Articles Posted in Productivity

At a major bank, Vice Presidents have authority to approve vendor bills up to $10,000. The law department, however, with all its lawyers at the VP level or higher, gained a special dispensation increasing the approval level to $50,000. As a consequence, no invoice during the past year required more than one approval signature because of the amount of the bill, i.e., all invoices were less than $50,000.

Raising the approval limits can ease one piece of administrivia. (The same bank saw about 15% of its bills requiring multiple lawyer review because the invoices covered a range of assistance and more than one lawyer had to sign off. (See my post of August 21, 2005 regarding e-billing and routing bills for approval.)

Overall, patenting has been slowing down since the beginning of the decade, according to a report by a U.S. IP boutique, Finnegan Henderson. The report also notes that biotech and pharmaceutical patentees are winning an increasing number of cases in US district courts. Between 2000 and 2003, the percent of cases won by the patentee fell below 50 percent each year, but in 2004 the patentee won 71 percent of the decisions. IP Law Bulletin, July 20, 2005

Perhaps 2004’s banner year for patentee’s was only a positive blip, or an artifact of statistics such as that there were only a few cases each year and a swing of one or two made the difference. But a 40 percent jump from the run rate of less than 50% victorious looms large.

Maybe less-than-meritorious patent infringement suits have lost their charm; maybe large firms, having swallowed the minnows of patent boutiques, have more litigation experience on behalf of their large, patentee clients; maybe Daubert is biting; maybe the high tech bust means less chaos in the high tech patent field; maybe consolidation in the pharma industry has created more clout among the defendant patentee giants; maybe I have no idea. (See my posts of March 29, May 1 and 4, 2005 on patent litigation costs.)

Of course, almost all requests for services from the law department come from clients, but there are certain client groups that have a strong flavoring of law. The claims department, for example, or contracts administration, or environmental audit. Others of these groups – can we call them as “pre-law groups?” – include export/import functions, those who review marketing materials, and compliance professionals. With each of these, knowledge of the applicable law and applying established principles define much of what they do.

If the pre-law groups do their jobs poorly, the lawyers bear the brunt of cleaning up or even counseling in the first-instance. Ideally, the pre-law groups handle well everything within their expected competence, and the lawyers step in for the exceptional and the difficult. Ideally.

Sometimes there is a three-way battle in a law department over who manages litigation. If a patent infringement dispute boils over into a lawsuit, should the patent lawyer pull the trigger; should a litigation lawyer lead the charge; should the business unit lawyer whose unit relies most on the patent spearhead the litigation? A war, no?

Assuming equally talented in-house counsel and excluding law firms from the decision (where there is a parallel question, by the way), I would choose the business unit lawyer to serve as general. For one reason, it is crucial to keep litigation in a profit and loss framework, not as an end unto itself. I demote the specialists – here, the patent lawyer – because their role might in fact be minor, as litigation discovery and motion practice and stratagems takes over. As for the litigator, they are a specialist advising the generalist coordinator, but in the end they will spend most of the time on the matter managing outside counsel.

Speaking with the general counsel of a $9 billion chemical company, it came out that the law department has a pool of three “word processors,” available to all the lawyers. One of the word processors works evening hours, so work left at night will be done by morning. Many lawyers who migrate from law firm to inside miss day-round availability of word processing. Another one of the pool lawyers has become very handy with PowerPoint – and also handles the intranet site.

Pooling of secretaries is generally disfavored, but here is an instance of it, with specialization, that works well. I especially admire the after-hours support

General Electric’s law department sprawls – 1,000+ in-house lawyers – but still it amazed me to read that “each of the 11 GE divisions has its own general counsel and specialists in fields such as litigation, mergers, employment, government and intellectual property.” (Financial Times, May 12, 2005 at 9). Not, I presume, that every division has each specialist. Sometimes a specialist for one division, such as a bankruptcy maven in commercial finance, helps out another division.

Few law departments can sustain specialist lawyers in business units. If you have only two or three lawyers dedicated to a unit, there is probably not enough work to keep a specialist busy. Rather, a shared service group assists all the business unit lawyers.

A post yesterday considers three structural choices: specialists report to the head specialist, to the head lawyer of the business unit they support, or report to both. Separately from reporting, a general counsel must decide where to locate the specialists: together for collegial interchange or at business unit sites for closer familiarity and integration.

I use the term quasi-lawyering to describe the tasks that a lawyer inside can do well, but shouldn’t do. It’s not simply lower value legal work; it’s work that the client should do, and I describe many forms of it in my recent article in Legal Times. In that same article, I explain why quasi-legal work comes about and how to root it out. (See my post on March 18, 2005 regarding contract management.)

An article by Marcia Pennington Shannon in Law Practice (June 2005 at 46) [www.shannnonand manch.com] cited a 2003 study done by a Univ. of Michigan professor. “The study results indicate that individuals actually lose somewhere between 20 to 40 percent efficiency – or two to three hours per day – as a result of switching between tasks or trying to do more than one complex task simultaneously.” See my post of July 14, 2005 on Blackberries and interruptions.) In-house counsel are notoriously besieged by calls, emails, and drop in visitors, which subjects them not just to multi-tasking but to hypertasking.

To counteract work as a flitting blur, keep a section of your desk clear, prepare to do lists, block off part of the day for thinking. Check your email only at certain times; tackle your toughest tasks when you are metabolically most alert; slow down; and see the article for about ten other ideas.

A study in Britain of 80 workers announced that technological distractions (such as e-mail, instant messaging, and the telephone (!)) make workers temporarily dumber by 10 IQ points – that is, more than two times dumber than if they were smoking pot. Tech. Rev., July 2005 at 18, citing a study Hewlett-Packard commissioned.

Distractions of any kind, but especially the variable reinforcement – and incessant interruption — of Blackberries and e-mail undoubtedly whittle away at the concentration good lawyers need.

A law department in Boston has had several lawyers leave the department, for reasons unrelated to the merit of their work, yet not accept other job offers.. Since those departures, the general counsel has several times retained the lawyers to handle spill over work, specialized work that would have forced him to go to more costly outside counsel, or work that the departed lawyers had done before.

Advantages of retaining former lawyers on an as-needed basis include, sometimes, a lower cost per hour, reserve capability that is available immediately, familiarity of the “temporary” lawyer with the company and its personnel, and the possibility that a good performer might return.