Articles Posted in Productivity

Listening to John Lennon, my mind took a perverse turn and wondered what if general counsel in the US suddenly, all over, transformed themselves into wonderful managers.

Fewer in-house counsel, I imagined, because they would be much more productive, insightful, and attuned to their clients’ needs. On the other hand, with such talent and output, companies might crave more lawyers, not fewer.

Lower total legal spending as a percentage of revenue (TLS/Rev), I imagined, because the enlightened legal departments would avoid legal risk, resolve disputes efficiently, and squeeze more beneficial services at a high level from their budgets. On the other hand, finely-tuned experts might spot more issues and pursue more forms of legal services, so spending would rise.

Cisco “recently completed a takeover in eight days (as opposed to the usual weeks or months) by putting lawyers in telepresence rooms instead of on aeroplanes.” Telepresence rooms, the Economist, Aug. 25, 2007 at 57, explains, enable attendees to feel hugely closer to attendees in the distant room than does old-school teleconference equipment.

I paraphrase from the article: People in telepresence meetings appear life-sized, and the tables and rooms at the two ends blend seamlessly because furniture and wallpaper are often identical. You feel like you are in the same room and can make direct eye contact with the other attendees, a feature which requires multiple cameras and enormous computing power. Delays in sight and sound are so short that the human brain does not notice them, so people can interrupt each other as if they were sitting across the table. When people speak, the sound comes from their direction. Yet, with all this immense sophistication, telepresences are simpler to get started than notoriously fickle and multi-step teleconferences.

Naturally, the rooms cost a pretty penny – more like several hundred thousands of dollars a room. Still, the article appeared a year ago and prices have probably dropped. Lawyers in-house will be able to benefit from this step-jump in communications technology.

A commonly discussed method to reduce costs and increase quality is to collect finished work product from law firms and make it available internally and externally. That effort sounds solid, well worth doing, but in fact usually languishes (See my post of Aug. 22, 2006: futility of collecting work product from outside counsel; Dec. 19, 2006: don’t expect a return on investment if you save law-firm work product; Aug. 16, 2006: conflicts of interest when sharing work product among firms; May 17, 2006: sharing work product among Schering-Plough’s primary firms; March 15, 2006: irregular quality of work product from large, international firms; and July 7, 2008: easy to underestimate the effort that went into delivered work product.).

Work product generated either internally or externally comprises much of what is thought of as knowledge management material (See my post of March 23, 2006: concept search software applied to department’s work product; and Feb. 6, 2008: Google offering that culls work product.). Quality control presents one challenge to doing this (See my post of Nov. 20, 2007: collective, anonymous grading of internal work product.).

Work product is sometimes collected and made available through a document management system (See my post of Dec. 6, 2007: document management with 15 references.)

Delegate! Everyone hears that exhortation; most in-house lawyers find delegation hard to do well. The reputed advantages of delegation are self-evident (See my post of Nov. 7, 2007: delegation alleviates stress; Nov. 6, 2006: delegation increases efficiency; and Dec. 3, 2007: an advantage of larger law departments.) but translation of theory into practice falls short (See my post of Aug. 2, 2006: challenges of delegation; May 23, 2008 #4: information theory and loss of information through delegation; and March 9, 2007: why attorneys are reluctant to pass down work.).

Also hard to do is to pin down which entries on this blog pertain specifically to the notion of delegation within a legal team (See my post of Aug. 26, 2006: a definition of “delegation”; and May 16, 2007: delegable tasks.).

The most closely related posts refer to the assignment of tasks to another, more junior person within the legal department (See my post of April 17, 2007: delegating contracts work; Oct. 20, 2005: delegating budget responsibility; Aug. 26, 2005: measuring delegation to paralegals; March 25, 2005: delegating to interns; Sept. 5, 2007: shifting work to administrative assistants; and May 16, 2007: long-term cost reductions through extensive delegation.).

Every company receives subpoenas for information, often because of a law suit between parties unrelated to the company one of which wants documents. Commonly, also, there are employment-related subpoenas. Large companies can be subpoenaed other than regarding employees several times a month. Employment subpoenas for large companies can reach 20 per month.

In terms of law department management, someone, and often someone in the law department, must find the right documents and the right custodian (See my post of Aug. 26, 2008: responsibility for the corporate data map.). Every subpoena typically has lawyer review and has a paralegal who attends to much of the administrative tracking and processing (See my post of Oct. 1, 2006: integration of matter management system and corporate service-of-process system.).

There also might be hold orders set in place for every subpoena. The hold order means the custodian may not delete any of the requested documents (See my post of Feb. 6, 2007: PSS Systems for litigation hold management; March 19, 2006: nuts and bolts of hold requests; April 27, 2008: initiative at Kraft Foods Global ; post of Feb. 5, 2007: Atlas ERM and data on document retention and destruction; Oct. 23, 2005: who is ultimately responsible for discovery; and Sept. 21, 2005: many iterations of legal documents.).

A legal department that encourages its members to provide pro bono services undoubtedly can find an infinite number of outlets. Perhaps a general counsel needs to set out some guidelines; perhaps it is more in the spirit of public service to let people decide how they will help others. In any event, some guidelines are usually needed as to what is a recognized pro bono activity.

A piece in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, Aug. 2008 at 45, explains that the legal department of Boehringer Ingelheim is currently “re-interpreting the scope of pro bono to include other legal/regulatory-related matters, including providing advice on records retention issues, regulation involving the handling of hazardous wastes in school chemistry labs, serving as moot court judges and participating in civics classes.”

How widely should a general counsel define “pro bono”?

A fundamental step for companies that want to be prepared for discovery of electronic documents is to prepare what is known as a data map (See my post of April 13, 2008: law department customized data mapping software.). As explained in an article in Inside Counsel, Aug. 2008 at 44, “data maps should capture what type of data lives where” in a company.

More to the point of this blog, the author puts the burden of maintaining the data map squarely on the law department. “It is the job of the legal department to keep the data map up to date, along with support from IT and records management.” No discussion, and I wonder why the lawyers must take the lead on this function that serves at least two other groups (See my post of July 19, 2007: GC’s role too expansive.).

The article also mentions two choices of enterprise search technology that can help create and maintain data maps. Software offered by Autonomy ZANTAZ and Kazeon Systems Inc. “can help in-house counsel automatically understand the content of data stored in various repositories throughout a company’s network.”

Lost in debates about chargeable hours and productivity of in-house counsel is the human truth sometimes they look up from their in-box. The American, July/Aug. 2008 at 29, pulls together data from America Online and Salary.com regarding how American workers fill their time when they are not doing what they are paid to do, personal time which ranges from 1.6 to more than two hours a day. During those periods of, shall we say, challenged productivity, several pursuits fill the time:

Surfing Internet (personal use) 44.7%

Socializing with co-workers 23.4%

For managers of corporate legal functions, a sweet spot lies between what their group handles that is routine work and what is rare work. With routine work, which appears with regularity, it is possible to train and delegate and systematize. It is also possible to have law firms to do much of it, albeit lower-cost firms that work on fixed fees, and thereby keep more interesting work inside (See my post of Nov. 5, 2005: reverse pyramid; and Oct. 18, 2005: mix of rocket science and quotidian work.).

As to rare work — legal issues a law department’s lawyers encounter infrequently – managers can’t develop and maintain the requisite skill levels. You can’t keep leading-edge acquisitions lawyers in the department, for example, if the company only buys other companies once a year. It is not just a matter of intelligence; it is a matter of sufficient volume to keep legal skills sharp (See my post of June 6, 2008: standardized, routine, and commodity services.).

Most general counsel reject my routine-work solution of retaining a law firm. They favor legal staff chugging away on the daily fare.

In early 2007, 84 general counsel of “leading multinational companies,” largely companies with headquarters in Northern Europe or the UK and Ireland, ranked the legal risks they encounter in terms of frequency (See my posts of Nov. 5, 2005: legal risk with 7 references; and March 23, 2008: risk management with 18 references.)

The survey findings are in PLCLaw Dept. Quart., Vol. 3, April-June 2007, at 27.

Here are their top six risks in declining order of mentions as “most frequent”: