Law school and law firm culture inculcate three orientations that pull at cross-purposes to what consummate in-house attorneys need to do. These three values, as quoted, come from a General Counsel Roundtable publication. “Excessive focus on quality.” This may serve law review authors and citation checkers as well as associates…
Three times I have commented on how to train internal clients and I mentioned 11 different techniques (See my post of July 14, 2005: lecture, lecture discussion, film, small group discussion, case studies, role playing, practical exercises, and unstructured exercises; Dec. 19, 2005: “in-class training, computer-based training [CBT], and paper-based…
Lawyers for corporations always want a “seat at the table.” But sometimes, if the truth be told, it is a good idea not to be at the table. For example, if a business manager brings along an in-house lawyer to a meeting with another company’s executive, the mere presence of…
An article in The Bus. Lawyer, Vol, 64, Feb. 2009 at 309, makes the point that lawyers often take the blame for a deal collapsing when in fact business executives sidestepped tough issues that eventually came to light through the lawyers and scuttled the deal. “Businessmen when bargaining often talk…
Have you considered “single-point post-transaction” reviews? “At the end of each transaction ask individual business colleagues within your organization for one improvement suggestion. This should be one improvement you and your external lawyers can make to continue to improve the service that you provide.” This technique comes from Ann Page…
Most in-house lawyers, I would wager, refer to fellow employees who seek their legal advice as “clients.” Others, a much smaller number, vociferously reject that term. They perceive themselves as working together with fellow employees on a team and disavow some of the implications of the term “client” (See my…
Managers of legal departments lack a descriptive metric for the degree to which in-house lawyers are relied on by clients. For example, no general counsel can say anything like “30 percent of the VPs and above last year turned to the law department appropriately at least 75 percent of the…
Law departments in these parlous times suffer layoffs. True, the volume of work may decline as sales slump, but headcount reductions often do not correspond to reductions in workload. If not, if there are fewer lawyers to do essentially the same amount of work, then clients need to change some…
The law department of Carillion develops an annual Legal Exposure Plan for each of its major client groups. As described in Ann Page and Richard Trapp, Managing External Legal Resources (ICSA 2007) at 16, the plan covers multiple ways “to bring our working relationships with our client businesses closer, covering…
The 2005 issue of Robert Half Legal’s Future Law Office report, “Client Service: Challenges and Strategies,” at 13, quotes a senior lawyer in the legal department of Ernst & Young. When a client satisfaction survey revealed that clients wanted faster responses to phone calls and e-mails, the general counsel’s office…