (See my post of Oct. 18, 2006: compares processes to tools; April 17, 2007: tools in law departments.). Other posts take up “processes” – steps of a repeated series of actions that lead to an outcome (See my post of April 27, 2006 and June 28, 2006.). But what about law-department management “concepts”?

Concepts are broad ideas. While tools are means to accomplish something and processes are routines, concepts are expansive ideas that encompass many tools and processes as well as considerations about them.

These distinctions between tools, processes and concepts leave something to be desired. For example, evaluations of law firms by in-house counsel is certainly a tool that helps a law department. It is also a process, since there are several steps and participants in evaluations and they are done with some consistency and regularity. At the same time, law-firm evaluations is a concept, with many aspects to it. Which law firms should we assess and on what attributes; how do we convey the results and does an evaluation make a difference?

Another example of this three-way perspective relates to standout performers sometimes referred to as “high potentials.” Several tools apply to high-potential employees, such as how to identify them and accelerate them; there are processes that go along with those tools; and the concept has broad ramifications for talent management and productivity.

The truth is, every tool of a law department, even the most trivial such as a pencil, fits into some process – drafting documents for one – and embodies concepts – communication, expense, training to note three. By contrast, game theory is purely a concept.

Dubious data on North American law-department challenges

Robert Half Legal reports data in ACC Docket, Vol. 30, June 2008 at 52, that come from a “survey of 150 lawyers from among the largest corporations in the United States and Canada." From the standpoint of reliability, are these lawyers of relatively similar seniority? How were the lawyers selected? What percentage of the lawyers who were invited took part?

Overall methodology aside, I really wonder about the results from one question: "Of the following, which would you say is your legal department's single greatest business challenge today?"

Increased workloads 34%
Compliance or regulation issues 28%
Controlling litigation or outside counsel costs 24%
Budget restrictions 7%
Employment issues (e.g., hire, retain, morale) 6%
Don’t know 1%

Multiple-choice questions are problematic because if you omit choices that are important, your findings will be under a cloud (See my post of Dec. 3, 2007: tricky aspects of multiple-choice questions.). For example, some lawyers might feel that the biggest challenge they face is the growing complexity of their legal issues, management of knowledge, lack of teamwork, unreasonable clients, or ineptness of technology. None of those choices were available so do the results have much meaning?

More fundamentally, the choices available overlap. “Increased workloads” could mean employment issues such as hiring constraints or they could evidence an inability or unwillingness to hire outside counsel (See my post of May 21, 2008: “workload/time pressure” as top choice of an Australia/New Zealand survey.). “Compliance or regulation issues” presumably contribute to increased workloads. “Budget restrictions” make it more difficult to handle increased workloads and compliance/regulation issues. Beset by methodological and logical weaknesses, the metrics have little value.

A popularity ranking for blogs covering in-house legal departments

USLaw Blog Directory lists this blog and five others under its heading “Law Blogs.” For each blog it gives a description as well as the average number of posts per day and, most intriguing to me, a “popularity ranking.”

Aha, said I, am I a wallflower or constantly on the dance floor? You make the call!

Legal Literacy adds posts once every three days and has a popularity ranking of 3.
Jonathan B. Wilson posts on average once per day and has a popularity ranking of 4.
Rees Morrison’s blog (that would be me) posts 2.5 times a day and has a ranking of 5.
InhouseBlog has a post every other day and a popularity ranking of 5.
CISCO High Tech Policy Blog posts every ten days and has a ranking of 6.
The Legal Thing averages posts every three days and has a popularity of 7.

Clearly, quantity of posts does not a popular blog make; I will have to turn my attention to quality.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to figure out whether a higher popularity ranking means a blog is more or less popular than a blog with a lower popularity rank.

Part IX of a collection of embedded metaposts

Here are ten more embedded metaposts with links (See my post of May 27, 2008: Part VIII.) along with the number of posts cited within them.

1. Benchmarks other than individual metrics (See my post of May 29, 2008 – 28 posts.)

2. Compliance (See my post of June 11, 2008 – 33 posts.)

3. Consultants to law departments (See my post of Jan. 1, 2008 –15 posts.)

4. Cottage industry (See my post of June 11, 2008 – 34 posts.)

5. Leadership (See my post of June 11, 2008 – 32 posts.).

6. Mentor (See my post of May 29, 2008 – 10 posts.)

7. Profit center (See my post of April 27, 2008 – 18 posts.)

8. Relocation (See my post of May 25, 2008 – 7 posts.)

9. Stress (See my post of June 11, 2008 –18 posts.)

10. Values (See my post of May 23, 2008 – 12 posts.)

Rees Morrison’s Morsels #74 – additions to earlier posts

Neurolawyering. Portfolio, June, 2008 at 114, offers us the neologism, cogniceuticals, “for drugs that focus on improving decision-making, learning, attention span, and memory processes” (See my post of March 25, 2008: transcranial stimulation; April 22, 2008: caffeine.).

Unusual role – reporting on compliance under a non-prosecution agreement. The scope of responsibilities for a general counsel can be broad. A general counsel at the Fifth General Counsel Roundtable, Dec. 6, 2007, summarized in a publication by the Economist Intelligence Unit at 9, describes the following obligation. "The company is under a non-prosecution agreement with the US Department of Justice that requires the GC to provide regular reports to the audit committee about the compliance plan and provide copies to the US Attorney's office" (See my post of March 16, 2006: scope of a GC’s responsibilities.).

Hard to keep specialist stars in-house. Thomson Litigation Consulting has hired Laura Kibbe from Pfizer (See my posts of Oct. 1, 2005: Kibbe and e-discovery expenses; Feb. 25, 2007: Pfizer’s discovery team.). This is another example of how hard it is for law departments to keep their non-lawyer specialists who become widely known (See my post of March 13, 2006.).

“Special legal counsel to the CEO.” Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, June 2008 at 95, mentions that the current general counsel of Qwest, Richard Baer, left his partnership at a major Denver firm in 2001 to become the company’s “special legal counsel to then-CEO Richard Notebaert.” That is an unusual role. Notebaert offered Baer the top legal position a year later.

Export compliance software at GM. That technologically advanced law department has implemented export compliance software, according to Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, June 2008 at 104 (See my post of Feb. 9, 2008: 27 kinds of law-department software.).

General counsel need to serve as references for service providers

From time to time, general counsel who consider hiring me as a consultant ask for references. They want to find out from other general counsel about my abilities and approach. Likewise, once a law department licenses software, purchases equipment, or chooses the products or services of any vendor, sometime later that law department may be quizzed by a prospective buyer about how the expenditure turned out.

General counsel should take those calls, give the caller their best advice, and recognize that user feedback is a very important part of the functioning of a market (See my post of Sept. 18, 2007: call users to learn the most about software.). If you expect references, you ought to give them.

Rees Morrison’s Morsels #73 – additions to earlier posts

A Ph.D in legal fees. The normally reticent Donald Trump admitted recently that "I have a Ph.D. in legal fees. I know when fees are fair and when they're not," Law Firm Inc., Vol. 6. May-June 2008 at 10. If he knows that and can teach it, he will make far more money than he does in real estate (See my post of April 8, 2008: pervasive mistrust of law firms’ billing practices.).

Theory of Mind. As described in John Medina’s Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Pear Press, 2008) at 44, we try to see our entire world in terms of motivations. Later Medina writes: it is defined as the ability to understand the interior motivations of someone else and the ability to construct a predictable ‘theory of how their mind works’ based on that knowledge." He believes that “people with advanced theory of mind skills possessed the single most important ingredient for becoming effective communicators of information." He notes that there are four main tests that measure empathy (See my posts of April 15, 20067: listening skills enhanced by empathy; and July 31, 2005: emotional intelligence .).

Knowledge sharing in bathrooms. A technology company that I have worked with has in each toilet stall plastic containers that hold one page, part of a series of guides about how to produce better software code. Some enterprising lawyers borrowed that idea and have created summaries of important legal principles for those plastic holders in the law department. They dubbed these one-page nuggets “Law in the Loo.” I mention this quirky activity because it evidences yet another way to promote knowledge management and consistency within a law department.

Half-life of legal knowledge. I speculated on the obsolescence rate of legal knowledge (See my post of Jan. 24, 2006: corporate counsel knowledge and its half-life.), but now I have some confirmation. In a summary of an Evershed’s study, published in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, May 2008 at 62, a partner says that Eversheds "firmly believes that we need to adapt to market changes -- if our lawyers are doing the same things in three years, then they won't remain competitive."

Part VIII of a collection of embedded metaposts

Along with the number of posts cited, here are ten more embedded metaposts with links (See my post of May 8, 2008: Part VII.).

1. CLE, continuing legal education (See my post of May 25, 2008 – 30 posts.)

2. Core competence or competencies (See my post of May 23, 2008 – 12 posts.)

3. Discovery teams (See my post of May 3, 2008 – 8 posts.)

4. Pareto’s rule or 80/20 (See my post of May 21, 2008 – 9 posts.)

5. Personality (See my post of May 27, 2008 – 8 posts.)

6. Post mortems (See my post of May 27, 2008 – 7 posts.)

7. Prompt payment, prompt-payment discounts (See my post of May 11, 2008 – 10 posts.)

8. Self-service, self help (See my post of May 18, 2008 – 7 posts.)

9. Specialist lawyers (See my post of May 5, 2008 – 30 posts.)

10. Travel policies for outside counsel (See my post of May 7, 2008 – 7 posts.)