Articles Posted in Tools

In-house counsel who need to present complicated material to clients or outside counsel should consider the advantages of a plotline. As a visualization tool, timelines leave much to be desired (See my post of Feb. 16, 2008: flowcharts and summaries.). “A plotline is more challenging to the audience. But, it is orders of magnitude more interesting. We were able to combine a flow chart, two line graphs, a pie graph, a bullet-point list and a traditional timeline into a single, coherent plotline – and we were still able to leave plenty of white space in our design.”

This quote comes from The Jury Expert, where the author explains in a post various aspects of a plotline. For instance, the title explains the meaning of the Plotline. As the least important elements, the time bar and the graph value lines are colorless and recede into the background. Informative material is color coded: “The purple group, the green group, the red group and the yellow group each have their meaning, and each are tied one to another to provide cause-effect links that follow logically in a common sense world.” There are summary statements (red, orange, green and black) which reiterate the story. Each entry is brief with little in the way of detail. Evidence supporting each entry should be explored in detail separately.

Automated tools are available to help lawyers and their administrative staff produce plotlines, such as TimeMap and TimelineXpress, by inData.

Many blogs and websites cite to Law Department Management Blog, 27 of which I have previously thanked (See my post of June 17, 2009: 14 blogs/websites that have directed readers here; and June 26, 2009: 13 more referral sources.). During the past two weeks, another thirteen saw fit to acknowledge this blog, so I return the favor. All of these 40 are resources for managers of legal teams in companies.

balkininfo.blogs.com/ (Ruth Balkin)

garrettworley.com/ (R. Garrett Worley III)

Since my previous post on the advantages and disadvantages of fifteen practices (See my post of March 23, 2009: pluses and minuses of 15 practices.), I have accumulated a dozen more debate posts.

1. Break-outs or plenary sessions at large meetings (See my post of April 25, 2009: meetings and smaller sub-group meetings.).
2. Cross selling by law firms or let me find my own firms (See my post of April 2, 2009: marketing by external counsel to companies that are already clients.).

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.).

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.).

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.).

1. The Home Depot and ING are adherents to Six Sigma. Later, the article mentions Gulfstream Aerospace.

2. 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.

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)

“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.