Articles Posted in Productivity

Two research findings were reported in the Financial Times (Feb. 2005): (1) independent research commissioned by the manufacturer of the Blackberry found that the average user converted about four and a half hours a week of downtime into productive time; and (2) Intel studied 100 users across all functions who were upgraded to the latest wireless enabled notebooks and found that on average they saved two hours and eight minutes a week

Using a typical fully-loaded cost per hour for in-house lawyers of $150, savings for a five-lawyer department – after cutting the savings estimate in half to be more conservative – is $81,000 a year (one half of 5 attorneys times 4.5 hours saved times 45 weeks).  The same department that upgraded to wireless notebooks would save somewhat less than half as much.

No one expects Research in Motion, Blackberry’s manufacturer, or Intel, a chip maker, to report less than glowing findings, but I tried crudely to correct for that prejudice by chopping the savings in half.  We can’t know the starting point, in relation to technology in place, of the populations studied.  More pointedly, neither can I vouch that these productivity gains would hold true in the world of corporate lawyers.  But directionally the findings appear plausible, and I take heart from the effort at least some people are making to measure the return on investment of productivity.

A 2004 study by Synectics, a consultancy, found that senior and middle managers spent more than three quarters of their time in meetings.  Would this metric hold true for law department attorneys?  Worse, on average only 12 percent of managers thought their meetings were productive.  Taken together, law departments may lose much productivity through poorly-managed meetings. 

Ironically, lawyers taking part in client meetings contribute hugely to client satisfaction and preventive lawyering.

In-housers may not call meetings much, but they can help shape the agenda, recommend locations and attendees, and push for clear outcomes, the disregard of which decisions torpedoing many meetings.  I liked the idea from Synectics that everyone should say at the end of a meeting what they think they have heard, and correcting the inevitable misconceptions or partial understandings.  I also liked the idea of asking people in a meeting to say what they liked about the things they heard; criticism usually comes unasked.

I know two New York City law departments that each year bring in a couple of third-year law school students as interns.  The departments pay them a very modest stipend and try to find them tasks that are interesting and useful.

This is a commendable process.  Law school students will welcome something more meaningful to do and they can be low-cost manpower for a department.  The interns can take on administrative tasks that need completion.  Over time, too, if more law departments introduced law students to the in-house alternative, the flow of talent into law departments would continue to improve.  Even if those students never join a law department, as practicing lawyers they will have a smidgen better understanding of the in-house life.

A gaping hole sits in the middle of law department metrics.  Nearly everything can be counted and benchmarked, except for lawyer productivity.  No one has figured out how to measure the quality-adjusted output of lawyers. 

By quality-adjusted I mean that you can’t simply count the number of contracts completed per lawyer; you need to include a large dollop of complexity, sophistication, and suitability to purpose.  You can’t say that lawyers handle $300M per lawyer worth of deals – a rough proxy for productivity in a year – without also mixing in some assessment of the difficulty of the deals and the appropriateness of the legalities dealt with.  All this is to say that lawyer productivity has a qualitative, immeasurable component that counts for far more than the pieces of work you can tally.

Way back in 1986 and 1987 I was an editor of Document Assembly News, published by the ABA’s Law Practice Management Section.  The early enthusiasts of document assembly, a watered-down expert system for creating drafts based on if-then logic, thought that the technique would sweep through the law.  It didn’t. 

Law departments would be logical candidates for using document assembly where they have repetitive documents.  The classic example is non-disclosure agreements (NDA).  Events have proved otherwise.

In the hundreds of law departments I have encountered, less than a handful have made use of document assembly.  Its allure, nevertheless, continues to lie in the areas of knowledge management, consistency and quality, ability to leverage work to paralegals, and an automatic database.  Those allures have failed to win the hearts and minds of law departments.  Using macros, marking up earlier agreements, keeping to rigid form documents, and having some form clauses available has gotten everybody by.  It seems in law departments document assembly has dispersed. 

Johns Manville’s law department used a Resource Allocation Prioritization Process (as a consultant, I cringe at the name, but we all go to great lengths to find catchy acronyms).  If you want to try it, first have your lawyers list their top 20 current projects.  Next, the lawyer ranks each project according to its relative benefit to the company – low, medium, or high value.  (Actually, from the description I read in Counsel to Counsel’s November 2004 issue, I do not know whether the ranking was an absolute one, where the lawyer tries to place the project in relation to the value contributed of all other projects, or whether it was in relation to the projects on his or her plate.  My hope is that the ranking was within the lawyer’s 20 projects, because more senior lawyers would typically have more value-contributing projects.).  In the third step, the lawyer ranked the project on ease of implementation.  Again, I am unsure whether the implementation score matched to all projects or only the lawyer’s projects.  (As I write, I also wonder whether someone other than the lawyer advises on implementation and value.)

The law department then created a 3 by 3 matrix.  They noted which lawyers were doing projects in which of the nine cells, and reassigned some work.  As a final touch, the department talked through this RAPP matrix with business executives and they jointly changed some priorities, some projects and some assignments.

One can quibble with this process.  Lawyers can inflate the importance of their projects, or exaggerate how difficult it is to complete them.  One person’s “project” is another person’s “just get it done.”  Value to the company remains a problematic assessment for many activities (what is reviewing an NDA worth if the other side might purchase $100 million or might just be nosing around?).  Having quibbled, however, the core idea remains useful.  Think about what lawyers are working on and try to match their talents with the importance and difficulty of the projects.  Good law department management demands no less.