Articles Posted in Clients

Tired of clients asking you the same question? Write the question and a response that instructs lay readers, put them both on your legal department or corporate internal website where they are easy to find, and wait for the next time someone asks the question. Then, either tell the client or write to the client that they should consider the guidance online and check back with you if that doesn’t help.

This useful suggestion, laden with implications for knowledge management, client self-service, quality control, and productivity, comes from the ACC Docket, March 2010 at 34. The author adds that he typically includes a link in the email response, instead of attaching the document.

The quote comes from a list of lessons learned by a general counsel who served for a time as the President of a major operating unit. The admonition has much merit. Consider these four corollaries.

What interests a specialist lawyer professionally about a situation may be the farthest thing from the client’s mind. Yes, a fascinating nuance of the statute or a ground-breaking interpretation may thrill a professorial sort, but to a client, show me the money or be quiet.

The exhortation also reminds us how much clients crave percentages. “If we do this, there is a thirty percent chance the joint venture will fall apart” has force not only because it gives a better sense of likelihood but also because it lets the businessperson roughly translate the joint venture’s fate into dollars lost.

I am a lawyer but I do not claim that lawyers are more moral than non-lawyers. That view would likely irritate and offend many people. What says lawyers are any holier than thou? Yet general counsel, or some of them at least, let it be known that they should have a special seat on the throne of goodness. They want to be the chief ethical officer (See my post of June 18, 2009: general counsel feel they should be the top ethics officer.). Likewise, what logic suggests that in-house counsel have any leg up when it comes to identifying or enforcing good behavior?

Start with the difference between integrity and morality. Integrity means to act or speak in a way that is consistent with what you said or believe (See my post of May 3, 2006: the law department as an “ethical beacon”; and Oct. 8, 2007: ethics assessments within law departments). You are aligned with and stick to your word. Morality means sorting out good and bad behavior (See my post of March 16, 2008: moral weaknesses of those who work in law departments.) and acting for the good. Showing integrity is easier than acting morally, and neither privileges lawyers.

A range of posts about in-house ethics appear on this blog (See my post of Aug. 27, 2005: reputational risk protector; May 3, 2006: lawyers empowered to do what they think is right; March 15, 2006: competencies include integrity; Feb. 19, 2006: subservience risk of decentralized in-house lawyers; Jan. 19, 2008: courage and integrity; Oct. 8, 2007: 180-degree ethical assessments; April 15, 2007: client satisfaction surveys that ask about ethical behavior; and Oct. 31, 2007: Linda DiSantis — a more enlightened ethical view.).

DuPont Legal’s operational budget is what it submits as one of the company’s functional units. Based on it, the legal team distributes its in-house costs as well as its outside counsel costs, spend on patents and trademarks, and regional costs. The operational budget forecasts spend for the coming year and includes even very small items if they can be foreseen.

Its other budget is the strategic budget, “which is regularly revisited and not projected more than six months at a time.” This budget focuses on individual matters on which DuPont is likely to spend at least $1 million annually.

From the article in Met. Corp. Counsel, Feb. 2010 at 6, that describes these twin budgets, it seems that the operational budget satisfies the company’s need for financial planning and chargeback of legal costs. The strategic budget serves as a tool for legal management to keep an eye on the most expensive matters, the ones that have fundamental consequences to the company and its bottom line.

At Colt Telecom, its 45 lawyers pride themselves on being embedded in the business operations they support: “senior lawyers do not even have the word ‘lawyer’ in their job titles.” Presumably, also, no synonym such as “counselor,” “legal advisor,” or “attorney.” The strained effort is pointed out in the Financial Times report, “Innovative Lawyers 2009,” dated Oct. 23, 2009 at 33. Might that reticence harm attorney client privilege, if it is available to Colt Telecom’s in-house counsel?

My further reaction is that this lawyer denial is going overboard. It is important that clients know they are being advised by a lawyer, someone with professional training and experience as well as a particular role. Alignment needs to be demonstrated by lawyers in more substantial ways than erasure of professional identify (See my post of April 16, 2007: extreme alignment; and June 15, 2008; alignment with clients with 16 references.).

At Catholic Healthcare West, a system of 41 hospitals and medical centers, the legal staff work on more than 5,000 contracts every year. They use at least 100 templates for physician contracts alone. To cope, they installed Contract Express, software supplied by Business Integrity, as explained in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, Nov. 2009 at 38.

Not only does the software help regulate the flood of contracts, it also handles requests by clients for contracts. “We also found that we could use ContractExpress as the front end of our portal where our clients make electronic requests to us for all types of legal work using a form that we call our Legal Services Request” (See my post of Nov. 8, 2009: pros and cons of requests for services from clients.). Clients can browse all the contracts that they have in the system and make requests to modify them or create new ones.” The latter capability is a form of client self-service (See my post of May 18, 2008: client self-service with 7 references.).

Before taking on work from a client group that has constant legal needs, it may be useful to have a person in that group be a gatekeeper, a triager, someone to determine as a first step whether your department is needed. Legal Strat. Rev., Winter 2009/10 at 24, mentions that Carillion plc, a nearly $10 billion company with 27 in-house lawyers, “has pre-legal vetting teams in place to monitor whether the business units are able to manage the [legal services] requirements by using established tools (See my post of May 18, 2008: client self-service with 7 references.).

What your internal clients think of you is the essence of your department’s “brand.” One somewhat far-fetched way to burnish that brand is to seek professional help. A lawyer writing in Int’l In-House Counsel J., Vol 2, Summer 2009 at 1190, tells us that “I heard about a legal department that asked its company’s marketing department to re-brand its image.”

Yeah, dude, a chill logo, foxy service mark, ads with edge on the corporate intranet, models in the cafeteria, and toasters given to new callers.

A law department that devotes effort and corporate resources to invigorate its “brand” fritters everyone’s time (See my post of Jan. 30, 2008: publicity by law departments with 12 references; and June 11, 2007: publicity with 12 references.).

All law firms working for The Body Shop propose a budget for their matters before they start. “Proposals that vary significantly from the legal department and business client’s value assessments are rejected.”

Gracious me! Do clients review budgets of law firms? It is hard enough to get budgets, let alone have meaningful review by inside lawyers; to layer on client approval must grind the process to a halt. Yet this is the quote from the “European Briefings” supplement to the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, Dec. 2009 at 64. The general counsel seems to suggest this rarely happens, but as a process objective I find it hard to support. The notion of hitting upon a value of a matter before the law firm starts in also makes my eyes roll. Finally, this role of clients, if true, implies that the legal department charges back to clients external fees incurred on their behalf.

“At one time, three days was a reasonable response time. With the advent of e-mail, it was shortened to something more on the order of three hours and now with wireless connectivity it may be 30 minutes.” I ran across this quote but regrettably am unable to give its provenance.

It strikes me that once law departments have online access to work product and knowledge systems of law firms, response time may come down to three minutes. With online templates and guides as well as decision analysis tools and expert systems, that might fall to three seconds.

It’s Moore’s Law applied to legal alacrity; put differently, getting “moore” done in less time for a client (See my post of Feb. 20, 2008: lack of responsiveness as primary complaint behind firing a firm.).