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The new top gun at Lockheed Martin’s legal department, Maryanne Lavan, put her sights on the general counsel position with a two-decade career that included significant stints outside the legal department. Among her posts she served as vice president of ethics and business conduct and – since 2007 – as vice president of internal audit. Corp. Counsel, Sept. 2010 at 39, provides this background information.

Many general counsel arrive from a law firm; a few held significant posts on the business side (Jeff Kindler at McDonalds or Jim Lipscomb at MetLife, for two examples). Lavan gives proof of the career-building steps that take a future general counsel out of the legal department for seasoning (Mary McDonald headed strategic planning at Merck before becoming the general counsel, as I recall). More executives know you and you know the company better.

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An article in the Admin. Sci. Quarterly, March 2000, at 81, explores age of companies and their pace of innovation. Its discussion bears on law departments, I believe. Apparently there are two schools of management thought. Organizational ecologists find the liability of newness, others find the liability of senescence.

What that dense sentence means in our context is that new law departments struggle just to survive so their tolerance for creative management steps is low on the dial. Or, unfettered by tradition and “this is how it’s always been done,” fresh departments (say, less than five years old) can take the path less travelled and that will make all the creative difference.

Established, older departments have the basics down pat, have some time and slack resources to breath, so to speak, and therefore can innovate. That is the argument that links maturity and innovation. Or, as some people believe, they become atrophied, rigid and conservative.

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Vendors see trends that might surprise the rest of us. In Met. Corp. Counsel, Sept. 2010 at 28, a software provider, WorkShare, promotes its applications that assure the integrity of documents – the original has not been altered – and that remove metadata from documents.

They then add a zinger. “Corporate legal teams are now implementing these technologies to cover the entire organization, and we are seeing a trend with other departments adopting the same comparison tools the corporate legal department is using in order to ensure their own document accuracy.”

Must have missed that trend of legal departments verging into IT departments.

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Here is a new role for a general counsel: Twitter reporter. I read in LinkedIn that “The FT’s [Financial Times] general counsel Tim Bratton will be providing live Twitter updates from next week’s Corporate Counsel Forum Europe.” The Financial Times sponsors the Forum so this unusual undertaking actually makes some sense.

If you want to follow Tim’s tweets over the two-day event yesterday and today, go to twitter.com/legalbrat or searchg for the #ccfe hashtag on Twitter (See my post of April 28, 2009: Twitter and 6 references; June 16, 2009: hits on this blog from Twitter; Nov. 10, 2009 #5: Safari readers from Twitter on iPhones; Nov. 16, 2009: lists on Twitter regarding legal tweets; Dec. 3, 2009 #3: penetration of Twitter among in-house lawyers; May 24, 2010: retweets from this blog; Aug. 3, 2010: more legal lists on Twitter and counts; and Sept. 6, 2010: speculation on retweet counts to show popularity of posts.).

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One panelist at the InsideCounsel SuperConference was the General Counsel of Johnson Controls, Jerry Okarma. His 55-lawyer legal department has a standardized on-boarding process for lawyers around the world. Otherwise, he said, there would be lots of different understandings. There is a schedule set for what newcomers should do and learn in the first three months, the first six months, and so forth. They have been using this process for the last year and a half and are continually improving it (See my post of Nov. 27, 2005: lawyers don’t coddle – sink or swim; April 27, 2006: on-boarding a new general counsel; Sept. 18, 2006: training program at Citigroup for new hires; May 28, 2007: Human Capital Theory espouses new-hire indoctrination; Jan. 4, 2008: socialization, another term for on-boarding; and April 6, 2008: new-lawyer orientation at GE.).

Okarma also showed his talent development chart. It has a row each for commercial contracts, corporate work, and antitrust. In the columns there were two numbered categories under each of basic, intermediate, and advanced. In other words, each lawyer for each of those three areas of law that were deemed core competencies is rated from one to six, the most advanced level of knowledge. The company also has a leader expectations model which is companywide and applies to the law department.

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An article several years ago laid out an organizing framework for knowledge in the form of a basic four-cell matrix. Visualize theory and practice as labels for the two rows and content and process as labels for the two columns. This useful table comes from Admin. Sci. Q., March 2003 at 95.

The authors place “organizational learning” at the intersection of theory and process, because that area of study combines theories about how organizations learn and the methods by which organizations encourage learning.

The authors place “learning organization” in the cell for practice and process, because the shift there is toward useful, non-theoretical advances (See my post of Dec. 19, 2005: think of law departments as learning organizations.).

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It would be an easy matter, technically, to log all calls made by a lawyer to a client within the company and all intra-company calls from clients to the lawyer. This recording would disregard all content, storing and aggregating only the people at either end and the duration of the calls. Since many lawyers spend much of their day on the phone, this unobtrusive tracking mechanism could substitute for some of the information laboriously (and often erroneously) secured from recording time (See my post of July 12, 2010: sloppiness in time tracking by outside counsel.).

I have already written about construction of a client-contact network (See my post of May 11, 2010: network metapost). If, then, in addition to modest tracking of phone traffic, client meetings were the subject of time recording, I believe there would be a quite full picture – and an accurate contemporaneous picture at that – of what an in-house lawyer does. Stated differently, three different techniques should substitute quite well for the onerous task of retroactive remembering.

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A trend may be a healthy movement to adopt something new, such as more para-professionals in legal departments, matter management software, benchmark metrics, or management by objectives. A trend simply says that increasing numbers of legal departments are adopting a practice, but not necessarily that it is a good practice (See my post of March 16, 2009: a best practice is not necessarily a trend; and Dec. 30, 2009: how hard it is to spot trends from matter management systems.).

Movements that I would label as trends include alternative fee arrangements, client self-service, co-location of lawyers in relation to revenue, competitive bids, compliance reporting to law, core competencies, environmental sensitivity, e-billing, knowledge management, matrix reporting (regional counsel), offshoring, panels, partnering, project management, social networking, and succession planning (See my post of Jan. 2, 2009: trends in management of law departments with 7 references.).

Fads, by contrast, emerge, surge, and then fade. Bill auditing by third parties would be one example as might convergence, document assembly, discovery counsel across cases, expert systems, internal discovery teams, mentoring, law department as profit center, online auctions, portals, Six Sigma and TQM.

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For all kinds of material on law department intranets, it would be good to accumulate comments and improvements by members of the department. An example of a tool that would make this easy is Google’s Sidewiki. With it you can “View other people’s perspectives on any webpage or contribute your own entries by clicking the Sidewiki button in the Google Toolbar. As you surf the Web, the Sidewiki button’s color lets you know whether Sidewiki entries are available for the page you’re viewing.” That description is from the Help file for Sidewiki.

“A yellow Sidewiki icon indicates that people have left Sidewiki comments for the page you’re viewing. To see these entries, click the button or the blue tab on the Sidewiki notification bar to open the Sidewiki sidebar.”

If such an easy-to-use, and easy-to-spot tool were available for in-house webpages, lawyers and others could quickly comment on or improve material posted for standard templates, checklists, outside counsel guidelines, process maps and other material.

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“Does your law department have a formal knowledge management system or practice?”

In answer to this poll on the Association of Corporate Counsel website as of the afternoon of July 25th, 7 people had answered “Yes” and 32 had answered “No.” htt Managers of law departments need metrics. That is my mantra and this poll does provide metrics. Having acknowledged the potential value of this poll, at the same time it seems to be riddled with problems.

What does the adjective “formal” add? I suppose it means that actions are described somewhere in some detail, people know about them, and the whole system has some official, departmental imprimatur.

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