Articles Posted in Productivity

Some help has arrived for in-house lawyers who are diverted too easily by RSS feeds, instant messages, e-mail, social networks, Twitter, or Google alerts. The Economist, June 12, 2010 at 12, describes more than a dozen software add-ons, packages, or apps that screen out the distractions that plague some users. It devotes most of the article to one particular program, Freedom, which can allow you to work in peace. Other programs also disable shiny, seductive time-wasters.

Even if you want to use one of these programs, will IT allow you to load it on your corporate laptop? And, isn’t it ironic that we need software to save us from software?

I decided to collect posts that say something substantive about RSS feeds, of which this blog has about 830 feed subscribers according to Feedburner (See my post of Sept. 22, 2005: Really Simple Syndication; Dec. 10, 2005: RSS feeds; March 1, 2009: aggregators and RSS feeds; March 9, 2009: rankings of this blog; July 15, 2009: MyCorporateResource.com; July 19, 2009: Feedburner statistics with 7 references; Nov. 16, 2009: RSS feeds to this blog; Dec. 21, 2009: Wikio and its rankings; and Feb. 22, 2010; material for my newsletter.).

The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) at the University of Denver surveyed law departments regarding litigation.

What stunned me about the 485 valid responses to the survey was that “112 respondents (almost one-quarter) indicated that their company had ‘less than 5’ state or federal civil cases in the last five years – less than one per year, on average.”

Is that not astounding? The frenzy over litigiousness, patent trolls, class actions, third-party funding of cases, e-discovery costs, and the general burden of litigation runs rampant. At the same time, in a broad-based survey, one out of four US legal departments rarely saw a single lawsuit from one year to the next!

Much of me wants to encourage general counsel to try out something new, something that requires training and oversight, change, some amount of effort – and every operational adjustment does. But law departments can get encrusted, overloaded, cluttered, burdened with management initiatives (See my post of May 30, 2005: Shell Malaysia and law-department initiative overload; April 15, 2006: how many initiatives a department can absorb; April 1, 2007: sunset some management requirements — five fingered; and Feb. 26, 2008: stop doing wasteful management practices.).

General counsel should ponder several techniques that attempt to constrain governments from piling on legislative requirements: (1) permit new spending only if there are corresponding new taxes; (2) include sunset provisions in enabling legislation; (3) reduce labor imposed such as with paperwork reduction acts; and (4) calculate, publish and be mindful of compliance times. Analogous disciplines in legal groups guard against the unthinking piling on of obligations. If your legal department has sufficient management initiatives now, then before you add one think about whether to subtract one (See my post of Aug. 4, 2005: the ROI of initiatives; Sept. 10, 2005: an index of management initiatives; May 31, 2006: the sigmoid curve of initiatives; March 6, 2007: an initiative pyramid as a way to think about operational improvements; April 23, 2007: a four-level spectrum; May 26, 2007: a topological map of in-house initiatives; Dec. 11, 2008: appoint someone to be in charge of an initiative; March 11, 2009: depict initiatives on two axes; Jan. 7, 2010:”one initiative for every other direct report”; and Jan. 28, 2010: 16 initiatives to save costs on external counsel ranked by effectiveness.).

Your next breakthrough idea may already be sitting out there, somewhere in your legal department. This is the principal of innovation through positive deviance.

A positive deviance happens when someone breaks the fetters of tradition or proscribed ways of working, tries something unorthodox, and succeeds. The trick is to spot those positive deviances from normal, understand why they flourished, and spread the improve practice throughout the department. This term and idea comes from talent mgt., May 2010 at 20-21 (See my post of Dec. 16, 2005: innovation with 7 references.).

Personal privacy advocates (and all lawyers who work in-house) will abhor this idea. I’m not an advocate either, but the idea has First Amendment rights.

According to the Economist, May 15, 2010 at 69, a company that provides remote workers – telecommuters by computer – has “developed tools that let employers check on work being done out of their sight.” The company, oDesk, includes software “that takes a screenshot of a worker’s desktop every hour, combining them to form a ‘work diary.’”

Images of stored screenshots conjured up the idea of a law department that randomly took them and searched them with software that identifies what client the work on the screen covered. Precision would not be necessary with enough random shots and plausible algorithms for determining the likely client group being served. Documents and email would be relatively easy to match to a specific client group; other screen shots would be ambiguous. With enough samples of screenshots and sophisticated recognition software, there would be no need for time-tracking by the attorneys.

An article in the Harvard Bus. Rev., May 2010 at 77, discusses practical steps to reduce overhead. Under the first category of incremental savings, what the authors call reductions of 10 percent, is to “reduce spending on department management.” The authors claim that “Most administrative departments (particularly those with more than 20 employees) use as much as 20% of their budgets to supervise and coordinate their own activities.”

Few general counsel would admit to such a high figure, but oversight of others exists in any legal department of 10 or more lawyers (20 or more total staff typically). To hack away at that overhead, the authors recommend that you look for tasks that haven’t changed much in a year and reduce supervision of those who complete them. “As a rule of thumb, you should be able to reduce the number of hours devoted to supervision by about 10% in each year that the department’s duties remain largely unchanged, as long as there has been little turnover.” Presumably the time freed up allows the supervisors to take on more useful tasks.

Having just touched on workloads and work-life balance (See my post of May 6, 2010: balancing two survey results.), let’s ponder a related finding. Again drawing on the massive survey of satisfaction by InsideCounsel, March 2010 at 51, consider that slightly less than half the respondents reported that on average they work 40-50 hours per week. In the next bracket higher, 36.7 percent reported that they average 51-60 hours per week.

How do you reconcile that on satisfaction with workload, one quarter were “somewhat dissatisfied” (19%) or “very dissatisfied” (5%), but many more than that (37%) say they toil more than 51 hours on average every week? That requires actual work – I assume not just being in the office – from 8AM until 6PM every day and a few hours at night, during the commute, or on weekends. This data on workload satisfaction and hours worked doesn’t mesh. Perhaps hours expand to fill the available survey?

Survey data from 348 in-house lawyers on two subjective states of mind, “work-life balance” and “workload,” left me with some questions. As released in InsideCounsel, March 2010 at 50, the lawyers gave these responses when asked “How satisfied are you with the following:” As to work-life balance 31.4 percent were “very satisfied” whereas with “workload” half that were “very satisfied” (16.3%). How can that be?

I take work-life balance to capture the feelings of employees about whether they can have a satisfying equilibrium of existence outside the office and inside the office (See my post of Aug. 21, 2008: work-life balance with 9 references.). If you find you have to get into the office early, turn off the desk light late, and still dig into a pile of emails and memos on the weekends, you are out of kilter. If you can go to the Little League games, hike all day Saturday with no workaholic guilt, and bake on Sunday without emails from clients, you are in a Karma-state.

If that is the desirable life-ledger and if a third of the survey responded that its perfectly fine, how can there be so many less satisfied with their workload (See my post of May 21, 2008: twin bogies of workload and time pressure; and May 21, 2007: interesting legal work and perceptions of workload.)? I may be forcing a round peg into a square hole, but it is possible that large numbers of in-house lawyers feel that they face a flood of work every day, but they can wade through, they can cope, and their weekends and evenings are theirs.

This is the thesis of Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else (Penguin Group 2008). I am convinced by Colvin and we should all feel both liberated and empowered. Liberated because expertise and skill is not so much bestowed as earned; empowered because even those of us with pedestrian abilities can conceivably race with the best.

The effort demands thoughtful, deliberate practice – often with a coach – for long hours over a long period of time. In-house lawyers can excel even if they did not make law review. They can excel by dint of studied application, especially focused on weak areas, kept at with commitment and self-reflection. Excellence for Horatio Alger, Esq..

This blog has worked hard to stress the potential of focused effort (See my post of June 12, 2005: ten years to become expert; July 15, 2005: how to increase “deep smarts”; Nov. 6, 2006: experts work hard to chunk knowledge, pursue ambitious goals, and study hard; Jan. 18, 2007: a decade of concentrated effort; and Dec. 15, 2009: takes at least 7-10 years of experience for someone to survive as a solo lawyer in a legal department.).

“Generally speaking, the number of people an organization needs to train in process improvement is the square root of the number of personnel.” That rule of thumb, from the Harv. Bus. Rev., April 2010 at 56, means that a law department with 75 people, perhaps 40 lawyers and 35 non-lawyers, would need 8.66 people to get training (the square root of 75) if it were to adequately tackle process streamlining. No legal department has anywhere near that number (or ratio).

Can any reader name a law department, other than the handful that have Six Sigma belts, with even a single person trained to untangle, analyze, and streamline processes?