Articles Posted in Productivity

A gerontologist quoted in the NY Times, Aug. 3, 2008 at BU 10, remarks that “By the time you are in your 50s and 60s, you need 30 percent more light to see clearly than when you were younger, so get a desk lamp or a floor lamp.” Aging in-house counsel probably see the necessity of this advice and act on it, possibly without explicitly recognizing the diminishment they experience in their visual acuity without adequate illumination.

A general counsel, especially a young one with bright eyes, should accommodate the declines that come with age and invest in lighting supplements older lawyers may need. One step in this direction is to provide large monitors and software that increases the font size on the screen. The article mentions MAGic and ZoomText that make documents much easier to read.

A pejorative air hangs around the term “plateaued,” as in “Sometimes veteran lawyers plateau.” The term leaves the unsavory impression that those lawyers no longer have any fire in the belly to be promoted or to take on new responsibilities.

Some lawyers reach their cognitive limits or their energy constraints or blockage in their willingness to change. None of that is bad so long as they have ample work to do, commensurate with their compensation, and can do it competently. Much legal work is not brain surgery (See my post of Oct. 18, 2005: much work doesn’t need a rocket scientist.).

Steady, good performers may not be peak performers, but they are a blessing, not a cursed plateau (See my posts of March 16, 2006: A-players; Sept. 10, 2005: B-players; Dec. 23, 2005: racehorses only are not good for a law department; and July 28, 2008: not every in-house lawyer years to be a general counsel.).

Dark matter accounts for the bulk of the universe, we can’t see it, don’t understand it and it pushes the universe to expand faster and faster. So too with e-discovery.

These days, the ether is filled with almost hysterical talk about the costs of e-discovery (See my posts of Aug. 5, 2005: “70-80 percent of litigation spending goes to discovery”; Aug. 24, 2005: spending controls crash into electronic discovery costs; Oct. 1, 2005: e-liminating e-discovery expenses; April 12, 2006: calculating Total Cost of Electronic Discovery; and Jan. 6, 2006: urban legend on costs for on e-mail discovery.).

Hundreds of vendors have poured into the space (See my posts of March 4, 2007: e-discovery consolidation: Merrill buys LextraNet; May 13, 2007: RR Donnelley gets involved; June 18, 2007: document review: the next e-discovery; Oct. 21, 2005: Attenex’s proportionality framework for e-discovery; and Oct. 29, 2007: electronic-evidence data-discovery vendors.).

GRC 360˚, Fall 2007 at 6, has a sidebar that briefly lists ten of the many processes its publishers maintain are involved in governance, risk and compliance (GRC). One of the ten is “Legal.” All that the sidebar says is that “Processes typically executed by the general counsel and legal staff such as defining legal strategy, investigations, litigation and assisting with due diligence for mergers and acquisitions.” With examples that broad, everything done by a law department is a process (See my post of April 9, 2008: all aspects of law department management fall under people or processes.).

But I consider “defining legal strategy” as something higher, more unusual, and different. “Processes” are steps of a repeated series of actions that lead to an anticipated outcome (See my posts of April 27, 2006 and June 28, 2006.). “Defining legal strategy” has too many elements, too many vagaries to be called a process. It is creativity and thought, not assembly-line predictability according to a cookbook.

Processes are important in law departments and I have devoted many posts to the concept and to examples. I have collected the germane posts twice (See my posts of Oct. 8, 2006 – 4 posts; and Feb. 6, 2007 – 17 posts.). Since then I have returned to processes five more times (See my posts of Feb. 24, 2008 and June 10, 2008: RFP processes Oct. 31, 2007: competitive bidding processes; Jan. 13, 2008: procurement processes; May 18, 2008: law departments rarely benchmark processes.).

An article in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 85, July-Aug. 2008 at 60, distinguishes between execution-as-efficiency and execution-as-learning. If law department managers lock into the first set of beliefs –efficient, timely, consistent delivery of legal services, they run the risk that people won’t bring to their attention critical information, won’t take time to learn, and won’t collaborate well.

A law department that embraces execution-as-learning makes it psychologically safe for members to explore and try new practices. Beyond that, managers need to use the best available knowledge – which is NOT a frozen best practice – and encourage lawyers and non-lawyers to collaborate by giving them ample information. Third, they need to gather information and data about processes to learn how the work actually happens. Finally, they need to study this data to find ways to improve execution (See my post of Aug. 22, 2006: the power of kaizen.). If general counsel take these steps, the execution-as-learning will lead to steady improvement.

When lawyers walk down the halls talking on a BlueTooth headset, the scene is surreal. Concerned always about confidentiality and attorney-client privilege, here is a lawyer blabbing for all the world to hear. Yet, the scene is not uncommon. It gives new meaning to “communication in the department” (See my post of Dec. 7, 2005: communication time wasters; March 23, 2007: communication frequency declines with distance; Oct. 19, 2005: communication tools; Nov. 30, 2005: everyone clamors for more communication.).

Jabbering in the air about a legal matter may mean that attorney-client privilege goes by the boards. The talk-in-public lawyer may think he is conveying how important and busy he is, but remember the World War II slogan, “Loose lips sink ships.”

We may see signs in legal departments that show a cell phone (mobile for the European readers) in a circle with a red diagonal slash through it.

When we use the term “productivity,” we should not mean in-house lawyers just churning out lots of work, but rather lawyers completing lots of important legal work. A good lawyer picks out the services that help the client the most. A competency of a good lawyer is the ability to identify and focus on priorities.

The topic of priorities has come up numerous times on this blog (See my posts of Dec. 22, 2006: prioritizing legal risks; Aug. 28, 2006: paired comparisons to analyze priorities; March 27, 2005: set priorities on management issues; March 10, 2005: Johns Manville’s priority grid; June 16, 2007: identify strategic priorities; and June 25, 2007 on status reports to clients as an aid to setting priorities.).

Core competencies focus on priorities (See my post of Oct. 6, 2006; and May 23, 2008: 12 references cited.). The broadest statement of the importance of recognizing priorities is that the skill is integral to thinking: to think is to decide and to decide is to set a priority.

“Surveys indicate that lawyers who work 60 hours can probably bill 40 hours to client matters …” That assertion in the NYSBA Journal, June 2008 at 45, got me to thinking along two lines.

One direction was that outside counsel, who might take four weeks of vacation a year, will be hard-pressed to break the 2,000 billable hour mark. To do so they would need to work approximately 2,880 hours to be able to bill 2,000, which means 10 hour days including Saturday all year. No wonder law departments are suspicious of such feats (See my post of Oct. 20, 2005: ask for total hours billed by your key outside lawyers.).

The second direction concerns the legitimacy of assuming in-house counsel work approximately 1,850 chargeable hours (See my post of Sept. 25, 2005: a reasonable assumption?). I don’t know whether the work-60-to-charge-40 rule of thumb holds, but corporate counsel have their share of activities that shouldn’t be charged for the benefit of a client (See my post of May 16, 2006: definition of in-house chargeable hours.). Also, in my consulting experience, it is rare for in-house lawyers to come to the office on weekends. They may check e-mail, do some reading, and organize material, but I think there is nothing like the long hours often logged on weekends by lawyers in private practice.

The source of this data is a survey by Robert Half Legal, referred to in the ACC Docket, Vol. 30, June 2008 at 52. The data comes from a “survey of 150 lawyers from among the largest corporations in the United States and Canada” (See my post of June 22, 2008: critique of the data source

The respondents were asked, “When working with colleagues who telecommute or are located in remote locations, which of the following, in your opinion, is the most effective method for maintaining communication?”

E-mail 62%

In his book, Theodore Levitt, Thinking about Management (Free Press 1991) at 64, Levitt writes dramatically that “routinization of anything is self-immolating. It deadens alertness, attentiveness, imagination, energy, and reaction time.” Other than that, I guess, routines are fine. A page later Levitt recommends “periodic euthanasia of the organization’s accustomed routines.” How would Levitt’s diatribe translate to law departments? To start our ruminations, I offer some definitions of three common terms: routine work, standardized work, and commodity work.

Routine work accounts for much of what lawyers in corporations do (See my posts of June 14, 2007: more than 50 percent; and Jan. 25, 2007: think again about commodity work; and Dec. 5, 2005: topsy-turvy pyramid of work.). It is “run-the-business” work. Routine legal work occurs frequently, although it may be quite challenging to lawyers who are not familiar with it. Those who manage lawyers in corporations like routine work because it’s easier to delegate and simplify, and sometime even export it to clients (See my post of May 18, 2008: self-serve and references cited.).

Standardized work is routine work that has been packaged, made uniform (See my post of April 17, 2007: debunks standardization of legal work.). The work can be sophisticated, such as ISDA agreements, but the path has been well trodden, well marked, and well mapped. A summary of an Evershed’s study, published in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, May 2008 at 62, notes that “premium services become increasingly standardized and then commoditized as they become common.” In their view standardization precedes commoditization.