by James S. Wilber, Esq., Altman Weil, Inc. As companies continue to pay careful attention to controlling costs, law departments remain under scrutiny. Accordingly, in-house lawyers regularly look for ways to demonstrate value to their clients. One of the easiest and most cost effective ways of doing this is…
Having completed a client satisfaction survey, you can sort your participants all kinds of ways. Let’s give an example by sorting the participants by level and then also identifying them by their office location. Assume that all we do is code them by US office or international office. The plot…
by James S. Wilber, Esq., Altman Weil, Inc. Most law departments periodically use written or online surveys to gauge the satisfaction of clients with the services they (and outside counsel) provide. A question that often arises is whether (and if so, how) to protect the confidentiality of the responses…
When you survey your clients to assess how satisfied they are with your law department, you want confidence that you have tapped a representative group by their levels. One way to visualize the responses you get from your survey by a distribution of levels is shown below. For this example,…
by James S. Wilber, Altman Weil, Inc. Law departments that appreciate the value of client satisfaction understand the importance of obtaining systematic feedback from their clients. The methodological choice typically is between a written or online survey, on the one hand, or in-person meetings and interviews of clients on the…
“[W]hile 50 percent feel that self-service drafting [of contracts and agreements] is important, 76 percent reported that their law departments do not have any kind of self-service drafting tools or protocols in place.” That summary of a glaring gap between efficiency and reality, the gap between clients being able to…
A speaker at the recent InsideCounsel SuperConference made a point about budgets from law firms. He said that if the expense for that law firm is charged back to a business unit, it is even more important to get the budget right. If the law department pays for law firm’s…
An article in Fortune, May 21, 2012 at 90, describes one application of what it calls the popular “gamification” trend. This form of software brings in videogame storytelling and interactivity to mundane tasks such as compliance training. Not only are forms of games more interesting to employees, they also allow…
“Unlike other departments that have specific deliverables unique to that department, the legal department’s ‘deliverable’ is to advocate on behalf of and address the issues of other departments.” With this puzzling assertion in the ACC Docket, March 2012 at 35, perhaps the author means that IT has sole responsibility to…
“We propose that a successful legal department is one in which the quality of the legal services delivered is unparalleled, the feeling of job satisfaction by members of the legal department is high, and the legal department as a whole is regarded as a partner in achieving the corporate goals…