Articles Posted in Tools

One of the most common management-related activities is the lawyer or departmental retreat (See my post of Feb. 12, 2008: retreats and conferences with 8 references.). To provide general counsel with one option to consider for their retreat, I created a fixed-fee offering. I will present to your law department retreat on any of the 24 topics listed on my website.

The fixed fee is $5,000 plus reasonable travel expenses. This fee includes pre-conference materials as well as facilitating a discussion or break-out sessions on the topic. More details are available on my site.

Through the expert assistance of Richard Ramos and and Language Translation, which specializes in translation services, French-reading in-house counsel can find out more about this blog and its author, Rees Morrison.

Rees Morrison, spécialiste d’expérience en matière de services juridiques, est l’auteur du blogue LawDepartmentManagementBlog.com. Depuis le 1er février 2009, plus de 4000 articles y sont répertoriés en 13 catégories.

Depuis plus de 21 ans, Rees Morrison, un ancien avocat pratiquant des États-Unis, prodigue ses conseils afin d’améliorer la gestion des services juridiques. Sa participation dans plus de 275 projets de consultation a permis l’évaluation des services juridiques et de leur fonctionnement, la recommandation de méthodes visant à réduire les coûts des consultations externes, le rassemblement et l’analyse de données de référence, la collecte d’indices de satisfaction des clients envers leurs procureurs, et l’analyse de l’efficacité des meilleures pratiques et procédures. Morrison a travaillé auprès de fournisseurs, d’équipes juridiques internes ainsi qu’avec des cabinets d’avocats afin de renforcer leurs relations avec leurs clients.

A cartogram is a map which resizes countries or states according to certain data; it shows political boundaries from the data’s point of view. This method of data visualization appears in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, March 2009 at 112. The example is a map that shows the size of countries according to several factors related to their innovation efforts: R&D spending, the number of postsecondary degrees awarded, and the number of patents issued.

Imagine a cartogram of the United States that shows the state with the largest number of in-house counsel as the biggest state, the next by number of in-house counsel as the second biggest and so on. Or, imagine a map of the world that shows countries in proportion to how many lawyers they have who are part of US law departments. One more example: instead of columns of different heights rising from states of the United States, to indicate the number of cases pending or the amount spent in the previous year, why not create a cartogram? The possibilities are endless for matching geography to data.

Brian Daley, the author of an article I cited (See my post of Feb. 22, 2009: software to depict and quantify decisions.), was kind enough to email me with some additional explanation. I have slightly edited the following excerpts.

“I have only used TreeAge software.

The mechanical process of creating a decision-tree is relatively easy. The time-consuming part is analyzing the main issues in a litigation and determining the dollar value of the various possible outcomes. A simple decision-tree, such as the example in my article, can be created in less than an hour, once you are familiar with the software and once the issues and dollar values have been identified. In complex litigation, it can take many hours to identify the important issues and determine how they interact with each other (mind you, determining what the issues are and how they relate to each other is essential whether you use a decision-tree or not).

My aim has always been to keep marketing out of this blog, so I down-play the fact that I am without doubt the universe’s absolutely greatest consultant to general counsel. OK, well, my mom agrees.

But it is only fair to break my vow of modesty to announce the first-ever fixed-fee offering by a consultant to obtain and analyze comparative benchmarking data. Walk, don’t run, to the nearest click here to find out more.

I am a closet academic, as long-time readers might have noticed. Ideas, research and writing interest me, and my blog posts are sometimes tiny efforts to teach. Too bad no group of law or business academics vigorously study and debate anything about law departments, let alone their management. Only sometimes do I run across professors with such arcane interests.

Some posts write about courses at colleges for in-house counsel, and obviously someone teaches those programs (See my post of May 14, 2005: program at Harvard Business School; April 18, 2005: Said Business School at Oxford; April 12, 2006: universities with courses aimed in-house counsel; and Feb. 24, 2008: Harvard Program on the Legal Profession.).

Other posts mention specific professors (See my post of May 5, 2006: academics with an interest in law department management; Oct. 23, 2005: empirical legal studies discipline, yet the dearth of academics who study law departments; Oct. 23, 2005: James Cook’s PhD dissertation on law department structure; June 25, 2007: Professors Ross and Fortney; Sept. 17, 2006: bill padding research by Ross; May 10, 2006: Fortney research; Feb. 25, 2007: law review article on roles of general counsel; and Dec. 27, 2008: research on gate-keeping by Sung Hui Kim.).

In the sphere of law department management, power-law distributions probably describe a variety of distributions of data (See my post of Feb. 24, 2009: background on power laws.).

Expensive lawsuits. Assuming $10 million in costs is the largest, the drop off can be predicted to the number of lawsuits costing $5 million, and the same formula predicts the frequency of $2.5 million cases. For instance, each level down may be four times more common (See my post of Nov.13, 2005: power laws and the ratios of litigation costs.).

Expenditures on specialty law firms. A plausible power-law distribution might see a law department spend about 53 percent of its outside counsel budget in a given legal-service area on its top choice firm, 20 percent on the second choice firm, 13 percent on the third, and 7 percent on the fourth. The decline can be expressed as a polynomial power-law function.

Cases cited by the US Supreme Court, punitive damages awarded by federal courts, damages sought by class action plaintiffs, revenues of law firms in a given year, lawyers at law firms, relative renown of law firms, and many other aspects of the legal industry exhibit what are called power-law distributions (See my post of May. 27, 2007: Zipf’s law is a power law.).

Power-law relationships are characterized by a number called an index. For each ten-fold increase in the amount paid in settlement of employment discrimination cases, for example, the probability of there being a settlement of a given size decreases by a factor of ten raised to the power of some index. For example, a power-law formula with an index will predict how commonly a $50,000 regulatory fine will occur, if you have discovered the power-law index based on a number of such fines (See my post of July 25, 2005: also example of regulatory fines.). Stated differently, a variable (for example, the size of the largest law firm) is a function of another variable (for example, rank by size) with an index exponent (rank raised to a power),” as explained in the McKinsey Quarterly, 2009, No. 1 at 11.

As compared to the familiar bell curve distribution, a power-law distribution has only one tail at the high mark (the largest fine, payment to a firm, settlement amount, etc.) and then drops off quickly to a long “tail” of significantly smaller events. IEEE Spectrum, May 2008, Vol. 45 at 18, offers more. The curve of frequency versus rank shows a steep decline at first, followed by a long tail that looks rather flat when plotted on a linear scale. On a log-log plot, the tail becomes a straight line.

The In-House Congress United Arab Emirates 2009 will be held in Bur Dubai on 4th March 2009.

From the online notice, three observations struck me.

The first is that the website page states in red print “Note: Registrations for the In-House Congress is not open to non-hosting law firms, recruiters, and consultancies.” If you are not an in-house lawyer, you have to pay to play.

Maya Karwande, then a rising senior at Tufts University, wrote a paper on Legal Process Outsourcing. that the blog Legally Yours published on July 19, 2008. You can learn about the Global Legal Professional certification from its website, but I quote from a portion of Karwande’s paper (four footnotes omitted).

”In April 2007 Rainmaker, recruitment and training firm that focuses on the LPO industry, introduced the Global Legal Professional (GLP) certification test. Designed in conjunction with three LPO companies: JuriMatrix, Bodhi Global, and Quislex, the GLP is aimed at testing candidates on skills needed in LPO: English fluency, technology and professional skills, personal effectiveness and legal knowledge. The first GLP was administered on September 16th, 2007 in the Indian cities of New Delhi, Bombay, Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad. The GLP website is explicit: “The purpose of the GLP is clear and simple – to put in place a mechanism that enables the industry to identify the talent required to fuel the L.P.O revolution.” The website invites “players” in the LPO industry to support and participate in the program by indicating their ‘acceptance’ of the GLP as a valid mechanism to certify industry talent. With participation, members of the LPO industry gain access to the talent pool, lower recruitment and training costs, and an “auto-application process” that enables test takers to fast track their scores to preferred employers. This test may open up opportunities for the 80,000 lawyers that graduate from Indian law schools each year, and is pushing towards a standard of evaluation. Although reputable companies aided in the design of the test, the top companies of the industry were not involved. In order for a certification test have real relevance; a broader network of consultation and input from LPO companies will be necessary. In addition, it may be beneficial to involve the American Bar Association as a way to form a link between a business and legal solution.”

I thank Karwande for the description. General counsel will be more comfortable with LPOs and offshoring if they know that some quality control is operating, such as certification.