Articles Posted in Clients

An earlier post today describes a method of training, spaced education, that could help in-house lawyers when they train clients (See my post of Nov. 19, 2009: spaced education.). To find other instances where this blog refers to client education, I used for the first time a software program called Examine32 that allows proximity and Boolean searches of Word files. Lo and behold, it outstripped by Find function and located a number of previous posts on client training (See my post of July 14, 2005: methods to train clients; July 21, 2005: training for clients; Dec. 19, 2005: train clients using classrooms, online and paper; Dec. 20, 2005: training clients to get the most from the legal department; Jan. 3, 2006: train HR personnel to handle EEOC claims; May 10, 2006: Kraft’s IP training; June 28, 2006: effect of client training on workload; and Aug. 2, 2009: computer-based training (CBT). I am training myself to be more efficient!

Compliance functions also do plenty of training, but I seem not to have noted that activity specifically.

People learn much more effectively if they spread out their learning over a period of time, rather than cramming, and if they are tested as they proceed, rather than at the end. Those are the two primary tenets of what is called in the Harv. Mag., Nov.-Dec. 2009 at 10, “spaced education.”

To improve your training program for clients, break the information they need to learn into discrete packages and repeat them over intervals of time, always presenting it in a test format. New information appears when the correct answer is explained and elaborated on. The two methods combined significantly increase the uptake and retention of knowledge (See my post of Sept. 1, 2008: learning methods with 12 references.). The same principles apply to training within the legal department. For more on this, visit the website Spaced Ed.

I have worked recently with a legal department that requires clients to complete an RLA (Request for Legal Advice) which goes into the department’s matter management system. If more than a couple of hours of work will be needed from the law department, clients are required to complete and submit a RLA. Let’s consider the sweet and the sour of RLAs starting with the sweet (See my post of March 26, 2007: comments on a US county that requires them.).

They lessen forum shopping by clients because the request is on file.

They create a database and metrics of workload because the information goes into a database format.

“Twenty-nine percent of the corporate lawyers [attending a conference] believe policies and procedures are a necessary evil — but believe they are evil. Forty-nine percent believe the policies and procedures are not completely worthless in influencing employee behavior, but almost.” That hurts. Inside lawyers often have their hand in corporate policies, be it to set them in motion, draft them, vet them, or interpret them. How discouraging to labor on what everyone else regards as millstones around their neck!

James Nortz, the director of compliance for Bausch and Lomb, james.a.nortz@bausch.com
provided these gloomy data points in ACC Docket, Vol. 28, Sept. 2009 at 104. Nortz added that according to his survey, “Sixty-three percent of the respondents indicated that if all their corporations policies and procedures were to ‘suddenly disappear,’ no one would notice. Twenty-eight percent indicated that there would be ‘jubilation and rejoicing in most corporate locations.’” The hurt increases.

Corporate policies cover many, many activities of company employees. They make up one form of codified behavior (See my post of Oct. 10, 2006: policies of law departments compared to practices; and Oct. 25, 2006: guidelines compared to policies.).

Sometimes the lawyers have responsibilities to state, interpret or enforce company policies (See my post of June 5, 2007: legal department’s role in managing corporate policy statements.), one of the most common being the code of conduct (See my post of Feb. 20, 2009: Codes of Conduct with 5 references.). And law departments spawn their own thickets of policies regarding their practices.

The vast topic of corporate policies extends far beyond legal departments, but I rummaged through my posts to see where I have written about those that that affect legal departments. Many posts do (See my post of Nov. 13, 2007: Dell and the involvement of procurement in outside counsel selection; Sept. 17, 2005: Cargill policy on minor litigation; Aug. 27, 2005: Australian government policy on outside counsel retention; Nov. 13, 2006: all retention of outside counsel must pass through the legal department; and June 7, 2006: BHP Billiton policy regarding retention of external counsel.).

An article in the Academy of Mgt. J., Vol. 52, 2009 No. 3 at 506, describes a study of physicians in a large HMO and their so-called reciprocity dynamic in reaction to beneficial or detrimental treatment. The three authors discuss loyalty of a professional – and I read into it in-house lawyers – for the company that employees them compared to the profession that they belong to.

A tension exists. The authors observe that “organizations tend to be concerned with efficiency and profitability, whereas professionals care mainly about providing the highest-quality service (as defined by the professionals), almost regardless of cost or revenue considerations.” They cite for this statement E. Friedson, Professionalism: The third logic (Univ. of Chicago 2001). This is a tension for in-house lawyers also. They want to do their legal work as well as possible, but the company that employs them may well be satisfied with getting by and getting on with business.

More, a lawyer’s connection to the law, to being a lawyer, may over-ride a lawyer’s affiliation with his or her employer, or at least interact with that affiliation. The study of physician employees analyzed how those doctors responded in terms of productivity and adherence to policies when the HMO treated them positively and treated them negatively. The researchers compared those reactions of reciprocity in light of individual measurements on scales of professional identification and company identification.

Peter Kurer, the former chairman of UBS and before that its general counsel, spoke at the Legal Week Corporate Counsel Forum last week. One portion of his remarks sketched a typology of behavioral and psychological differences between business people and lawyers. Here are my notes.

1. Business people seek closure; lawyers are perfectionists.

2. Business people want simplicity; lawyers revel in complexity.

In-house lawyers should tell their clients more stories if they want to reach them effectively. Stories are the way humans learn best, according to an article in the J. of the Legal Writing Inst., Vol. 15, 2009 at 270. It claims that cognitive neuroscience shows that our brains are structured to grasp stories (narratives) more efficiently than facts. MRI studies show that stories stimulate different regions of the brain than those stimulated when the brain is processing information in sentences.

If you want to educate a client or change their behavior, tell them a story. Not only do stories trigger emotional responses that give stickiness to the message, they also “trigger release of neuro-transmitters (catecholamines, such as epinephrine and dopamine) that affect both hemispheres of the brain – and this leads to holistic learning.”

“When people tell stories or listen to them, they form mental images that are stored in memory as symbols. Studies show that while people retain “only 20% of what they read, … they recall 80% of symbols.” Don’t just lay out the issues, give your client a context and a narrative so that the message gets through in an understandable and memorable way (See my post of June 22, 2008: neuroscience with 32 references.). A story, especially one with symbolic lessons, is worth a thousand words.

Here is a bizarre way to get work from clients. As written in Mark Prebble, Managing In-House Legal Services: Providing High Value Support for Your Organisation (Thorogood 2009) at 24, “Legal departments use a variety of methods to deal with incoming work, which include: 1. A central email address which clients use to log work with the legal team, members of which then pick up the items, with a process for allocating items which are not picked up.”

To be blunt, I find this system impossible to imagine working. No legal department should deal with its clients through email primarily. Clients can’t write out problems they face and certainly do not want to. Second, in-house lawyers should not themselves decide which matters they will take on. A manager decides workload. Third, where does external counsel fit into this strange scheme?

Several years ago, the inventive legal department at Cisco developed a tool that lets engineers start to figure out whether an invention is patentable. According to Robert Haig, Ed., Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (Thomson Reuters/West 2009 Supp.), Vol. 1, Chapter 11 at §11:22 fn 8, the online system asks legal questions about a potentially patentable invention. If the rules-based software concludes that the patent application meets Cisco’s criteria, the application is assigned to a law firm to prosecute.

One of those firms that prosecutes patents, Baker Botts, has access to the software. An article in September 2005 cited by the chapter’s authors states that “Baker Botts then created its own extranet for managing patent investigations, which Cisco now pays Baker Botts a fixed fee to use.” Again, Cisco was innovative in terms of law department management (See my post of Sept. 25, 2008: Cisco’s Mark Chandler with 30 references.).