Articles Posted in Clients

“Get off email and get out of your office,” Stephen Swanson, Abu Dhabi Investment Co.’s chief legal officer, exhorted attendees at a recent conference. “Getting in front of your business colleagues will give you valuable information.”

This excellent advice appears in the June issue of Legal Week and its summary of the second annual Middle East Corporate Counsel Forum. Client service by walking around is excellent advice. Nothing beats talking to a client in person for learning more and satisfying them more.

The Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics disseminated a seven-question survey to its members regarding board training. The Society got back 171 responses and published a summary, written by a partner of Jeff Kaplan, one of my guest bloggers, in its Compliance and Ethics Mag., Vol. 6, June 2009 at 36. Seventy percent of the companies that responded provide ethics and compliance training for their board members, most frequently once a year.

As to who conducts the training of the board members, one out of five said it was their general counsel (id. at 38). Outside counsel did the training for three percent of the companies. The three topics for which board training was most commonly provided are “compliance program oversight” (70% checked that), “conflicts of interest” (65%), and “general ethics” (54%).

Among the many reasons the Hartford Financial Services Group won Corporate Counsel’s 2009 award for Best Legal Department is that in the fall of 2008 it launched a quarterly newsletter on ethics, compliance, and privacy. They call it The Hartford Advantage and it is available only to employees (and only online). I applaud the energy-saving method of distribution and appreciate the item about the newsletter in Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, June 2009 at 66.

Few US legal departments publish newsletters or keep them up if they try. Nevertheless, even a modest or short-lived effort brings benefits (See my post of Sept. 4, 2006: general comments on purpose of in-house newsletter; March 13, 2007: examples from BMO and Lucent; Sept. 22, 2006: one way a law department markets its services; Sept. 1, 2008: electronic newsletter of an insurance company’s law department; Oct. 3, 2008: Lockheed Martin ethics newsletter; March 31, 2009 #4: newsletter of Carillon for network law firms.).

Most lawyers think of continuing legal education almost entirely in terms of the need to freshen their knowledge of a substantive area of law (See my post of May 25, 2008: CLE with 30 references.). Few think of the softer sides of their practice, such as writing skills, public speaking, rhetoric, negotiation, active listening, teamwork, project management and other deskside skills.

Two other areas I had not thought of are “dealing with ambiguity” and “conflict management.” Tim Glassett mentions these two topics in E. Leigh Dance, Bright Ideas: Insights from Legal Luminaries Worldwide (Mill City Press 2009) at 17 and adds that one source of resources for materials on topics like these is Lominger.

A quote in a recent article in the European Lawyer pointed out a perceived shift in discourse recently from “value” to “cost.” General counsel used to speak about value; now, more bare knuckled, they demand lower costs. Whether or not that shift is underway, I thought of Oscar Wilde’s quip: “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.” What else does the claimed re-orientation imply in terms of differences between value and cost?

1. Cost is objective; value is subjective.
2. Cost means hour-based bills; value favors alternative fees.

Some general counsel and the lawyers on their team believe in “lawyer exceptionalism.” They haughtily maintain that they are exceptions to the rules that apply to others in the corporation. Wrong, for the most part. Here are some comments.

“Finance has the craziest ideas about accruals and budgets” (See my post of June 18, 2009: interplay of finance/accounting and legal with 19 references and 2 metaposts.).

“Procurement practices don’t count for us lawyers” (See my post of March 1, 2008: procurement with 17 references.). But many of the disciplines of sourcing groups make sense for in-house lawyers to apply.

You may want to try this to encourage your lawyers to learn more about the business they support (See my post of May 7, 2009: learn as much as you can about your company’s business.). At a retreat, Karen Wishart, the General Counsel of TV One, assigned her legal team to come up with a new business idea, laying out the marketing approach, projecting the financials, filling in the resources needed, doing everything business people do. She explained during her remarks at the SuperConference that her team of lawyers complained about the project, which they labored through for two weeks after the retreat ended.

The effort culminated with a presentation by the lawyers to the CEO and CFO, but before then there was much consternation and grumbling. Afterwards, however, the participants realize they had learned a huge amount about the business, the difficulties of their client colleagues, and their role in business initiatives.

You build strong trust and respect with your clients if you never make them feel dumb. They may do something or ask something that seems so basic to you, but never make them feel silly. That alienates them; it patronizes them. This rock-solid advice came from a panelist at the most recent SuperConference, Marti Wronski, General Counsel of the Milwaukee Brewers.

Posts on this blog have criticized corporate lawyers who look down on their clients or intimidate the non-lawyers among them (See my post of Oct. 24, 2005: a risk if you explain a lawsuit’s costs and ask a client to sign off; April 15, 2006: listen to clients, don’t patronize them by rushing ahead; May 8, 2007: lawyers can intimidate non-lawyers; and Dec. 10, 2007: “hold the hand” of executives demeans them.).

You don’t like it when some high and mighty partner trots out the “I know more than you” routine, so don’t do the same with your colleagues. A few times I have called out patronizing attitudes of some law firm partners (See my post of Oct. 30, 2006: condescension by law firm partners; Nov. 19, 2005: another patronizing British comment about law departments; June 9, 2007: UK views about the relative stress inside and outside; Aug. 4, 2008: disparagement of inside counsel; and June 15, 2008: some reluctance to offer instruction since it may come across as patronizing.). More broadly, I dislike patronizing, disparaging remarks about in-house (See my post of June 9, 2007: superior minds at law firms; and Oct. 12, 2006: “little merit to a full-service law department”.).

A session at the most recent SuperConference concerned what inside lawyers need to know about the business of the company they support. Marti Wronski, General Counsel of the Milwaukee Brewers, made the interesting point that ambitious lawyers shouldn’t “wish for too much too soon,” in part because the higher you rise, the more you are expected to understand intimately how the business works. If you haven’t learned enough business, you won’t be ready. At the level of general counsel, that person serves as an executive of the company, expected to be fully conversant with the full span of business issues that arise and decisions that need to be made.

For that reason, Karen Wishart, the Chief Legal Officer of TV One, invested in an executive MBA program, “which made a huge difference in my career.” Wronski mentioned that she reads all the baseball trade journals so that the accusation “You don’t understand how we do things,” strikes out.

Probably no data is available on professional development training taken by inside lawyers that is oriented toward substantive legal topics as compared to business-related topics. If we had that data, I am sure it skews heavily toward legal updates and practice tips, not how to understand the flow of cash in your company.

General counsel want to show clients the value produced by the legal team, but often haven’t a persuasive way to convey that. The new general counsel of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Christopher Dewees, wants the efforts of his dozen or so attorneys to be better understood by clients. He explains some of his efforts in Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, April 2009 at 47. The quote in the header starts the topic.

Dewees wants to apprise clients of the number of new patent applications, “how much the company pays in customs duties, or how and where it directs whistle-blower complaints.”

Metrics have been good to me, and I applaud his efforts to quantify the work of the law department (See my post of Feb. 25, 2008: practice area benchmarks with 24 references.). Numbers tell some of the story – you can tally up contracts completed, NDA’s signed, cases closed, and on and on – but some data makes little sense. In that senseless category are payments for customs duties and traffic direction on 800-line calls.