Articles Posted in Productivity

A survey asked chief legal officers, half of them from departments of five lawyers or less, about seven types of software – plus “other” – that their law departments had implemented, “which has created significant cost/time efficiencies for your department.” Of the 848 respondents to the survey, ACC’s Seventh Annual Chief Legal Officer Survey at 5, approximately half completed the question.

They most commonly gave the nod to document management (44.6% selected it), contract management systems (37.7%), and matter management (25.3%). Three other genre of software were each selected 10-14 percent of the time (note that respondents could select more than one type of software): client-facing intranets, e-billing, and extranets with law firms.

The 14 percent who selected “other” listed document scanning (5 mentions), “content/knowledge management systems (4), IP management (3), and 10 other forms with on mention each: Blackberry, “departmental e-tracker and e-rooms,” document assembly, EFT payments, “electronic law encyclopedias,” electronic signatures (EchoSign), ethics programs, instant messaging, online mock juries, and web forms for internal client requests.”

Marketing material from Business Integrity distributed at the recent LegalTech Conference tells an impressive tale about how three law departments have worked with the company’s DealBuilder software to automate chunks of three contract processes.

For example, Rosemary Martin, global general counsel at Reuters, explains how her legal department deploys the software to help sales executives and contract negotiators “generate consistent and legally pre-approved sales agreements in seconds by updating a few business questions on a browser-based questionnaire.” The software produces PDF contracts in English, Spanish or Portuguese.

Microsoft has used DealBuilder to tame its monstrous demand for end-user licenses. The Legal and Corporate Affairs group now assembles licenses much more quickly and confidently. Furthermore “DealBuilder records and captures the business information enshrined in each document. The contract ‘metadata’ can then be analyzed and made available to other corporate systems.” Someone can search the library of license agreements, say, for all of them executed by companies based in France.

This blog has planted a long row of posts on processes (See my posts of April 27, 2006 which defines processes; May 1, 2006 about the breadth of the term; June 28, 2006 on their importance; and Aug. 13, 2006 on components of processes; Oct. 16, 2006 on processes in law departments generally; and Oct. 18, 2006 which compares processes to “tools.”). There is much more to say about processes in law departments.

Why are processes a useful construct for general counsel? Because once you identify and understand processes you can streamline them and teach people to step through them more adroitly (See my posts of Oct. 30, 2005 on guidelines for processes; and Aug. 28, 2005 on process maps.).

Every activity in a law department can be subsumed in one or more processes (See my post of). Processes are a fundamental unit of activity, while most of them can be aggregated with others into a larger process. At the most macro aggregation, everything a law department does could be lumped into one process: helping the company avoid legal problems. At the micro end there can be processes for issuing and tracking litigation holds (See my post of Feb. 5, 2007 on software that helps this process.).

Some corporate lawyers who write frequently should find voice recognition software to their liking (See my post of Aug. 26, 2005 on Dragon NaturallySpeaking.). I create the first draft of many of my posts by breathing fire into Nuance’s Dragon® Naturally Speaking® and have just upgraded to Version 9.0. The voice recognition software works quite accurately, especially when I dictate quotations. It is a product of Nuance Communications, based in Burlington, MA.

Another voice recognition vendor is Crescendo Systems. That program, built on the SpeechMagic™ technology of Philips, claims that it corrects or adapts to hesitations, non-speech and redundant phrases. In general, improvements in processing power of CPUs and improved software technology will keep honing the edge of this kind of software.

I have always thought that a PDF file bars the reader from copying or changing the content of the PDF document. I learned differently at the recent Legal Tech conference.

For example, ScanSoft PDF Converter Professional claims that it lets members of a law department convert PDF files into fully-formatted Word, Excel and WordPerfect documents. This capability is explained in a handout from Nuance Communications (Burlington, MA). So, to illustrate the benefit of PDF conversion, if a law department receives documents in PDF format from a law firm, it can convert those documents to its word processing format and use them.

Also at the recent LegalTech I ran across material from Bluebeam® PDF Revu by Bluebeam Software (Pasadena, CA). That software makes it easy to convert Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to any of 10 formats, including PDF, TIFF, JPEG, BMP, GIF, PSD, PNG, EMF, WMF and PCL (impressively technical, aren’t I!). Bluebeam® PDF Revu lets you insert, reorder, delete and extract PDF pages were combined or assemble several PDF files into one document. It also allows you to annotate and bookmark PDF documents as well as easily create hyperlinks.

The most recent LegalTech conference included several vendors who offer digital transcription services. What follows is not a technology review but my impression of how the software might help a law department.

In essence, a corporate lawyer can dictate into an inexpensive machine, which produces a standardized digital file. The file can be e-mailed anywhere in the world, transcribed, and e-mailed back. They allow a lawyer to dictate to a digital handheld recorder, to a laptop, or over the phone. At least one system sends an e-mail notification to the transcription person that a dictated file is ready, some even with priority designations. Moreover, some systems integrate with the document management system of the law department.

The vendors I ran across include bigHand, Verdatum, and Crescendo Systems.

In the Nat’l L.J., Vol. 29, Jan. 8, 2007 at 8, there is a profile of Matthew Fawcett, the general counsel of JDS Uniphase Corp. Fawcett describes how his time is distributed: “25% is devoted to management, 20% to corporate matters, 15% to intellectual property, 15% commercial concerns, another 15% to mergers and acquisitions and material deal issues, and 10% to ‘potpourri’.”

I presume that “management” has to do with running the law department, which comprises 30 lawyers and professionals in four countries. Maybe not, however. Most general counsel might describe a similar breakout, with some having less on intellectual property and others having a category for “participation as a member of executive management” and “board and senior executive advice” (See my post of Aug. 28, 2005 on the role and term “consiglieri.”). Possibly Fawcett includes this facet of a general counsel’s role in “management,” but then when does he lead and manage the law department?

All processes can produce data (See my posts of April 27, May 1, and Oct. 16, 2006 generally on law department processes.). Since processes happens repeatedly, someone can count input, elapsed time, participants, output or all of these. The contract review process comes to mind as an example. Any law department can quantify the number of contracts it handles, turnaround times, sources and kinds of contracts, time spent by lawyers and paralegals on the contracts and the varieties of work done on them, the dollar volume covered, number executed, issues arising, and many other quantifiable aspects. In fact, any process spawns an infinite amount of data.

Data, however, does not fully represent what happens during the process, because inherent in processes are many instances of lawyers drawing on tacit knowledge or experiential judgment. To stay with the contract review, it may be that the in-house lawyer has dealt with the other party before, or the combination of representations made in the agreement bodes ill. Data can’t do justice to the complexity of a legal process, but the data is always there. Where there’s the smoke of numbers there’s a smoldering process.

According to a piece in MIT’s Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 48, Winter 2007 at 11, if you perceive a product or service as a commodity you will stunt your creativity about it. In the author’s words, “the fatal lure of the commodity ideology is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.” The economics of “good enough” innovation become good enough and the potential for change and improvement is consciously or unconsciously undervalued.

Sip and fall lawsuits may be high-volume and low challenge; workers comp issues seem to most people to be administrative and barely legal; nothing much new arises in a sea of bankruptcy claim filings – all of these services are perceived as legal child’s play, commodity work, except by practitioners.

Simply because a certain legal service is frequently done and many lawyers are competent to perform it does not at all mean that someone can’t provide that service much more effectively nor devise a breakthrough service proposition. To label work as commodity work is conclusory, dismissive, and not conducive to thoughtful and creative management.

Researchers distinguish task conflict from relationship conflict, and the difference can be seen in law departments. According to MIT’s Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 48, Winter 2007 at 5, disagreements among law department members related to a specific task, such as what step to take next in an acquisition, are task conflicts. They need to be worked out, and almost always can be, or someone can make the decision.

But conflict among members of a law department that’s unrelated to the legal issue at hand – what’s referred to as a “relationship conflict,” proves to be harder to resolve and is universally found to be bad for a group’s performance. When members can’t agree to disagree, prospects for an effective working law department diminish sharply.