Articles Posted in Productivity

A financial services company, whose lawyers are essentially allocated by client business group, has three coordinators who orchestrate practice groups in securities, real estate and broker/deal law. A multinational bank I have worked with also has communities of interest for such topics as anti-money laundering.

If many of your lawyers are dedicated to supporting business groups, some of them share substantive law interests. A practice group that spreads useful documents, holds periodic conference calls, sponsors intranet content, assembles material from law firm and conferences, and provides expert backup for each other brings much value to the law department. (See my post of July 31, 2005 about specialist lawyers.)

Although lawyers, paralegals, and administrative assistants probably constitute well over 95 percent of all staff in law departments, one runs across a plethora of specialist roles. Here are some that I have encountered, which is by no means comprehensive. Please email me with roles I have overlooked (Rees Morrison)

• blue print person (Port Authority)

• budget analyst (Tyco, GlaxoSmithKline)

Inside counsel do not want to track their time, for many reasons. They do not want to have their performance based on how many hours they report, since competitive pressures and ethical distortions can inflate the hours written down. They do not want to rob lawyering time to jot down and enter time records, since they feel it is just pushing fake money around internally.

They want to be able to devote to a client’s legal problem the time it deserves, without feeling pushed to accelerate. They gain nothing personally from the resulting metrics, only the possible far off and diffuse advantages the department as a whole might accrue. They sense that huge qualitative differences exist between lawyers in terms of value delivered, differences obscured by a focus on churning out hours. They do not want to charge clients for their time, the next step in prospect, because they do not want clients to stop coming to them which over time will jeopardize their jobs.

For sizeable law departments, I do not agree with these views, as I stated in my post of August 31, 2005.

Pro bono services by in-house counsel get relatively little publicity (with the notable exception of periodic issues of the Metropolitan Corporate Counsel). Without much experience with pro-bono programs, my ruminations ran to these:

(1) Should in-house counsel be expected to contribute free services in the same proportion that private practitioners do (or should)? I think so, because the privilege of being admitted to the Bar brings with it an equivalent responsibility for helping out others without adequate means.

(2) Should a general counsel control permitting department lawyers to do pro-bono service, or should it be a right they have? I think that the decision should be that of the individual lawyer, not something they must obtain permission for, so long as they meet the requirements of their job.

As discussed in another post today, time tracking is for in-house counsel what Roe v. Wade is for conservatives. At the same time, many law departments have instituted time tracking.

I just read that a large pharmaceutical company’s legal function selectively charges lawyer time, with the basis for selection being services that the law department views as less integral to its mission. Perhaps quasi-legal task, which my article describes, or tasks where the answers are available on an intranet site, or tasks that have been explained to the client repeatedly. The idea is intriguing: free service for valued work, a usage charge for the rest.

This 80-lawyer department, serving a financial services giant, worked five months in 2004 to develop a Lotus Notes system where lawyers can track new statutory and regulatory requirements. The system also identifies the lawyer responsible for tracking the law and the date it will go into effect. The lawyer making the entry explains how the change will affect the business division he or she is responsible for.

Other lawyers can also find out about the upcoming change and advise their clients. Central compliance pitches in to implement and check on changes in procedures(Corp. Legal Times, Sept. 2005 at pg. 32)

This avatar of technology-enabled law practice impresses me. It captures knowledge, has built-in incentives for data entry, knits together law and compliance and clients, and improves everyone’s performance.

In-house lawyers who do not track their time detest, abhor and revile the thought of doing so. “If I wanted to record 10ths of an hour, I’d have stayed at a law firm!!”

I smiled, therefore, when I read that the Corporation Counsel of NYC’s accomplishments included “implementing, over significant internal opposition, a requirement that attorneys keep time records, a reform intended to give [law] department managers a better idea of the resources devoted to the needs of its ‘clients’ – city government agencies.” (emphasis added) (NY Law J. Aug. 15, 2005)

With 650 lawyers in that department, the need for data on how lawyers are spending their time becomes imperative. For small law departments, those under five lawyers, I doubt the efficiency of tracking time. For intermediate size departments, tracking time in hour increments, or only for a quarter a year, or only on certain kinds of matters, gives most of the insights with less of the angst. For large departments, as many as 40 percent track attorney time and I recommend it

Leases, sub-leases and appurtenant legal documents weigh heavily on the law department of a 1200-store supermarket chain. At Food Lion, lease documents had to be reviewed by several groups and physically routed during a process that was manual and could consume two crucial weeks.

Its inside lawyers, however, working with the company’s primary outside law firm, Akin Gump, devised a streamlined approach using scanners, standardized sub-lease term sheets, remote access by they various groups involved, and e-mail integration. “What once took two weeks now takes only two days.” (Counsel to Counsel, July 2005 at pg. 5)

The legal group in Canada of Schering-Plough developed a checklist of key points and made them mandatory in employment contracts. They settled on provisions for parties, terms of the agreement, position and responsibilities, compensation, vacation entitlement/benefits, policies, and restrictive covenants. (Counsel to Counsel, July 2005 at pg. 5) Nothing surprising, but an excellent management methodology.

Place this step in a spectrum. Law departments must start by recognizing documents they prepare or review time and time again. A further step along the spectrum is to collect examples of those documents, in hard copy or, better, electronically. Next in the spectrum of increasing sophistication, they can create a checklist of key points to look for. Further, they can draft exemplars of key provisions (as did Schering) and go on to having document assembly capabilities as well as annotations to explain the key provisions, possibly with some alternative language where there is likely to be negotiation. The most sophisticated departments delegate much of this to paralegals, if not back to the client organization, and serve in a review mode for exceptional issues.

Moving along this path of standardizing, streamlining and shifting roles, a law department will find that its productivity increases, the quality of the issues it addresses increases, litigation and disputes decrease, and cycle time decreases. Not too shabby!

Many in-house counsel have difficulty delegating work to their paralegals. Reasons for this, other than the lack of a capable paralegal, of course, include mistrust of others’ work, ignorance of how to effectively manage someone else, a hoarding mentality based on “I am the only one capable of doing this important work,” fear of having to do more difficult – yet more valuable – work, and no incentives.

Try this: ask your paralegals to list the sources of their work, by percentage, between clients, lawyers, and outside counsel. For the lawyer providers, ask the paralegals to go back over the past 12 months and estimate the percentage of the work from each in-house lawyer who gave them work.

The picture will then be clear about who delegates. Not the quality of work delegated, but the amount of time. (See also my post of Aug. 18, 2005 about law firms not delegating to paralegals.)