Articles Posted in Clients

An article in 2001 by Lisa Dolak, then an Associate Professor, Syracuse Univ. College of Law, discussed professionalism and in-house counsel.

She states that malpractice claims against in-house counsel “may be relatively rare, but they are on the rise.” Examples at the time she wrote the article included a counterclaim against a general counsel who had sued to collect severance, “based on the counsel’s alleged negligent supervision of outside counsel,” and a claim against a city attorney allegedly responsible for a default judgment entered against the city.

If malpractice claims arise, where do indemnification protections pick up for in-house counsel?

A law department identified only as a “Fortune 500 retail company” shared some of its client training activities in Jan. 2005 materials of ACC provided at a conference organized by the ABA Section of Business Law and ACC, Nov.18, 2005 at 16. That department provides a number of types of training.

The short piece notes that “in-class training, computer-based training [CBT], and paper-based training will all be part of the program’s training components.” All law departments should consider the various ways to reach out to their client communities.

It struck me, from the profiles of two general counsel who serve the US legal needs of multinationals headquartered elsewhere, that an important part of their job is helping the senior executives of their companies – based in Tokyo, Geneva, Paris, or wherever – understand our Kafkaesqe and expensive legal labyrinth. Do US class actions make sense? How do you convey the risk of punitive damages? On an on.

As James Brumm, general counsel for Mitsubishi International explained in an article from Columbia Law School’s quarterly, oral agreements are not enforceable in the US, but try to explain that to a foreign colleague who has done business with a promise and a handshake all his life. (See my post of Dec. 14, 2005 on the special demands on GCs in highly-regulated industries.)

Estimates of the number of US businesses that use instant messaging (IM) range from 50 to 90 percent, with the range due to the frequency that individuals have acted on their own when no corporate IM is available. Large numbers have downloaded and are using commercial IM packages (Fin. Times, Oct. 28, 2005 at 9).

Many in-house counsel have IM capabilities. Observers of the IM scene note that it is especially useful when you have to exchange a lot of specific information. They also note that you cannot hide, if your IM system shows you are at your computer. This visibility is what is meant by the term “presence.”

Clients, colleagues, outside counsel, and managers know you are there – assuming you have turned on your IM light – and that you are accessible. Being on-call all the time becomes even more likely with IM presence.

Resonance Partnership’s blog, commenting on my post of Nov. 21, 2005, asked, “Is Mr. Morrison suggesting that attorneys shouldn’t ask their clients for feedback for fear that they may have to live up to their client’s expectations? Or that by asking for feedback it might be implied that attorneys upon receiving feedback might feel obligated to improve their performance? Surely not.”

Indeed, surely not. In-house legal departments should find out what their clients think of them and should expect that by doing so their clients will want even better service from them.

The blogger makes the excellent point that “The meaning of the words in a satisfaction survey has to be exactly what the operational definition of the words specifies. … Ask a question about responsiveness and unless you have defined responsiveness, or operationalized it, to mean something specific to the client, such as returned phone calls, then collecting “feelings” will be useless information because you will not know how to improve responsiveness….or as Mr. Morrison notes, the validity will be undermined.”

A leading consumer products company surveyed its 400 top executives. It asked them, among other questions, the extent to which they felt each of the staff functions added value to the company. In the one instance I know about, the law department scored the second highest on that scale.

I question whether that question and the resulting metrics or rankings are worth pursuing. The term “adding value” carries enormous subjectivity, in the first place; the aggregate scores don’t help the staff units know what they should do to improve, in the second place; and it breeds nonsensical competitiveness in the third place.

“How well have they served you” is probably the question the executives were really answering, rather than some effort to understand the contributions of the different staff groups and how much they contribute to the success of the company.

It’s not as useful to get clients’ opinions on the department’s performance considered in total as it is to understand clients’ opinions about different practice groups within the department (See my post of Aug. 28, 2005 on performance and importance.).

Without that specificity of ratings, such as for the IP group or North American widgets or litigation, none of the department’s senior lawyers, responsible for such groups, will fully accept accountability for the results. How do they know that generic criticisms lash them, or praise boosts them?

In some of my client satisfaction surveys, I have included a question along the lines of, “With which group of lawyers did you work most during the past year?” I then analyze the responses according to the groups identified. (See my post of Nov. 21, 2005 about two unusual client satisfaction questions.)

An April 2002 report at page 3 by Florida’s Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability about Florida’s Department of Legal Affairs, a massive department with 1,253 full-time equivalent positions and a budget exceeding $135 million, makes a useful observation about how best to drive up response rates on client satisfaction surveys.

When the Department electronically surveyed its 124 clients in 2001, 25 percent responded. By contrast, two years before a paper survey found a 54 percent response rate, or twice that of the later online round. The report did not state that the two surveys were substantially the same or that they went to substantially the same positions, but I will assume that. Possibly, 2001 was at the dawn of e-mail or online database comfort; possibly an electronic survey on the same terms in 2005 but with a more techno-savvy client group, would rebound to the higher figure.

Meanwhile, law departments who wish to find out what their clients think should offer clients both methods of responding.

A series of studies reported in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Fall 2005 at 5, suggest, to the degree that they are applicable to the clients of law departments, that client satisfaction surveys may raise expectations of performance in the future by the law department.

The item makes the point that clients create expectations based on past experiences. Hence, the first survey by a law department has a retrospective tone, but it may raise the bar of performance expectations for the future. If true, the law department that frequently asks “How are we doing?” may find itself on a treadmill of rising client expectations.

In 1998, the legal department of the University of North Carolina, called the Office of Legal Affairs, distributed 255 surveys campus wide, and got back 110 (43%) From the Office of Legal Affairs, U. of North Carolina, March 2003.

The first part aimed to determine who the clients were of the Office, which surprises me, because I had until now assumed most law departments know who most of their clients are, and indeed send them the surveys.

The second unusual question asked clients to list the types of legal services requested. Again, in my experience law departments can tick off the commonly requested services, and this survey did not quantify the services clients requested in any way.