Articles Posted in Productivity

Philistine that I am, this blog has slighted the importance to the effective operation of a law department of art. This chromatically challenged host has noticed that there is artistic color in the world (See my posts of Dec. 9, 2005 on color-coded maps; Aug. 24, 2006 on dashboards that are splachboards; Jan. 3, 2007 with Venn diagrams.), but the decoration of law department hallways and rooms has passed me by.

As the Fin. Times, Dec. 11, 2007 at 16, went on about Clifford Chance, the London-based law firm, and its in-house exhibitions of art and its reliance on Frank Hindley Art Consultants as their advisor and the collections that rotate among three offices, I regretted my omission and resolved to correct the situation. Think strategically about the ethnographic implications of the paintings in your pantry. Conduct a SWOT analysis of your statuary in the reception and above all reframe and rehang the watercolors in the conference rooms.

Employee morale in a law department rises and falls on the quality of the mobiles by Calder, the posters of Van Gogh and Monet paintings, the objets d’art that subtly play off the colors of Six Sigma belts. It’s not just the logos of firms that stimulate our aesthetic senses (See my post of March 23, 2006 about those pigments of our imagination.) but also the performance art that opens our paralegals up to new perspectives. Thoughtfully gild your work spaces and your minds will expand. Ars longa, vita breva.

A hullabaloo has erupted this past year about general counsel who are not licensed to practice law in the state where they have an office. This blog has ignored that cause célébre. Even so, being a lawyer in New Jersey, it caught my eye when Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, Dec. 2007 at 47, explains that New Jersey in-house lawyers come in two flavors. Those with “plenary” licenses have passed the state’s bar exam and otherwise filled its requirements to be admitted to practice in that state.

The other flavor, those lawyers with “limited” licenses, are “for counsel who provide their legal services solely to their employers.” Employed lawyers presumably means corporate lawyers. For limited licensees, “basic competency and other factors of bar membership are governed by the home jurisdiction.” For those who manage law departments, it would be a good idea to understand the bar admission obligations – and limitations – of their department’s lawyers.

The article is fundamentally about whether in-house New Jersey lawyers should be held to the same standards of mandatory continuing legal education (MCLE) as external counsel in that state. New Jersey is considering whether it should require MCLE. Obviously, if lawyers of law departments are required to comply, costs will rise and productivity will fall, unless the CLE is highly specialized and pertinent (See my post of Jan. 20, 2006 on the wastefulness of most CLE courses for in-house lawyers; May. 24, 2007 for three other references; June 9, 2007 for other thoughts on the distribution of training; and June 30, 2007 for the evaporation of knowledge gained formally.). For more information on this topic, get in touch with Phil Crowley, a lawyer with Johnson & Johnson.

Andy Hull, a senior legal director for M&A at Yahoo! Inc., wrote a piece for the ACC Docket, Vol. 25, Dec. 2007 at 18, about the transition of lawyers from a law firm to a law department. “A big adjustment to moving in-house is the comparative level of administrative, back-end support.” Because a cost center is rarely funded as well as a revenue generator, “resources are typically more limited in-house.”

Secretarial pools, messengers, repro and telecommunications centers outsourced to experts, concierge services, overtime word processors, 24X7 paralegals, quiet book-lined libraries, these amenities are all things of the past for the lawyer who ventures inside. On the good side, however, there may be less call for that kind of administrative support because outside counsel are doing the things that demand it.

Sapient’s law department, headed by general counsel Jane Owens, has set up “an operations group in our India office that handles worldwide contracts administration.” Further, as described in Top of Mind, Vol. 6, at 2 (K&L Ι Gates), the company has a “deal administration team” in India that tracks contracting processes throughout the world and “measures quantitative and qualitative performance.” For its hat trick, the law department trains and certifies some clients so they can negotiate and sign contracts on their own (“self-service”) below a certain level of materiality.

An excellent group of methods to handle the legal needs common to many law departments: contracts (See my post of June 25, 2007 on metrics about contracts and how to handle them; April 17, 2007 about delegating contracts work; and Sept. 5, 2007 on contracts and complexity.).

A short item in the NY Times, Dec. 1, 2007 at C5, summarizes an article that offers four stress fighting tips (nice oxymoron:“stress fighting”).

(1) Take off your shoes and massage your feet. If you can, roll a tennis ball under each foot for two minutes. If you roll the ball on the inside rear part of your instep you will relax your lower back; if you rock the ball in the area near the big toe, your shoulders will unclench.

(2) “Don’t think in absolutes,” it says, because “if you are thinking in all-or-nothing terms, chances are you are blowing a problem all out of proportion.” If you think only win or lose in litigation, your stress level will soar. If you see the negotiation as a triumph or a disaster, watch out for hyperventilation!

A number of tips are discussed earlier on this blog (See my posts of Nov. 6, 2006 with three tips; June 16, 2006 and five tips; Dec. 28, 2006 with additional suggestions and comments; July 20, 2007 on Capital One and two tips; and Nov. 7, 2007 with five good practices.). But the hits just keep on rolling!

Law Technology News, July 2007 at 34, presents several good ideas from Tom Ranalli of Kirkland & Ellis.

1. Put your main point in the first paragraph, like a news journalist starts with the guts of the story.

I ruminated once about how law departments might grant hourly rate increases to law firm lawyers not simply because a year has passed but because the lawyers have gained some demonstrably increased ability (See my post of Nov. 13, 2006 on the rationale to grant requests for rate increases and discounts; and Nov. 21, 2005 on the need for law firms to show increased productivity.).

A law department might take the same approach for its own members. “Show me how you are better now than last year in meeting the needs of this department and company, and I will base your merit raise – if any – on that increase in productivity.” What would this do? My cynical answer is that it will push lawyers to manufacture ostensible improvements in their capacities (See my post of April 8, 2005 about dumb SMART goals and their distorting effect.). Managers who evaluate those supposed extra skills will be no better off.

Law departments shouldn’t reward lawyers for expanding their jobs or moving up the hierarchy (aka promotions), but for increasing their skills, adding to their expertise, and managing their groups more effectively. That aspiration is easier to say than to do.

A lawyer’s in box — what a quaint phrase — gets filled in a variety of different ways. But what exactly is the allocation of work by source? Not being burdened or confused by any empirical data on the sources of legal work for in-house counsel, I will proceed resolutely to propound before your very eyes the ultimate list, adorned with irrefutable, iron-clad percentages, and all in declining order.

The largest portion of many lawyers’ time is for work that they take on independently, because it has to be done and they recognize that, such as litigation or securities filings (31.6 % of all time worked by in-house lawyers).

In the age of ubiquitous telecommunications, email triggers substantial legal work; its cousins, like the Blackberry, are rising on the frequency charts. Together they account for a total of 25.4 percent of a typical 10th year attorney’s time.

Assemble three findings from a survey conducted in 2007 by Corporate Board Magazine and FTI and general counsel appear to have become amazingly more productive last year. Let me explain this striking conclusion.

More than 200 general counsel estimated in that survey whether they had spent less, equal or more time on certain areas of law in 2006 compared to in 2005. Of those general counsel, 55 percent claimed they spent more time on “compliance” in 2006 than in 2005; 48 percent spent more time on “enterprise risk management”; and 27 percent spent more on “crisis management” (See my posts of Nov. 10, 2007 on the compliance findings; Nov. 9, 2007 on the risk management findings; and Nov. 10, 2007 on those of crisis management.).

By my reckoning, days still had only 24 hours in 2006 and these categories are very broad, so on what areas did these hard-pressed top lawyers spend less time (See my post of Dec.16, 2005 on estimated allocations of general counsel time.)?

For at least three reasons, few lawyers in-house are bored. From what I observe as a consultant, work is more difficult, there is more of it, and it arrives faster.

Legal complexity has increased (See my posts of March 13, 2007 on legal complexity and references cited; and Sept. 5, 2007 on contracts and complexity.). Complexity means that the number and inter-connections of applicable laws, decisions, and practices that touch a given legal problem have swollen significantly. In turn, legal complexity often means that a team of in-house lawyers — and often outside lawyers — might be needed to deal with a Hydra-headed issue. Not only legal sophistication, but the non-legal ramifications like reputation and governance have, well, ramified.

Legal volume has picked up over time. More paperwork flows through law departments, more cases are filed, more clients clamor for legal advice, more learning deserves to be absorbed – all of these are indicators of an increased flow of legal work (See my post of Oct. 24, 2007 on the number of deals completed by Freddie Mac’s law department.).