Articles Posted in Productivity

The first suggestion is to read your e-mail no more than three to four times each day. Frequent interruptions to look at messages degrade your performance (See my post of Oct. 2, 2006 on multi-tasking’s drawbacks.). The second is to respond immediately to an e-mail if you can answer it within two minutes. Move other messages to appropriate folders and delete the messages that you don’t need to keep. This is a variation on the hard copy acronym of TRAF: trash it, respond to it, act on it, or file it.

The third suggestion, which along with the first two comes from Law Practice, Sept. 2006 at 49, is to clearly describe in the Subject line the contents of any message you send.

These are each productive ideas and can work in concert with ideas discussed previously (See my posts on e-mail of Oct. 22, 2005 and risk creation; July 14, 2005 and inefficient practices; Feb. 1, 2006 on listening to e-mails; June 16, 2006 on the economics of promiscuous messaging; June 21, 2006 on rules from one law department; and June 16, 2006 on suggestions for productivity.).

As law departments add staff, they lose the ability and agility to decide speedily. Bureaucracy in all its forms strangles initiative and decisiveness – more people have to be consulted as more levels of approval are necessary, endless meetings take place inside and outside the law department, more PowerPoint decks snowfall down, more memos and drafts, more teams and policies and e-mails.

Multiple reporting layers stifle alacrity and initiative; project groups – ever bulkier to address all interests –proliferate; bi-weekly scheduled teleconferences become the norm and the minutia expands to fill the hours; the arteries of managerial effectiveness clog.

Yet large law departments innovate more and probably develop more expertise! They do so despite bureaucracy’s heavy hand.

A number of posts have discussed quasi-legal work, which are tasks that law departments are able to do but ought to be done elsewhere in the company (See my posts of July 21, 2005 with definitions and Feb. 23, 2006 on how to snag these activities.). Law departments with a solid understanding of their role and how they can best contribute to their company should minimize quasi-legal work.

From a different slant, other posts have talked about various units in the company whose everyday work depends on knowledge of substantial amounts of law (See my post of Aug. 30, 2006 on wannabe lawyers in units such as Human Resources, R&D, Environmental Health & Safety, and Industrial Relations.). Call these groups whose competency in an area of law is crucial “legalistic units.”

The connection between legal units and quasi-legal work becomes clear. A company’s need for legal advice represents a see-saw. The more that is done within the law department, the higher the quotient of quasi-legal work. The more that is done in legalistic units, the less the law department need take on.

Picture a corporate lawyer as a huge sponge. As much legal water as the lawyer touches will be absorbed, until saturated (over-worked). The unexpressed outpouring of need for legal guidance in a company is infinite, and that’s not accounting for unrecognized legal needs.

If the lawyer-as-sponge metaphor holds true, well-managed law departments triage and focus their efforts to some degree under the Pareto principle (See my post of Sept. 4, 2005 on the 80/20 rule.) Work may expand to fill in-house counsels’ time, or the thirst of clients is unquenchable. During consulting interviews all corporate counsel bemoan their unmanageable workload.

They try to provide those legal services that are most important, while knowing sought-for needs let alone that latent needs go unmet. The levees on a rising river of need for legal counsel might at any time breach.

If in-house counsel are besieged by e-mail, instant messages, cell phones, and personal digital assistants, not to mention telephones, walk-ins, meetings, deliveries and radios, their ability to concentrate is severely compromised. It’s a dramatic drop-off, in fact, according to an expert on information technology and its use, Jakob Nielsen, in the Fin. Times, Aug. 23, 2006 at 5.

Nielsen has found that for knowledge workers “every time you are interrupted it takes five to 15 minutes to fully recapture your train of thought and get back to being completely immersed in your main task.” In a research study cited in the same article, volunteers carried out tasks, first in a quiet environment and then in one where they were subjected to a barrage of calls and e-mails. In the second scenario the volunteers’ effective IQs were reduced by 10 points (10% of a normal IQ).

Lawyers who work in-house need time and peace to concentrate; the ruptures of interruptions severely impair both.

Previously this blog adumbrated three components of a law-department management model (See my posts of June 14, 2006 on models, theories, and narrative descriptions.): processes, tools and productivity (See my posts of April 27, 2006 and June 28, 2006 on processes; Aug. 13, 2006 on the three elements; and Aug. 8, 2006 on productivity.).

To the three components discussed before, we should add volume, the amount and kind of legal work stirred up by the client corporation. We should also add resources, which broadly encompass the people in the department, outside counsel and vendors, the structure of the department, and its practices (See my posts of July 5, 2006 on the meaning of “practices”; and Oct. 10, 2006 compared to “policies.”).

These five elements interact in a system (See my posts of Aug. 28, 2005 on systems thinking and McKinsey’s 7S model; Sept. 22, 2005 on that discipline; and Feb. 16, 2006 on Booze Allen’s four-part organizational DNA.). Therefore, a law department consists of productivity, processes, tools, volume, and resources.

Dial Corp. has a multifaceted incentive program for its inventors. Inventors get “monetary awards” where there are “different pay grades at different stages of development,” according to Kate Huffman, intellectual property and patent counsel at Dial, in an article of InsideCounsel, Oct. 2006 at 30. This tantalizing but opaque statement means, perhaps, that inventors get different cash awards according to the level of the inventor and how far along the invention is toward commercialization.

Complementing the cash, Dial also gives inventors plaques, which are distributed at monthly meetings, and the top R&D executives personally recognize the contributors (See my post of Jan 27, 2006 about other forms of encouragement to inventors.).

Do Dial’s patent lawyers get “monetary awards,” wall eye-candy, and a handshake from on high when they cope with all the inventions these incentives encourage?

Members of a panel, pontificating about technology and law departments, waxed eloquent about software that upgrades “workflow.” To one of them software that improves workflow is a contender for the strongest trend in such technology. Examples were not given – why be granular when you can be grand?, nor was the term defined or differentiated from “productivity” (See my post of Aug. 8, 2006 with its dissection of productivity.).

The steps in a process might be the flow of work. The throughput of a law department might be its workflow. The quotidian labor of lawyers in-house might be called “workflow.” Fuzzy but fancy, that’s what’s wrong with that floozy term.

Deterred by the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, shaken by liabilities taken on by other Board members, members of Boards of Directors now require more stroking and educating. That care falls increasingly on the general counsel, who must above all others point the way to proper Board behavior. But that’s not all.

Companies may have a harder time attracting capable Board members, and the general counsel may play a role in recruitment and retention. Thus, on top of more education and training, where GCs are asked to answer questions in a murky area, they may have to venture outside their sphere of expertise, including evaluations of Boards (See my post of Oct. 1, 2006 on Board evaluation software.).

Not only do law departments have cause to worry about the funds contingency fee firms receive in massive settlements only to invest in further litigation (See my post of Aug. 24, 2005 on the dollars involved). They also can fret now about another litigation financing source: specialized hedge funds.

According to James Altucher, in the Fin. Times, July 18, 2006 at 7, several hedge funds lend to law firms, “with loans backed by cash flows from the firm as a whole, and from personal guarantees from attorneys.” The interest rates are lucrative and the hedge funds diversify their risk by lending to different law firms and collateralizing their loans by proceeds from various kinds of litigation recoveries. Law departments bear the brunt of that litigation liquidity.