Articles Posted in Productivity

PD Villareal, Schering-Plough’s lead litigation counsel, contributed a piece on ten ways to survive litigation stress (Inside Litigation, Winter 2006 at 13). In the middle, under the heading “Edit the Editing,” he notes, quite correctly, that “none of us writes like Proust or Flaubert.” Less correctly he imposes the rule that therefore “you’re allowed a maximum of two drafts” because “real men (and women) only need one draft.”

He’s right to root out the over-working of memos, but it’s the rare lawyer who can turn out quality (or even workmanlike) prose on just the second time through.

All law departments of more than one person are “groups,” in that their members are united in a purpose. More precisely, however, in larger departments there are often teams, committees or workgroups set up to achieve a purpose. A group to understand matter management, choose a system and install it; a group to develop the knowledge capabilities of the department; a leadership group consisting of the direct reports to the general counsel; a group assigned to handle a large-scale environmental remediation – and many other groups.

A psychometric instrument, called the Group Development Questionnaire (GDQ), can help such a law department group diagnose itself, push itself to improve, and compare itself to other groups. The GDQ recognizes the well known steps of forming, storming, norming and performing, but adds much more depth of understanding.

“Research shows that employees who work on different floors interact 50% less than those who work on the same floor, and the difference is even greater for those working in different buildings,” according to Gerd Gigerenzer in the Harvard Bus. Rev., Vol. 84, Feb. 2006 at 58.

The drastic drop-off in interactions supports the common observation of how hard it is to have lawyers exchange information and deal with each other when the lawyers are geographically separated. If different floors cuts interaction in half, I suspect larger distances harm relationships exponentially more (double the distance, halve the sharing).

I am not endorsing this software or vendor, but the software struck me as welcome for some lawyers who have long commutes or an aural style. With MagneticTime software, in-house counsel can listen to their documents and e-mails. It converts Outlook e-mails and Word documents into MP3 files, which can play on a cell phone or PDA.

MagneticTime creates a new folder in Outlook and automatically copies all incoming messages. You or your assistant can select which e-mails to convert to audio files and transfer them to the MP3 player by clicking on an icon. MagneticTime comes with a desktop player so that you can also listen to e-mails or documents at your desk. The program costs $39.99.

According to Constance E. Bagley, Winning Legally: How to Use the Law to Create Value, Marshall Resources, and Manage Risks (Harv. Bus. School Press 2005) at 122, Hewlett-Packard wanted to increase its patent applications 50 to 150 percent over the two years ending October 2004 (See my post of Aug. 3, 2005 on Microsoft boosting its patents by 50%.) To achieve that increase, H-P “offered employees $175 for each patent idea submitted on an invention disclosure form and $1,750 for each formal patent application.” The company also gave commemorative plaques.

Bagley continues. “Some firms offer stock options for each patent filed or issued, and 3Com Corporation gives each business unit a share of the licensing fees their patents produce.”

The patent lawyers in a company will face much more work if companies give such incentives. Additionally, the rewards might lead to a dilution of quality, and thus more work by the lawyers.

These conclusions come from a survey conducted in 2004 by the General Counsel Roundtable, as summarized in Corp. Legal Times, Feb. 2005. They strike me as plausible, but hard to prove.

I cannot help but wonder whether cause and effect are being confused. Do well-run legal departments tend to have lower costs and higher productivity, and also tend to hire empowered and capable administrators? Is the cause of better performance the administrator, or is the administrator one piece of broader effectiveness?

My second question, unanswered by the brief reference in the article, would be: “How did the survey measure in-house productivity? Possibly the study compared departments on total legal staff per billion dollars of revenue, and those with lower ratios more commonly had what the study deemed to be “business managers.” (See my post of Dec. 9, 2006 on my methodological complaints about a study of ADR-favoring companies and their putative benefits.) I doubt the GCRT has discovered the elixir of how to measure law-department productivity. (See my post of March 24, 2005 on that missing metric.)

Even for in-house counsel who must satisfy mandatory CLE requirements, budget constraints often limit the choices those lawyers have to satisfy the requirements. One law department holds the line by limiting CLE to on-line providers.

Compounding the lack of funds, law department lawyers may find themselves too specialized in comparison to the level of instruction at typical CLE survey courses.

Geography can pose other problems. There simply are not enough local CLE opportunities that offer more in an area of law than in-house counsel already know. Law firms might fill some of the gap, but in the end, in-house counsel might just go through the motions.

Ronald McDonald, Esq. manages more than 13,000 real estate sites. The company’s real estate department keeps information about each site on a mainframe database, yet the law department’s lawyers and paralegals frequently need access to some of that information.

As explained in a vendor’s marketing document (Mitratech, McDonald’s Case Study, Aug. 1, 2005 at 4), the law department created a shared services team, headed by a paralegal, to track and analyze all law-related real estate information, so that everyone in the department can have it available.

Moreover, each day the law department’s matter management system exchanges information with the company’s mainframe database for real estate, so both systems keep up to date. See my post of Aug. 5, 2005 on supplemental databases.)

The law department of McDonald’s Corp. uses its matter management system, TeamConnect from Mitratech, as a document assembly tool (Mitratech, McDonald’s Case Study, Aug. 1, 2005 at 4. The example given is technology agreements, which are “usually standard consulting agreements and work orders, with only a few variables.”

The benefits from using document assembly are as easy to state as its implementation seems difficult (See my post of March 24, 2005 doubting the spread of such software and Aug. 31, 2005 about Schering-Plough Canada and its use.): greater productivity in producing similar agreements, centralized maintenance of standard forms of agreements, and easier training and quality control. And one more advantage for McDonald’s: “once contracts are completed, TeamConnect promotes compliance by advising key team members of agreement deadlines.”

Citing 2005LegalMetric’s January 5, 2006 press release, William Heinze, in his blog, I/P Updates, writes that “the number of new patent infringement cases in the U.S. dropped 10 percent in 2005 for the first time in ten years.” Presumably, that means the first drop in the number of such filings in a decade. By contrast, LegalMetric states that the trademark cases increased from 2004’s level. Heinze usefully shares data from that company on historical plaintiff win rates that they use in a calculator: 59.3 percent for patent cases; 87.2 percent for trademark cases; and 85.5 percent for copyright cases.

We all hear about the “litigation explosion” and the spiraling cost of lawsuits. To the degree either phenomenon is true, the legal industry needs facts and figures to corroborate or contradict that received wisdom. More specifically, astute general counsel deserve to know whether their department’s experience reflects secular trends or departs from the norm.