Brian Armstrong, the progressive general counsel of Canada’s Bruce Power, was informative and candid about his efforts to demonstrate the performance and value of his department. His 200-page annual report is a compendium of nearly every metric imaginable, according to the long profile of him in CCCA Magazine, Fall 2011 at 28, including results from client satisfaction surveys.
Not surprisingly, senior management rated the department higher than lower-ranking clients. That much could be expected. But Armstrong gave numbers: an overall score of 81 by the top clients compared to a 67 by the rest. That gap of almost one-third makes the point clearly: in-house lawyers snap to much more for the officers of the company than for the non-coms. Armstrong concludes that “if we want to drive these results higher, we have to pay more attention to the other people.” That’s true mathematically, but in the real world, where resources are very finite, I would go with keeping the big chiefs smiling.
The article has lots of other good points and even a picture of this blogger. Click here for the CCCA article.