Articles Posted in Clients

When you post documents on a legal intranet, many intranet packages can tell you how many times clients download them (See my posts of March 1, 2007 #3 about Honeywell’s legal intranet; and March 13, 2007 on mini-intranet sites.). If you track and study that data, you can find out which of your forms are most useful and you can give thought to why some forms languish.

It may be that clients can’t easily find the right forms. Your navigation tools, site layer, search functions, or naming conventions are poor. Or, perhaps, clients do not even know that legal forms are available for their use (See my post of Sept. 14, 2005 on clients and the self-service model.).

Clients may be afraid to use a form that seems too daunting to them. And, finally, the forms may simply not be very useful, or useful to very many clients.

Textron launched a major Six Sigma initiative in 2002. USA TODAY recently asked Textron’s CEO, Lewis Campbell, who is himself a Six Sigma green belt, about that initiative. The CEO praised the law department. Mirabile dictu!

“Our legal department has been one of the most aggressive to touch Six Sigma.” That commendation is certainly much visibility from the CEO’s office, and on a management practice to boot (See my post of June 11, 2007 and 11 references cited about other forms of public relations undertaken by law departments.).

Law departments cannot escape the slur: “You’re just a cost center.” Listen to John Lipsey, vice president, corporate counsel services, of LexisNexis: “Today’s GC has to work within the company’s economic environment and operate the law department as a cost center.” The first part of that sentence is trite, for the reason that everyone must work within the corporate constraints.

It’s the resignation to the fact that today’s GC must accept that her department is a lowly cost center that irritates me (See my posts of May 24, 2005 on the term “cost center”; Jan. 14, 2007 on savings by law departments from business profits; and March 17, 2006 on how HSBC’s decentralized team weakens the cost center complaint.)..

I don’t think that cost-center epithet is fair. If any major US company had no law department, the company would undoubtedly save a quarter percent of its revenue or so, which is the median cost of an internal law department. But I have no doubt that that company would pay much more for outside lawyers and it might in fact end up paying more in settlements and judgments. It takes contracts to make money, and it takes lawyers to complete and enforce contracts. It takes people to run companies, and lawyers to help hire and fire many of them. It takes lawyers to have companies make money, so why are they dunned as cost centers?

Sometimes during speeches I show a slide that makes a point about behavior of partners at law firms that irritate in-house lawyers. One of the leading irritants is “being patronizing” (See my post of Oct. 30, 2006.)

Yet, I often detect the same critical and superior attitude among lawyers in law departments. In-house counsel patronize their clients. Those foolish, obtuse or obstinate clients are always getting into trouble; they don’t know as much as we do; it’s an effort to get those dense clients to understand what we are telling them about legal risks and paths; we can’t trust clients to act responsibly.

When the theme is “do more with less,” one pressure valve is to empower clients (See my post of Dec. 2007 about Sapient letting clients complete contracts.). Unless you think your clients are capable and well-intentioned, you won’t let them take on tasks that you have been doing. Hard as it may be to accept the fact, remember, even lawyers sometimes make mistakes or decide poorly.

1. The best way is to do consistently good work that helps your clients achieve their goals.

2. Second, structure your law department so your commercial lawyers feel primarily responsible for a particular business unit or units (See my posts of Aug. 3, 2005 that attacks “client alignment”; March 31, 2007 on roadblocks to achieving alignment; April 16, 2007 for an extreme manifestation; and March 28, 2006 with an illustration from PPG and Aug. 2, 2006 with an instance from Qualcomm.).

3. Appoint a single point of contact (SPOC) for each major business unit (See my posts of Oct. 14, 2005 on SPOCs.).

I took notice at a recent conference when Ben Heineman, the former general counsel of General Electric, criticized law department lawyers who think in terms of their “clients.” In Heineman’s view, that term and framework tends to separate an in-house lawyer from the person the lawyer is counseling. Heineman drilled into everybody’s consciousness that as lawyers they are part of the company and are working with their colleagues.

This contrarian position differs from what many general counsel try to drum into their troops: demonstrate a client-service point of view, they repeat. The attitude those general counsel are trying to dispel is a post-office mentality, where employees have no choice but to come to the law department and how you treat them is not very important. The law department enjoys a monopoly and doesn’t have to go out of its way for its customers.

To those general counsel, a client orientation means to make efforts to keep the client satisfied, clients who will seek out the law department for the value of its counsel. Heineman has skipped over that change in mindset and assumed that his lawyers were that close to the people they counseled.

When Jack VanWoerkom became the new general counsel of Home Depot in the summer of 2007, one of his first obligations was to serve two weeks as a store clerk. According to Corp. Counsel, Vol. 14, Sept. 2007 at 30, Home Depot requires its executives “to get a feel for the business by wearing an orange apron for a while.” This is an excellent practice, and one which is applicable to all law departments.

If law departments want to make good on their claim that they understand the business they serve, their lawyers ought to spend time on the shop floor. The closer in-house counsel are to their clients, in terms of proximity partly but close familiarity mostly, the better they will serve their clients. Get out in the field, lawyers!

It is for this reason that many law departments invite clients to speak at law department retreats (See my post of May 21, 2007 on law-department retreats.).

A morsel from InsideCounsel, Aug. 2007, at 52, describes a practice that can help bring in-house lawyers closer to their clients. Tamara Joseph, general counsel of Mayne Pharma, makes it a practice to eat lunch with her clients. “Clients are often more relaxed over lunch and talk about business in a way you don’t hear in a formal meeting,” she observes. You can break through some of the distance of a business relationship when you break bread together. A steady diet of client lunches is an idea worth chewing over.

When a new general counsel takes over, an argument for a formal assessment of client satisfaction within a few months is that those scores establish a baseline of satisfaction. If the general counsel intends to try to improve client satisfaction, that baseline will enable the general counsel to show better scores on the next client survey. The early survey will also help the new general counsel pinpoint the biggest problem areas.

A counterargument will be that whatever happened on the predecessor’s watch is not now relevant. The new general counsel should allow some time for her to put her stamp on the department and its services to clients. Then conduct a survey and find out if where there’s room for improvement. A smaller concern is that surveys can irritate clients, so the newcomer should start out without that mark immediately against her.

Buried in the back of InsideCounsel, July 2007 at 95, is a mysterious item. It explains that “law firm managing partners and law school deans nominated the winners” of the Burton Awards for “Legends In Law.” The awards program is run in association with the Library of Congress and is sponsored by LexisNexis. Selections were made on the following criteria: “reputation in both the legal profession and as a proven authority in a specialized area of law; background and experience; complexity and scope of matters handled; global or national importance of issues confronted; and proven and exemplary leadership.”

The 2007 winners were all general counsel at corporations witih revenues in excess of $1 billion: James T. Hale (Target Corp.), Michele Coleman Mayes (Pitney Bowes), Tim Mayopolous (Bank of America), Geralyn Presti (Forest City Enterprises), and Richard Walker (Deutsche Bank). A different law firm nominated each of the five winners.