For a survey this year, 780 Canadian corporate counsel considered nine skills, as listed below followed by the percentage of the respondents who selected each one. This comes from In-House Corporate Counsel Barometer 2006, Canadian Corp. Counsel Assoc. at 7:
“Effective leadership” (21)
“Business sector knowledge” (19)
Recently, 780 Canadian in-house attorneys ranked 11 choices as 1 (most important), 2 or 3. I list the choices below followed by the percentage of the respondents who ranked it as one of those three, from In-House Corporate Counsel Barometer 2006, Canadian Corp. Counsel Assoc. at 8:
“Establishing/maintaining a relationship with senior management” (48)
“Keeping an eye on developments in the law” (61)
Convergys, a provider of outsourced services, lives and breathes contracts. For that reason, in late 2003 its law department had not only 18 attorneys in its three locations but also eight contract administrators (See my post of Oct. 26, 2005 on FMC having twice as many contract managers as lawyers, and reporting outside the law department; and March 25, 2005 on two-tiers of professionals.).
The article in Legal Assistant Today, Nov./Dec. 2003 (by Debra Levy Martinelli) also notes that adds that the Convergys department has only one paralegal. The law department uses a software database to track each of their thousands of contracts and link that information to a scanned copy of the contract (See my posts of Jan. 4, 2006 and Oct. 20, 2005 on software for contract management and Jan. 6, 2006 on McDonald’s use of document assembly software for contracts.).
It would be interesting to know the differences in day-to-day work, compensation, training, and career paths of paralegals compared to contract administrators. Further, should such a group of contract professionals, who typically track renewal dates, payments, and compliance with contracts along with preparing first drafts and perhaps negotiating the simpler agreements, be part of the law department? I have opposed that idea (See my post of March 18, 2005.).
A piñata term sounds special and hangs there all fancy, attractive, and full of promise – but empty of nutritious or worthwhile content. Let’s whack at the ubiquitous “value-added,” as in “Our law department will incessantly focus on providing value-added services.”
“Value-added” is supposed to mean, ultimately, “The in-house lawyers are doing things that are more useful to the company at this time than anything else they might do.” Short of that tough standard, “value-added” means the lawyers are doing things that justify their pay, but this definition thins the gruel almost to water. The adjective phrase has overtones of output being worth more than input (fully-loaded cost per hour of the lawyer), which again seems insubstantial.
I just can’t split open and find much of substance in this piñata term value-added, swing at it as I will.
For many plaintiffs’ lawyers who sue companies on a contingency-fee basis, the litigation rewards them with Croesusian sums. One scholar has “estimated that contingent fees in tort cases are generating upwards of 22 billion dollars in annual income and are increasing at a substantial rate.” The law professor, Lester Brickman, in “The Market for Contingent Fee-Financed Tort Litigation: Is It Price Competitive?,” Cardozo L.R., Vol. 25 at 68 (2003) cites this awesome flood of funds, much of it flowing from corporate defendants. As canny law firms invest those billions in more lawsuits, and the many satellite activities that sustain such lawsuits, law departments will face more and better litigation (See my post of Aug. 24, 2005 on the flow of funds to law firms in securities cases.).
Brickman states one other jaw-dropping fact. “Over the past 40 years, the average effective hourly rate of the contingent fee bar has increased, in inflation-adjusted dollars, by 1000 percent to 1400 percent” (id. at 69). Lucre like that will draw in talent and encourage investments, all to the detriment of law departments.
We who care about the effective management of in-house legal functions bandy around the term “processes.” What is a law-department process?
A process is a series of related activities repeated to achieve an understood goal. Law departments consist of hundreds of substantive processes: review promotional material; analyze trademark clearance searches; decide whether a document is protected by a privilege; determine the completeness of coverage in a non-disclosure agreement, etc. Administrative processes are almost as numerous: review and approve invoices, enter data into the matter management system; interview candidates, etc.
A process can be described in a flow chart, a process map (See my post of Aug. 28, 2005 on process maps.). A process can be studied, as compared to a one-off, singular activity. A process can be standardized, streamlined, and quantified (See my post of Nov. 14, 2005 on Six Sigma.). A process can be assigned to one or more people, and resources linked to it. For instance, knowledge management fills the sail the most when there is a process that the knowledge applies to
Ron Friedmann, on his PrismLegal blog (March 31, 2006) suggests that law departments can look to their firms not just to draft but also to manage contracts. For its law department clients, a firm can keep track of all contracts, including their expiration dates, obligations and rights, renewal options, payments and risks.
Friedmann cites a LegalIT report that credits DLA Piper Rudnick with having streamlined contract management and having teamed with Affinitext to implement its “contract navigation system.” Here is an example of a benefit from a law firm that law departments might not have considered, although the cost may be high unless the firm transforms the traditional law firm model of service delivery.
Here are some ways that English-speaking general counsel, who do not speak the language of one of their foreign-based lawyers, can more effectively manage that lawyer.
More than you do in the United States, you can rely on clients to monitor the work and performance of the lawyer. You can visit the foreign office more frequently than you might otherwise. You can ask for work product to be sent to you periodically, on a random basis, and review and critique it. You can look to a local law lawyer whose judgment you trust for feedback on your employee lawyer. You can hold periodic conference calls and have that lawyer take part actively, such as by reports. (You might even have their work product translated through Google and see what you think of it.) It’s tough, but there are ways to manage a remote lawyer who does not speak your language natively.
I have heard some instances of lawyers and others in law departments developing symptoms like carpal tunnel syndrome from their repetitive use of their computer’s mouse. I also notice more ergonomic keyboards, of the wavy kind or of the kind with wrist supporters. Along with those physical aids there are a proliferation of different mouse devices, all of which reduce the stress that the old style mice caused.
The subtle and wide ranging incursion of technology into law departments creeps on, often unobserved (See my post of April 23, 2006 on secretary ratios declining.).
Many law students would leap at the opportunity to work in-house for some number of hours a week at very modest pay. Certainly a second-year law student who comes in 10 hours a week can help a law department catch up on filing documents, organizing the library, indexing precedent documents, collecting discovery documents, cleaning up databases. Agreed, too, that internships can help recruit talent. The labor is cheap, willing, but of questionable ability.
To compensate for that inability, supervisors of interns must train them to some extent and oversee their work to a greater extent. My sense is that most law departments do not choose interns, because there isn’t enough work suitable for them to do and they come at a cost of supervision and training.
Law Department Management Blog