Articles Posted in Productivity

Fast Co., Iss. 132, Feb. 2009 at 50, cites research on email volume that the “average worker receives 200 a day.” Regardless of your inflow, these six programs sound useful to some in-house lawyers.

The article praises ClearContext, a free Outlook add-on that scans your traffic and uses what it gleans to prioritize the incoming messages with color codes and other techniques. ActiveWords “lets you script common email answers.” That sounds like the ability to use a single key stroke to recall an oft-written message. Gist and Xobni roam around your contact information and, for example, showcase a phone number of someone you are writing. Gist searches news feeds and blogs for information about the person you are emailing.

The author of the article scoble@fastcompany.com recommends that you bypass email for some collaborative tasks. Instead use an online word-processing tool such as Google Docs or Adobe’s Buzzword.

Yale Law School’s Career Development Office posts online a guide for its law students who may be interested in working in a business setting, one of which is to practice in a law department. The high-level description of corporate practice is good, but one comment about obstacles to pro bono involvement rings false.

In a list of disadvantages to working in-house, the author puts down pro bono opportunities (See my post of Aug. 24, 2008: pro bono programs of law departments with 12 references.). “Finally, in-house positions offer fewer, and perhaps no, opportunities to provide pro bono legal services. Corporate charity is usually a marketing function involving executives and the economic and legal structure of a four-profit company do not lend themselves easily to pro bono work.”

The author is mistaken, I suspect. Corporations and their sensitivity to good corporate citizenship may in fact encourage more pro bono contributions per lawyer hour than do billable-hour hungry law firms.

As reported in the NY Times, Jan. 15, 2009, at B9, researchers “recently asked office workers to perform several common tasks using various monitor configurations. They found that people who used two 20-inch monitors were 44 percent more productive at certain text editing operations than people using a single 18-inch monitor.” These days, with flat-screen monitors dropping in price like the Dow and display sizes at 22 inches or larger quite common, the cost is trivial (less than $200) but the productivity gains from dual displays may be significant (See my post of Jan. 18, 2008: multiple monitors; Nov. 9, 2008: energy-consumption concerns; April 27, 2008: flat panels and energy; and Aug. 4, 2008: magnification of screens.).

Everyone is more productive if they can keep two documents fully visible, and cut and paste more easily. Or they can avoid the distraction of switching applications, such as from e-mail to word processing and back (See my post of April 23, 2006: ergonomics; and April 23, 2006: keyboard ergonomics.).

To grapple with “legal complexity” is not for the simple minded (See my post of May 15, 2005: complexity of legal services generally; and June 28, 2005: legal complexity.), so a small item intrigued me. Inventors, it said, require ever-increasing effort to absorb what is known and go beyond that prerequisite base of knowledge. The item, in the Atlantic, Vol. 302, Dec. 2008, at 21, says that the “burden of knowledge” means that “aspiring innovators are going to school longer, specializing more, and relying more heavily on collaboration.” Does a comparable weight fall on lawyers, burdened by the accumulating weight of all the decisions, scholarly articles, regulations, statutes, practice observations, and presentations?

Everyone assumes complexity in the practice of large-company law has increased (See my post of Dec. 6, 2007: ways in-house lawyers cope with complexity; and Nov. 24, 2007: pressures on in-house counsel include complexity.).

Posts on this blog have here and there considered complexity in various practice areas (See my post of Sept. 5, 2007: contracts and complexity; June 25, 2007: index of contract complexity; Nov. 22, 2007: complexity scale for litigation; March 13, 2007: measure litigation complexity; Aug. 27, 2005: litigation complexity; April 22, 2008: example of complex litigation; April 19, 2006 # 1: federal employment regulations; April 30, 2006: #1: tax complexity; Feb. 16, 2006: tax issue complexity; and Jan. 4, 2008: UK FSA rule book.). The difficulty of defining complexity in areas of law overlaps the difficulty in defining benchmarks for practitioners in areas of law.

I have predicted that lawyers inside and outside corporations will increasingly use brain-enhancing drugs to sharpen their mental faculties (See my post of June 22, 2008: neuroscience with 32 references.). Pills for performance is probably happening already, and drugs taken in the near future will make the mental rush of Red Bull feel like a calf.

A long step beyond pharmaceuticals, years to be sure, is gene doping. According to an eminent sports physician, Warren Strudwick, from an item about him in Stanford Bus., Vol. 77, Nov. 2008 at 9, competitive people will alter their genetic makeup to gain an edge. He “predicts that the manipulation of human chromosomes will be used not only by athletes to produce stronger bodies with specifically designed skills, but also by society at large,” which to me means that some lawyers will experiment with cerebral boosts through genetic engineering. Wealthy lawyers will be among the first adopters of mental mutation. I know, you think I am addled and certainly nowhere near taking IQ drugs of altering my chromosomal makeup.

Ziggurats were pyramidal structures of the Babylonians. Each level moving upward was indented by terraces but the basic appearance was triangular. Hershey Kisses, by contrast, have broad bases but their width shrinks dramatically and unevenly toward their pointy top.

Many people describe the distribution of work done in-house as, well, zigguratish, with a base of routine work and less and less of more and more sophisticated work as you move up (See my post of Sept. 13, 2006: commodity legal work; and Dec. 5, 2005: upend the pyramid.). At the top of the pyramid is the notorious bet-the-company lawsuit, M&A monster, or governmental investigation (Feb. 28, 2006: exaggeration of frequency of BTCL.).

A more accurate depiction of what law departments deal with, are the famous Kisses. As compared to the ziggurat, much more of the work is familiar, only occasionally requiring research or creativity, within the comfort zone of the lawyers. Shrinking rapidly in frequency, a few nettlesome issues arise that call for specialized experience from outside.

Here are six techniques that you should consider asking your mediator to incorporate. They come from Dispute Res. Mag., Vol. 14, Spring/Summer 2008, and are listed in declining order of value as determined by a survey of 109 participants in focus groups on mediation conducted in 2006-2007.

1. Suggest possible ways to resolve issues
2. Ask pointed questions that raise issues

The seven lawyers who work for Synnex, the $7 billion IT information provider, have one support person. Hence, in the words of Simon Leung, the general counsel, who spoke to 8-K, Vol. 4, Fall 2008 at 12, “Most of my [department’s] attorneys do all the work themselves – type their letters, copy their own documents. It’s a very flat, egalitarian organization.”

Two reactions. The first is that one lawyer for every billion dollars of revenue is an amazingly low ratio, especially in a legally intensive industry like technology. (The profile makes no mention of the amount Synnex pays outside counsel.) Second, that anorexic ratio of lawyers to revenue stands out even more if the few, harried lawyers have to send their own faxes and make their own travel arrangements. It sounds penny wise and pound-foolish.

A press release from Exari Group announces that Linde, Inc., a member of The Linde Group, has licensed Exari to automate North American sales contracts for three of its business units. Those units use approximately 20 different documents covering the different products and geographies and will use the document assembly software to handle them.

As the press release put it, “Using Exari will allow our sales people to be more responsive to our customers,” said Mark Weller, Linde’s North America General Counsel. “Once the legal department sets up the smart templates in Exari, sales people will be able to create their own contracts and close deals in less time either avoiding tying up our in-house legal resources or certainly using less of their time.” That quote puts very nicely several of the benefits to law departments of document assembly (See my post of Feb. 26, 2008: document assembly with 16 references.).