Articles Posted in Tools

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.

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.

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.).

Your legal department has to ramp up to accomplish a large acquisition. Because large projects such as this involve many activities, your lawyers need some way to determine what will need to be done so that they can manage time, costs, and ultimately expectations. Skilled project managers often accomplish this, according to William J. Stevenson, Operations Management (McGraw-Hill, 2005, 8th Ed.) at 735, by developing a work breakdown structure, which is a hierarchical listing of what must be done during a project.

A WBS for a project (Level 1) looks like an org chart, with the major elements of the project at the next level down, Level 2. Each major activity (due diligence, corporate structure, tax coordination, financial issues) has several boxes below it, which are the Level 3 tasks. Level 4 lists the supporting activities for Level 3, and so on down if necessary.

It might take a legal department staff some time to develop a comprehensive WBS for a large acquisition, electronic discovery in a major investigation, or establishment of a joint venture, but the effort is the basis for developing time and cost estimates(See my post of June 24, 2007: project management with 5 references; and Dec. 2, 2007: Gantt charts.)

This online site, founded by the Corporate Executive Board in 2007, is “Designed for organizations with annual revenue less than $1 billion.” It is managed by the team that operates the General Counsel Roundtable and “serves legal executives and their teams with unlimited access.” The site doesn’t state the subscriber’s fee to belong or how the services differ from the full-fledged General Counsel Roundtable. Nevertheless, it offers guidance for smaller legal teams.

According to the website on June 9, 2009, CLEx has “more than 300 member organizations and 1,200 participating legal professionals,” with the presumably more up-to-date counter stating 1,975 professionals in the network.

A survey conducted a year ago on behalf of LexisNexis, hosts of Connected, gathered responses from more than 449 in-house attorneys (See my post of Oct. 12, 2008: background details on the poll; and June 9, 2009: some questions about data on social networks used by corporate counsel.). One question asked “What are the top advantages of participating in an online legal professional network?” Here are the choices on the survey and the percentages of those who selected them.

1. Access to info I couldn’t get elsewhere (46%)
2. Easier exchange of information/experiences (45)

Joint efforts by a number of legal departments for their collective good have shown up frequently on this blog. As early as four years ago I collected several instances (See my post of Oct. 14, 2005: collective activities by law departments with 5 references).

Time passes, the blogging hand writes, and it is time to trawl for more recent examples (See my post of Oct. 19, 2005 #3: technology development; Oct. 22, 2005: to determine “industry standards”; March 14, 2006: evaluations of law firms; May 24, 2006: patents pooled in a defense alliance; June 19, 2006: British local authorities hire external counsel; Nov. 25, 2006: mentoring shared among several law departments; Dec. 28, 2006: patent applications collectively reviewed; Feb. 14, 2007: Corporate E-Discovery Forum; March 6, 2007: collective effort by law departments; April 15, 2007: Lloyds and legal fees; April 22, 2007: update UTBMS codes; May 24, 2007: Allstate shares its CLE programs with other law departments; May 13, 2007: League of Minnesota Cities and legal insurance; Nov. 18, 2007 #2: minority job fairs; March 20, 2008: benefits of shared evaluations; Sept. 21, 2008: diversity teamwork among three law departments; Feb. 26, 2009: conflicts rules; and March 26, 2009: data pooled for decision analysis.).

Many people consult to legal departments; partners at law firms consult to legal departments. Why such different attitudes by general counsel toward the two roles?

A consultant, experienced with other legal departments and their management efforts, objective in assessments, creative and forceful with ideas, and committed to concentrating on a problem, brings much value to a general counsel (See my post of Jan. 1, 2008: consulting with 15 references.).

A partner in a law firm, experienced with the legal issues, objective in analysis, less beholden than employees to politics and the “way things have always been done,” and staffed to get big tasks done quickly likewise bring value to the legal department.

A model simplifies reality so that the analyst can grapple with the fundamentals of a system (See my post of July 14, 2006: narratives, theories and models; and May 21, 2009 #3: three kinds of formal models.). Some primitive verbal models aim to do something similar for legal departments (See my post of April 9, 2008: four fundamentals – people, processes, structure, and resources; April 8, 2009: productivity, quality and risk; May 19, 2006 #1: all law department activities viewed as information flows, processes, or systems; Aug. 13, 2006: processes, tools, and productivity; and Oct. 10, 2006: adds volume and resources to the model.).

Components of law department models answer different questions. Who does the work (people, which includes structure)? How do they do the work (processes, which includes roles)? What helps them do their work (productivity enablers, which includes technology and tools)? The least well nown component is “Why do they do their work?” In the spirit if “Ps” call it “pulmonary. This component of the model connotes the department’s heart, culture, level of engagement, client relationships, and all that gives meaning to work: friends and colleagues — corporate mission, pro bono, diversity, work-life balance, the environment, the morality of a company.

Other models applicable to law departments are already mentioned in earlier (See my post of Aug. 28, 2005: McKinsey’s 7S framework of structure, style, skills, shared values, systems, staffing, and strategy; Feb. 16, 2006: Booz Allen Hamilton’s organizational DNA with structure, decision rights, information, and motivators; Sept. 22, 2005: systems thinking with feedback and inter-connection; April 27, 2006: the science of services; and Oct. 1, 2005: conflicting views in economic models.).

The all-seeing Doug Cornelius, host of the excellent blog Compliance Building, saw my recent post about 16 compliance-related blogs (See my post of May 20, 2009: corporate governance, ethics and CSR.). Much more versed than I in this area, he recommended 15 more blogs, and I deeply appreciate his contribution. Head over to his blog to learn more.

Del. Corporate and Commercial Litigation Blog (Francis G.X. Pileggi of Fox Rothschild LLP)

Enforcement Action by Bruce Carton