Articles Posted in Productivity

Previous posts mentioned Faegre & Benson’s Client Technology Services (Oct. 21, 2005), Nextra’s discovery specialty (Sept. 13, 2005), British law firms’ on-line offerings (Oct. 17, 2005), and ADR/CMS’s litigation management assistance (Sept. 13, 2005) – all specialized departures from traditional law firm offerings and economic models. Computer Patent Annuities Limited Partnership (CPA), provides a yet another set of alternative services.

CPA, a partnership owned by an international group of patent and trademark attorneys, has approximately 1,000 staff and 60,000 clients(Conspectus, Oct. 2005 at 6 ). Along with handling the typical functions of obtaining patents and trademarks, CPA performs trademark searching, trademark watching, domain name management, and design protection. (See my post of Nov. 28, 2005 on IP trading on-line.)

An interesting capability marketed by CPA involves mapping the patent spending and holdings of competitors against a client’s spending and holdings.

To assist their clients, law departments might want to keep in the back of their mind the possibility of offering R&D work, patents, and trademarks for sale on the internet. A company called Global Commerce & Communications has set up a web site as a forum for buying and selling IP online.

According to a short piece in the Twin Cities Global Bus. Quarterly, Vol. 2, Jan 2004 at 3, anyone can browse for free and anyone can post IP on offer at costs of $100 or more. The company claimed a year ago that the IP-transfer market (excluding licensing, I assume) was then worth an estimated $1 billion.

As with recovering monies, this method empowers law departments to monetize its legal prowess (See my post of Nov. 25, 2005 on law departments sharing in recoveries.)

When someone in a law department tries to describe a lawyer’s powers of cerebration, the vocabulary likely foils everyone. We know it when we experience it, but we can’t define with discrimination the level of a person’s mental faculties. A recent article (Historically Speaking, Sept./Oct. 2005 at 14) presented a solution.

Fifty some years ago Benjamin Bloom proposed what has become widely accepted as a model of cognitive outcomes . If you want to more clearly explain a lawyer’s thinking level and develop competency maps, try these six levels of increasing mental sophistication.

Knowledge: the lawyer can list, label, name, state and define legal principles, requirements, or steps in the approximate form in which they were learned: “what is a security interest and how to perfect it”

If I had my druthers, I druther not blather on about “culture.” It’s just not something you can measure, evaluated, even describe. “The way we do things around here” leaves me cold.

Yet, everyone talks about transforming the culture of a company or department? How, other than over a long period of time and a fair degree of self consciousness. I do not think it a useful lens for looking at law departments.

The values, behavior, and style of the general counsel permeate a department, but if the GC leaves, can one spot a culture residue? (See my post of April 3, 2005 on “people, culture, and behavior” and May 14, 2005 regarding integration of national styles in global law departments.)

That i-ful means that law department which tinker and try and retool will fare better than law departments that go for the homerun of the dramatic and new. Kaizen, the Japanese word for continuous improvement, has the value of compounded interest: keep at it and you will have a wealth of processes operating better and better.

A law department of ten lawyers has hundreds of processes, policies, practices, structural elements and other opportunities for progress. (See my post of April 5, 2005 claiming more innovation comes from larger law departments, Sept.10, 2005 light bulbs compared to dawn.)

Everyone puts a positive valence on the term “innovation.” It’s not a necessary outcome of innovation, however, as a new practice can be deeply flawed.

A law department has identified 102 kinds of legal issues, and assigned a lawyer to each one (sometimes two or three), and for many of them a “primary client contact.” Furthermore, for these hundred-plus types of matters – such as privacy, trust, treasury, derivatives, leases and all the rest – the department has sometimes assigned a compliance person or paralegal to the team.

The benefit of defining these issues and assigning professionals and key clients to them, then publishing the three-page compilation, is that clients know better whom to call, lawyers and compliance officers know their own knowledge leaders, and it gives some recognition to everyone. An excellent practice. (See my post of July 21, 2005 on brokering knowledge, and July 25, 2005 about knowledge management and communities of practice.)

A review of Thomas H. Davenport’s, Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers (Harvard Bus. School Press, 2005) offered some tidbits, and a main course idea (Economist, Oct. 15, 2005 at 91).

No one has devised means of measuring the output of lawyers (knowledge workers par excellence), although many (including this blog’s author) are seeking ways to improve their output. Davenport mentions as one technique “yellow page” directories of experts at Hewlett-Packard. “Research has shown that the computer programmers with the biggest offices are the most productive.” Maybe the best coders get promoted and earn larger offices, not that offices boost output – see my posts of Feb. 20, 2005 and Nov. 8, 2005 about SEI and its open floor space.). Apparently too, “e-mail is a better medium for complex negotiations than instant messaging.”

The main course idea stands out: the book “is a bold attempt to address a pressing issue.” I wish the law department industry were more concerted in its efforts close in on corporate counsel productivity.

When the dotcom boom busted, Motorola shrank and reorganized its 150-patent lawyer group and how it handled its portfolio of 25, 000 patents (Corp. Legal Times, Vol. 15, Nov. 2005 at 27).

One step managers of the patent department took was to form a “preparation and prosecution” group, in which the lawyers continued to have numeric filing goals, but now had to manage to a budget and now could get significant bonuses for exceeding their goals. (See my post of Aug. 4, 2005 about Microsoft planning to patent more and the comment to that post criticizing the decision.) The new group increased outside counsel usage somewhat and hired a controller dedicated to patent operations. The group also developed a proprietary database and online submission and tracking program.

The calculus of what to do in-house (what to make) and what to send to outside counsel (what to buy) has many, many solutions. Usually one hears about keeping “strategic” work inside and sending “commodity” work outside. (I often suspect the opposite holds more truth.)

David Krasnostein, the General Counsel of Australia’s National Australia Bank, explains in an article that he, having completed a study of what work is handled internally and what is outsourced, developed a different slant. He wants his staff to “focus more on the most value-adding part of our business, which is legal risk management, and outsource work that is more product or process orientated.” (See my post of Aug. 14, 2005 chaffing those who bandy about the term “risk management.”) “Strategic” work, perhaps, is managing legal risks, but getting the contracts done still has solid value.

European Union member states are split over the issue of privilege for corporate lawyers – 13 extend the privilege to them and 12 do not (Legal Week, Oct. 6, 2005 at 8). Surveys show, nonetheless, that lawyers per billion Euro of revenue stand as high in Europe as they do in the US, so the absence of the privilege hasn’t deterred companies from hiring in-house. Someone should research differences in that metric between privilege and non-privilege countries.

One other point. An opponent of the privilege said “that as in-house counsel you are inevitably in a state of conflicting interests.” Yes, getting the next pay check deters full objectivity, but don’t tell me that getting the next invoice paid doesn’t deter full objectivity. Both employees and partners resign very reluctantly.

I also wonder about the applicability of the privilege. For example, if an in-house counsel works for a law department of a company incorporated in a non-privilege country, does it make any difference if the lawyer practices in a privilege country? Conversely, if a US company has an in-house lawyer in a non-privilege country, does that lawyer lose or keep the privilege?