Articles Posted in Productivity

An interview in the New York Times, Sept. 27, 2009 at BU2, of Larry Kellner, CEO of Continental Airlines, has some of the usual CEO-talk that urges general counsel to do such things as hire good people, listen a lot, encourage quiet people to contribute, don’t slay the carrier of bad news, and give direct, immediate feedback.

I paid renewed attention to two of his time management practices. Kellner said that he ranks the three tasks he most needs to accomplish in a day and then works on them. Tough to do, for sure, but the gist of the idea can help over-taxed general counsel sort out the important from everything else.

Second, Kellner gives each of his direct reports “a budget of X number of days of my time.” He lets them schedule their time as his availability allows but not exceed the allotted hours (I wonder how many hours his general counsel got). Of course, the exigencies of business sometimes over-ride on such a discipline, but a general counsel might try these two techniques that allow him or her to focus on value-added responsibilities.

A recent study found “There was a 50/50 split between those [law departments] choosing to retain the volume-based work and those choosing to send out the volume work and retain the more complex work in-house,” reports Legal Strat. Rev., Summer 2009 at III.

Your typical in-house attorney wants good work that is interesting, but not work that scares them with its complexity, burns them out with boredom, or crushes them with enormity. Few people would look forward to constant challenge (See my post of post of Dec. 5, 2005: rocket science and of commodity work.). Nor do lawyers want the dispiriting chill of assembly-line work, over and over, without variety or respite.

The sweet spot of not too hot, not too cold work, at the right volume and level of professional interest, is the porridge sought (See my post of Aug. 21, 2008: sweet spot.). The Goldilocks happy medium is a hard bear to find.

Estimates have put the percentage of commodity work handled by legal departments as high as a third of all they do. Whatever the proportion, where general counsel identify blocks of relatively routine work, they can choose from a set of actions how best to handle the services.

1. Standardize processes and create aids, such as process maps, benchmarks, templates, and training tools.

2. Invest in software that streamlines the commodity work, such as document assembly, intranet guides, precedent banks, and macros.

The Economist, Sept. 12, 2009 at 84, explores the emergent field of investments in patent portfolios. Citing Coller Capital, Intellectual Ventures, and Fortress, as active purchasers of patents, the article foresees patent investments as entering the financial mainstream. Brokers such as iPotential and ICAP Ocean Tomo help investors value, acquire and monetize patents.

Ultimately, however, for investors to reap their returns they will have to negotiate licenses or litigate rights. In-house patent lawyers will bear the brunt of either course (See my post of March 27, 2009: more detail on patent investors; and April 9, 2009: AT&T sale of fallow patents.).

Along with third-party capital invested in intellectual property assets there has emerged the fledgling entrepreneurialism of third-party capital that invests in lawsuits (See my post of May 21, 2009: lawsuit financing by groups with 8 references.).

It had to happen. A post on the humble chair, where in-house attorneys often spend more time than with their loved ones (See my post of July 29, 2007: to goose meetings, do away with chairs; and Feb. 7, 2008: infrastructure includes chairs.). Donna Payne writes about chairs in LTN – Law Technology News, Vol. 16, Sept. 2009 at 38, and I realized my omission on this topic has been reprehensible. I took my old-fashioned seat and wrote this post.

Many lawyers may have to park themselves on company-issued seats. A few can invest in chairs like the handful of colorful and memorable “exercise chairs” described in Payne’s article. Others may favor a kneeling chair, which forces you to sit up straight and thereby reduces the stress on your back (See my post of April 23, 2006: ergonomics.). She closes her portion on chairs with massage chairs, but that may be a perquisite of general counsel only.

Each of these terms deserves lengthy treatment for the reason that they are crucial to the effective management of work in a law department. I think I ran across this list in material from the General Counsel Roundtable, but the exact provenance is now lost. Here I loosely define the terms and include a few posts that have addressed some of them.

Role clarity – who is responsible for what work and the practical delineation of those roles has so many manifestations on this blog that it defies collection.

Division of labor – each person should do what they are best at (See my post of April 27, 2006: economic notion of comparative advantage applied to lawyers.).

So much of what many in-house lawyers do has some connection to contracts that I quailed at the thought of wading through all my posts that pertain (See my post of May 16, 2006: misperception that all in-house lawyers do is review contracts; and June 24, 2007: 50-60% of work being low-value standard contracts.). True, an early foray had corralled some (See my post of May 5, 2006: contracts with 15 references.). Still, my procrastination had undoubtedly left piles of them, which discouraged me from the task. But on a long train ride I buckled down and located another batch of four dozen posts.

Several have to do with policy decisions (See my post of March 8, 2005: law departments handling contracts; June 7, 2006: legal approval of contracts; July 14, 2006: policy on who can sign contracts; Nov. 13, 2006: Aviva policy that contracts have to be passed to the legal team whenever they are signed; Dec. 2, 2008: seven guidelines for when the legal department ought to be involved in contracts; and April 8, 2009: wide differences in policies on contract review by legal functions.).

A group of posts here concern processes and tools applicable to contracts (See my post of June 19, 2006: streamlining aspects of contracts; Aug. 16, 2006: end-to-end study of contract handling; Jan. 17, 2007: improved turnaround time for contracts; April 17, 2007: delegating contract work; Dec. 13, 2007: style guides for contracts; May 24, 2009: term sheets for clients; Nov. 22, 2008: contract negotiation guides; and Aug. 13, 2009 #5: translate only key terms if you can’t read a contract in a language.).

A drawback of internal time tracking that asks lawyers to enter how many hours they worked on a matter is padding. Inevitably and inexorably, unless a client is charged for the time and therefore brings some market discipline to the exercise, lawyers are seduced into bulking up their hour totals. Feeling competitive, wanting to show their contribution, knowing busy lawyers are perceived as good lawyers in demand, everyone inflates their time.

If, however, you take a different approach and ask timekeepers to put down the percentage of their total time for a week they spent on a matter, then you normalize everyone’s time. The 60-hour a week lawyer looks the same as the 40-hour a week lawyer because they both record 30 percent of their time during the week on the matter they worked on the most.

Obviously, you lose the granularity of actual hours worked, but query whether that seemingly more specific data suffers too much from the risk of manipulation.

Tired from compiling e-mail tips (See my post of Aug. 26, 2009: 30 e-mail suggestions.), I staggered on and found some more. These come from the Harv. Bus. Rev., Sept. 2009 at 88.

1. “To eliminate the need for recipients to open very short messages, put the entire contents in the subject line, followed by ‘eom” (end of message).”

2. Send less e-mail. “An outgoing message generates, on average, roughly two responses.

A study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard a few years ago noted declines in IQ scores when knowledge workers were distracted by e-mail and phone calls. The decline, chronicled in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Sept. 2009 at 84, was an average of 10 points (See my post of July 14, 2005: cites this study in connection with Blackberries.).

In-house lawyers, bombarded by interruptions of these kinds and others, must be reduced sometimes to fragmented imbecility. People need uninterrupted time to tackle particularly demanding tasks. Nor can they ponder when pulled in several directions (See my post of July 7, 2005: multi-tasking lowers productivity; July 14, 2005: inefficiencies from e-mail interruptions; May 14, 2006: multi-tasking ability highly ranked by Canadian in-house counsel; June 5, 2006: the stress e-mail causes; June 7, 2006: attention density; Oct. 2, 2006: multi-tasking’s drawbacks; Feb. 20, 2008: multitasking drags down productivity; March 30, 2008: distracting use of laptops during meetings; and Nov. 6, 2006: email with 6 references.).

Not just less intelligent, interruptions from email make us slower. Another study cited in the article, this one done by Microsoft researchers, found that when co-workers were “interrupted by an e-mail notification, people took, on average, 24 minutes to return to their suspended task.” Not that they spent all the time on the incoming email, but they got distracted by other mail, other diversions, and other hurdles to getting back to what they had been doing.