Articles Posted in Knowledge Mgt.

“With a network of more than 100,000 users in 180 countries, Serengeti Law is now the largest online community of legal professionals in the world.” So claims a press release summarized in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, Dec. 2009 at 93. Literally true, since all those Serengeti users share the common thread of sending bills online, its is a nano-thin community.

The number of timekeepers who invoice electronically through Serengeti is impressive, mind-boggling to be more precise. The achievement is laudable. Nevertheless, it is not an online community if all you share is submitting bills through the internet on the same software. You know no one else in a meaningful way and have no communication with them.

Until Serengeti allows its legions to post messages for each other, to join online discussions, to upload and search for shared information, to form affinity groups – the nuts and bolts of Martindale-Hubble Connected, Legal OnRamp, LinkedIn, Xing, Viadeo, Plaxo and other professional online communities – this bit of self promotion misleads (See my post of Sept. 22, 2008: social networks such as LinkedIn, with 7 references.).

By now, with all the frustrated initiatives and years of lassitude, let’s just accept that in-house counsel couldn’t care less about contributing to departmental knowledge bases (See my post of March 5, 2005: no altruistic information sharing.). Not if they have to do anything to donate material. You can try to make it easy for them to chip in, such as with dictation equipment, voice recognition, and tagging, but they are still unlikely to push content out.

The best techniques for obtaining knowledge from in-house lawyers are to pull learning in, with extractive technologies. Let software sort through documents and e-mails that are created in the ordinary course of business and pull out what ought to be stored in a database. Marry that with capable search technology and you have yourself a knowledge repository of some usefulness (See my posts of March 5, 2005 on Google Desktop; Dec. 10, 2005 on search software; Feb. 4, 2006 on e-mail search tools; and Feb. 19, 2006 on concept search software.).

You can also siphon off knowledge through efforts of non-lawyers tasked with selecting useful information. Alternatively or additionally, a document-management system unobtrusively pulls, makes available, and stores precedent files (See my post of Dec. 6, 2007: document management with 15 references.).

Raymond Bayley, CEO of Novus Law, writes in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, Nov. 2009 at 47,that “several studies show that lawyers spend more than 20 percent of their time looking for things. If you can bill 400 or more hours annually looking for things, there is no incentive to build a better knowledge management system to eliminate this wasted expense, unless you provide services on a fixed fee basis, as we do at Novus Law.” His comment is aimed at law firms, but I am not sure why inside lawyers would be appreciably different.

His backup for this metric, he explained to me in an email, is “studies by IDC, Gartner and Lexis Nexis.” In all my consulting interviews I have never heard complaints that inside lawyers spend anything like this amount of time searching for things or documents (See my post of April 5, 2009: methods software uses to search with 18 references.).

If the figure were true, knowledge management efforts by general counsel would have made much, much more headway.

To the approximately 28 books I have already found, Google’s book search added a few more about legal department operations and management. I have listed all the information that Google provides.

Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education-New England Law Institute – Corporate legal departments (1979) 158 pages.

The Punjab Law Department manual, 1938: being a collection and digest of the rules and orders relating to management of the legal affairs of the Punjab Government by West Pakistan Law Dept (Supt., Govt. Print., West Pakistan, 1967) 146 pages.

“The idea that those who actually took part in great events or lived through particular times have superior understanding to those who come later is a deeply held yet wrongheaded one.” This quote from a book by Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (Modern Library 2008) at 43 precedes her statements that we do not always remember accurately. Memory is not only selective, it is malleable.

So much of what we know about law departments comes from statements of those who were in a particular law department and part of its particular management initiative. We must always bear in mind that those participants may not have a superior understanding of what happened or be able to tell their tale objectively. Everyone employs rhetoric, pursues an agenda, and sees the world through distorting lenses.

General counsel invest their department’s money and time each year in professional development courses (See my post of May 25, 2008: CLE with 30 references.). Some of that expense must be borne because of state law requirements imposed on lawyers admitted to the bar of that state to keep up to date. Other development efforts, such as attending conferences, online learning, and presentations from law firms, are discretionary, but for both mandated and optional education, there should be some expectation of a return on investment.

Benchmarks are non-existent about what US legal departments put out for continuing legal education. It is possible that $4,000 per year per lawyer is a plausible estimate. That figure comes from $2,000 for one conference plus associated travel and lodging costs and eight hours of a lawyer’s time at $250 an hour fully loaded. Not that internal costs of a lawyer fall into the same category as checks written to a conference organizer, but for a company it comes down to virtually the same dollars.

One way to calculate the ROI of CLE would be to gather from a group of legal departments their spend per lawyer on CLE and a few other metrics, such as lawyers per billion of revenue, outside counsel spend as a percentage of revenue, and total legal spend as a percentage of revenue. If amounts invested for professional improvement per lawyer correlated to any of those outcome metrics, you could argue with more specificity that CLE activities translate into greater productivity, capability, or reduced costs. For example, you might find that the more you spend per lawyer on training, the fewer lawyers are needed per billion of revenue.

In its eulogy to Bob Banks, the controversial general counsel of Xerox during the 1980’s, Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, Oct. 2009 at 21, explain that “In 1981 he and eight other in-house lawyers met to discuss the possibility of forming an in-house bar group that would operate outside the American Bar Association. A larger group met again in March 1982 and, after an impassioned speech by Banks, voted 49 to 3 to form what was initially called the American Corporate Counsel Association.” ACCA later renamed itself ACC.

Who were the other eight lawyers at the historic first meeting?

“Selective networking should be a part of the day job, not just a ‘nice to do’ task.” I commend this idea from Mark Prebble, Managing In-House Legal Services: Providing High Value Support for Your Organisation (Thorogood 2009) at 19. Whether you meet people in the know at conferences, through social networks, from an article, with a blog, or in the course of a consulting project, you should periodically keep in touch. They can ask you questions about management; you can turn to them for advice when you need to. It costs little and it is the best kind of advice – knowledgeable, mostly objective, and free.

Each encounter with a person knowledgeable about legal department operations creates an opportunity for a continuing link (See my post of Nov. 16, 2008: conferences aimed at inside lawyers with 11 references; Sept. 22, 2008: social networks such as LinkedIn, with 7 references; and Jan. 1, 2008: consulting with 15 references.).

If your department maintains a legal intranet, you might wish to track some of the same traffic metrics that bloggers do. You could monitor the number of visitors, visit length, pages viewed, and business unit represented. You could find out which people visit with what frequency. You could also compile metrics on the amount of content on the intranet. A further analysis could study which items are used (viewed, downloaded or annotated) the most.

These would not be metrics collected for metrics sake, but to help you decide what parts of the intranet offer the most value. Fertilize those areas and prune or replant the others (See my post of Nov. 30, 2008: legal department intranet sites with 12 references.).

Actually a four-volume treatise, Robert Haig, Ed., Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (Thomson Reuters/West 2009 Supp.), the huge supplement this year alone has generated two dozen posts (See my post of April 20, 2009: minority general counsel in the Fortune 500; April 22, 2009: zero-based staffing decisions; April 24, 2009: lawyers and their relative aversion to change; May 3, 2009: whether in-house counsel compete with outside counsel; Aug. 7, 2009: don’t send courtesy RFPs; Aug. 10, 2009 #1: citation to this blog; Aug. 18, 2009: dubious metric on inside costs being one-third of outside; Aug. 18, 2009: collaborate with external counsel on your intranet; Aug. 20, 2009: CISCO’s online patent tool; Aug. 20, 2009: court limitations on inside counsel and confidential material obtained during discovery; Aug. 20, 2009: statements general counsel can sign in support of ADR; and Aug. 25, 2009 #2: four-month secondment by UPS to Legal Aid.).

Each chapter is a treatise, chock full of references to articles and books. The writing is stolid, complete, and dense with material. Much of the set appears to be substantive legal updates, but the management chapters are plentiful.