Articles Posted in Productivity

In August 2002 a “Benchmarker Survey” of 100 heads of legal departments in UK businesses, published by Legal Director, asked them to rank their priorities in the management, organization and structure of the legal services their departments provide http://www.legalit.net/ViewItem.asp?id=24483.

On a scale of one (not at all important) to ten (extremely important), here are four of the priorities given in the summary by Gill Hague, “Factors Affecting the Use of Information and Communications Technology by In-House Legal Practices in North West England,” J. Info. Law and Tech., Dec. 15, 2004.

Quality and efficiency (9.1)

Rosemary Bloom, General Counsel Europe of Disney, speaking at PLC’s Global Counselors’ College in mid-2004 suggests giving clients a self-help option for routine legal matters. She urges in-house lawyers to give clients workshops, tools, checklists, standard form contracts, terms and conditions, “and make yourself available should they have concerns. They are responsible and if you trust them, they will act responsibly on the whole.” Many other lawyers in-house will need to accept this conclusion and have confidence in their legally-empowered business colleagues.

According to Bloom, Disney, for instance, “produces a best practice manual for the branded TV business covering issues like data protection, music clearance and dealing with children, with practical advice and standard release forms” (See my post of Feb. 16, 2006 on self-service for clients, and my recent article.).

In mid-2004 PLC, with Howrey Simon Arnold & White, organized a Global Counselors’ College. At the College, Peter Plompen, the lead in-house counsel on competition matters at Philips, explained some of the things his group does to reduce anti-trust mistakes (See my post of April 13, 2006 on how they train clients.)

Somewhat confusingly, a summary of his comments states: “Each new lawyer spends two years in a specialist group before being posted to a generalist role in a divisional or regional department.” The summary states that Plompen said, ‘these lawyers, with at least some knowledge of anti-trust, become our network, they are our first aid kit, so to speak’”. Whether each new lawyer at Philips rotates through two years of anti-trust training, or through two years of some specialist training is not clear, but the basic idea of a training rotation to seed the generalist business ranks with specialist knowledge makes sense. US law departments, though, rarely hire new lawyers who are junior enough to justify a training rotation. Instead, they hire experienced lawyers who continue on in their area of specialization.

A study commissioned by Workshare in 2005 asked law departments about what issues they face when working with law firms on major transactions. According to a summary in Legal IT, June 16, 2005 (John Rogers), there was “a common theme: the difficulty of maintaining effective control during the drafting and reviewing of documents.”

The collaborative drafting of complicated documents (See my post of April 2, 2006 on forms of collaboration.) certainly sounds nightmarish, but law department lawyers do not bring it to my attention.

A previous post mentioned some metrics about certified and not-certified paralegals (See my post of March 19, 2006 and the good comment to it.) The US Dept. of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics explains some of the levels of legal assistant certification.

“An estimated 1,000 colleges and universities, law schools, and proprietary schools offer formal paralegal training programs. Approximately 260 paralegal programs are approved by the American Bar Association (ABA).” Moreover, “Paralegal programs include 2-year associate degree’s programs, 4-year bachelor’s degree programs, and certificate programs that can take only a few months to complete.”

The National Association of Legal Assistants (NALA) has set standards for certification requiring various combinations of education and experience. “Paralegals who meet these standards are eligible to take a 2-day examination, given three times each year at several regional testing centers. Those who pass this examination may use the Certified Legal Assistant (CLA) designation.”

Dr. General Counsel: You can motivate your staff lawyers, and boost the effectiveness of their brains, by stimulating their production of three neuromodulators. These chemicals, released when positive things happen, help someone process information – that’s the brain boost – and feel better, according to Forbes, Vol. 177, March 26, 2006 at E.

Here’s the prescription. Create conditions for your lawyers that encourage them to pay attention, and their brains will release the neuromodulator acetylcholine. Give your lawyers a positive surprise and watch the effect of the neuromodulator norepinephrine increase their alertness and motivation. Then, create an expectation of a happy outcome, and watch dopamine improve their mood and self-esteem.

To wit, announce “Tomorrow, somewhere on the intranet site, I will announce $500 spot awards for many of you.” Your lawyers will pay attention to the good news and look forward to a bonus. All that will cause a neuro-not-so-modulated rush!

Economists know well the problem of the so-called free-rider. These parasites also appear in law departments. For example, where a law department builds a knowledge management system, those lawyers who do not contribute but who benefit and borrow from others’ efforts, are free-riders. For departments that are trying to cut costs, the lawyers who are disciplined about managing outside counsel carry colleagues who do nothing, but who benefit at bonus time from the others’ cost saving. The do-nothings are free-riders. If a colleague takes on the chore of choosing a document management system everyone else is to some extent a free rider.

We might all have visions of free riders like Easy Riders, crashed and burned off the road.

A previous post observed the highly uncertain prospects of many patents (See my post of Jan. 3, 2006 that most patents cover only incremental improvements.). An item in the Economist, Vol. 378, March 11, 2006 at 68, reinforces the low odds that any given patent will reward its owner financially.

“Of 1,091 Canadian inventions surveyed in 2003 by Thoas Asebro, of the University of Toronto, only 75 reached the market. Six of these earned returns above 1,400%, but 45 lost money.” For the point of this post, I assume that an “invention” has been protected by a patent. If so, although all of them cost money and time –often by an in-house lawyer – to obtain, only about 3.5 percent made any money.

Economic analyses of the value of patents suggest that all aspects of the patent value chain — invention disclosure forms and committees, outside patent counsel, patterns of international coverage, licensing — ought to be scrutinized for their worth.

An item on Law.com, of In-House Counsel mentions that about one-third of Sun Microsystems’ 170 lawyer-department “either works in drop-in offices or they work in the main campuses or they work at home.” (See my post of Nov. 8, 2005 on SEI and its tiny square footage and Nov. 19, 2005 on cubicles for lawyers.) The general counsel of Sun himself, Mike Dillon, does not have a dedicated office. Talk about role modeling!

The article makes the point that lawyers who have no fixed office, so clients do not need to come to them, necessarily have more opportunities to be with and around clients. I wonder, however, whether hoteling and nomadism leaves too much room for improvement.

The litigation group of a law department ought to analyze the process by which it handles litigation hold orders (See my post of Aug. 21, 2005 about not hiring a head of litigation.). Large companies must issue hold orders routinely, so some thought and preparation ahead of time will be rewarded.

Guidelines for hold procedures make sense. One I know about has 7-8 pages with attachments. The attachments describe a litigation support team, give a sample hold order with annotations, provide instructions to law firms of what to do and not to do with documents, guide document custodians, and explain in lay terms the function and importance of a litigation hold order.