Articles Posted in Knowledge Mgt.

At different sizes and times, founders and executives of companies conclude that they need an employee lawyer. Before that point, they hire law firms as they see fit, sometimes relying on one particular firm as their outside general counsel. Daniel J. Alexander II, a lawyer in Tustin, CA, fills an intermediate spot. He blogs at Outhouse General Counsel where he writes:

“As a business owner, you need an experienced business lawyer you can call on to handle these business/legal issues. That is why my partner and I developed our “Out-House” General Counsel practice with the goal of providing business clients with critical corporate legal services replicating, as much as possible, the methods, approach, and style of an “in-house” law department.”

Many lawyers offer to stand in like an in-house generalist lawyer for fledgling companies, but I give this nod to Alexander because he blogs about that role (See my post of Aug. 8, 2006: part-time general counsel; and July 11, 2008: Respironics and split GC role.).

Having hosted for more than a year discussion groups on LinkedIn about law department management and on Legal OnRamp about legal department operations, I can attest that very few in-house attorneys either start topics or comment on topics. Most of the traffic comes from the host (that would be me) or from consultants or vendors. Pecuniary gain motivates contributors, not sharing knowledge. The “gated communities” end up opening access to people who contribute for gain.

Nearly everyone of the hundreds who have “joined” my groups then disappear, as far as I can tell. Maybe the topic of how best to direct an in-house legal team doesn’t actually interest them. Maybe they are shy, reluctant to expose their writing and ideas, uncomfortable with English. Certainly time presses them. Maybe lurking is all they ever intended.

I can’t speak to participation levels for substantive legal topics, but I wouldn’t be surprise if the heavy writing is done by law firm partners (and some professors). Again, the active participants have a pecuniary interest.

I relish surveys and analyzing their methodology and findings (See my post of March 2, 2008: surveys of law departments with 72 references.). The most prolific survey for law department management data from this blogger’s perspective is certainly that of Serengeti Law, so I thought some public praise is well deserved.

As of today, I have cited the data accumulated by Serengeti, primarily through the hard work of Rob Thomas, at least two dozen times. During 2005-2007 I wrote about the surveys 11 times (See my post of April 5, 2005: lackluster responses to its survey; April 9, 2005: low participation rates in a survey; Aug. 5, 2005: estimates of savings from five cost-control methods; Nov. 6, 2005: budgets; Nov. 8, 2005: usefulness of requiring minimum years of experience for associates; Oct. 1, 2006: integration of service of process tracking; April 13, 2007: savings from matter management systems; May 9, 2007: response rates to legal department RFPs; May 11, 2007: minimum levels of associate experience demanded; Aug. 4, 2007: inside time spent managing outside counsel; and Oct. 25, 2007: prompt payment discounts.).

My pace of citations to Serengeti surveys picked up during the past two years (See my post of Feb. 17, 2008 #1: smaller companies spend more on legal as a percentage of revenue; Feb. 23, 2008: average annual increase in outside billing rates; April 8, 2008: reported savings from matter management; April 8, 2008: collaborative billing technologies; June 10, 2008: data on convergence; Aug. 15, 2008: compliance functions; Dec. 27, 2008: disappointment over convergence benefits; Jan. 22, 2009: top concerns of in-house counsel; March 5, 2009: “standard billing rates”; March 6, 2009: periodic written updates on matters; March 8, 2009: information about expenditures from accounts payable system; April 18, 2009: number of law firms typically used; and April 20, 2009: lower average hourly rates.).

A previous post offers 13 techniques to improve your performance if you moderate a panel (See my post of May 22, 2009: moderator methodology.). As I kept thinking about the topic, images popped into my head of moderator headaches. So, here are some bad situations to try to avoid.

Imbalance of rank on the panel. The lower-ranking people tend to remain quite. The best solution is to speak beforehand to the high-ranking person and ask easy questions of the lower-ranking members.

Too many panelists. The best way to cure this is to avoid it, but if you have 45 minutes and five people on the panel, designate a single point each speaker should make, impress on them the limited time they have, and if you have to, embarrass yourself and the speaker by interrupting.

Rather than ask lawyers and paralegals to crank out deadly-dull postmortems, suggest that they write “human stories that people can connect with.” This idea comes from the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, May 2009 at 23 and the experience of the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation (IFC). If you learned something from a contract negotiation, for example, write a little vignette rather than a bloodless clinical dissection.

Three other tips from the briefing are to (1) encourage honesty in the tale, (2) highlight contributors (“which include outside interests, to help readers connect with contributors and their ideas”), and (3) publicize the learning stories. The IFC has 3,225 employees who, during an average month, view the lessons learned expressed in stories 1,800 times.

The fourth suggestion really caught my eye. “Readers can rate each posting by how interesting it is (not its technical perfection). Additionally, the stories are rated by a panel of judges, who award $1,500 twice a year to the top-ranked post; the next-ranked gets $500.”

HSBC Holdings, the huge, global bank, has something like 650 in-house lawyers (See my post of March 17, 2006: HSBC’s decentralized reporting.). In addition to its other management initiatives chronicled on this blog (See my post of April 13, 2008: offshore legal support center; July 27, 2008 #3: 50 secondees taken on for free; and April 2, 2009: strap-line, panels and two other points.), the bank’s legal team has put in place a “knowledge-sharing venture SmartSearch.”

Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, May 2009 at 66, explains that the program “allows its in-house legal team to access know-how and precedents at firms on its approved list of outside providers.” Allowing preferred clients access to work product, showing value delivered beyond the services provided, and honing knowledge capital to a discloseable level of quality, certainly both distinguishes a law firm and benefits a law department (See my post of March 9, 2007: direct access to knowledge base of law firms; and May 17, 2006: Schering-Plough expected its central firms to share work product.).

My brother earned his PhD from Harvard Business School, where his professors often emphasized that business research could be “true, useful, or generalizeable,” but rarely all three at once. I feel the same about my blog posts and much that is bruited about regarding law department management. Some examples:

It is true that legal departments have conference rooms, but that is not useful knowledge for managers.

It is useful to know that class action lawsuits have been declining in frequency, but that fact is not generalizeable to your specific law department.

For inside counsel, nothing is certain but death, taxes and retirement – and general counsel certainly know that many of their lawyers will retire from the department some day (See my post of Dec. 19, 2005: “contented” attorneys in-house face the specter of retirement; Sept. 4, 2005: demographic forces; and April 9, 2006: hairline of law departments receding.).

What general counsel do to preserve the experience and knowledge of those who take the gold watch is usually woeful (See my post of March 16, 2006: little preservation of knowledge possessed by those soon to retire; June 12, 2005: how to minimize losses from retirements; and Feb. 25, 2007: knowledge preservation through video recordings.). Especially with subject matter experts, the brain drain can be very disruptive (See my post of Oct. 22, 2008: SMEs with 7 references.).

A sidebar in talent mgt., April 2009 at 40, mentions a few maneuvers that may stem losses of knowledge from retirements. Procter & Gamble allows certain retirees to work on temporary assignments (See my post of Oct. 8, 2007: IBM’s extensive use of retired patent counsel; and Sept. 17, 2005: retired general counsel retained as legal consultants.). Other companies used phased retirements that allow employees to scale down their hours rather than retire completely. For other companies, pre-retirement apprenticeships help pass on learning. Monsanto pairs highly-valued employees with successors; other companies pass on knowledge through action learning “in which people work on a real or simulated problem, and the expert acts as a resource and critiques the outcomes.”

A recent article describes six “search technologies,” each of which can help a law department’s members find useful material stored on drives, intranets, or databases. The ABA J., Vol. 95, April 2009 at 43, focuses on litigation support rather than knowledge management, but it discusses these ways to search through text and summarizes them in a sidebar (See my post of Feb. 23, 2006: four patents for search methodologies; Dec. 10, 2005: implicit search software; June 30, 2006: new search tools; and July 21, 2005: software that helps collect knowledge.).

Boolean search, using terms along with connecting words like “and” and “or” (See my post of March 5, 2005: Google Desktop Search.).

Fuzzy search, that extends the Boolean search beyond the exact term entered, such as “general counsels” if someone enters “general counsel” (See my post of March 23, 2006: knowledge management software and fuzzy logic.).

This post is part of a series sponsored by Martindale-Hubbell Connected. Please see tomorrow’s post on Sean Doherty’s blog, and all the subsequent posts in the series.

A couple of recommendations I would make for lawyers who are new to online professional networks are to concentrate on one or two networks and to comment on blogs by email.

As to concentrating, you will find that you can sign up for any number of professional networks and spend more time than is productive keeping track of all their emails, requests for connection, discussion forums, announcements, and other spin-offs. Much better to pick one or two networks and get to know them and their members. If you become familiar with a network, you might form a discussion group and keep it going. Once you know a network, you can get much more out of it than if you flit from network to network and never really get a handle on any of them (Sept. 22, 2008: professional online networks for lawyers, with 7 references.).