Articles Posted in Talent

In-house attorneys learn and gain proficiency when they handle real matters start to finish. Here is how the point is put in Practical Law, Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 at 86: “the best way to develop in-house lawyers is to ensure they are exposed to a wide variety of experience and many different cycles of learning.” This was the prime takeaway from a session at the ACC Annual Meeting last year. The best training programs fall short of first-hand experience (See my post of Sept. 3, 2008: action learning is best.).

What this means in day-to-day management of a legal department is that supervising attorneys need to let lawyers tackle matters that present new problems for them. Yes, this requires more supervision; agreed, not every lawyer wants to learn about new areas; certainly you might consider outside counsel to check over the results. But, in the end, learning by hands-on doing most effectively enlarges a lawyer’s skill set.

Thanks to Christian Liipfert for this strong warning in favor of good training, good supervision, good information governance, and good ethical compliance.

“In late 2010, Lauren Stevens, formerly an Associate General Counsel with GlaxoSmithKline, was indicted in Federal Court in connection with correspondence she had written to the Food & Drug Administration concerning off-label use of one of GSK’s drugs.

The in-house senior lawyer was also charged with violating 18 USC §1519, part of Sarbanes-Oxley. It says “whoever knowingly … destroys, … conceals, …or makes a false entry in any … document … with the intent to … influence the …proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States or … in relation to or in contemplation of any such matter …, shall be … imprisoned not more than 20 years ….”

Having just written about Salary.com’s data online (See my post of Jan. 13, 2011: base salary for Associate General Counsel at $199,361.). I poked around on the Robert Half Salary Calculator.

To try to get a comparable figure, I selected my Princeton zipcode – probably a relatively high cost area of the country – and picked an attorney with 10-12 years of experience since there are no titles to select. The calculator told me that salaries ranged from $159,075 to $274,995. It added that the “midpoint,” which is a more user-friendly term than the mathematical and technical “median,” is $217,035. Thus, the two online sites offer reasonably similar figures.

There may well be other online sources of compensation information for in-house lawyers (please let me know!). Since they offer compensation data for free, an in-house lawyer could pull data from several of them and average the results. Robert Half even sends out a free 2011 Salary Guide.

Along with the theme of learn by doing, a recent conference session on professional development stressed personal accountability: you know what you need and you have to push to satisfy your needs (See my post of July 22, 2009: professional development must be the personal responsibility of each in-house attorney.). It is not the responsibility of your manager or of the law department or the general counsel. They may enable some choices and channel your efforts, but identification of areas to improve and selection of how to go about it falls on you.

This sound advice comes from Practical Law, Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 at 86, and its summary of a session at the ACC Annual Meeting last year.

Being likewise accountable to learn from my own writings, I assembled my posts on professional development since the most recent metapost (See my post of May 7, 2009: assumption that CLE skews toward substantive training not business training; May 13, 2009: professional development at Exelon includes board opportunities and Toastmasters; July 13, 2009: bring foreign-country lawyers to headquarters for training; July 13, 2009: if you invest in formal education for your lawyers, insist on repayment if they leave soon thereafter; July 16, 2009: soft skills are important to learn; Aug. 10, 2009: CLE accounts for about nine percent of the operating costs of a typical US law firm; Oct. 19, 2009: calculate the ROI of CLE; Oct. 22, 2010: on the job training is most common; Jan. 20, 2010: reverse secondments as a training method; and Nov. 13, 2010: send your lawyers to a firm for training.).

Microsoft’s Department of Legal and Corporate Affairs uses an online tool to let its hundreds of members give feedback on their manager and their manager’s manager. A manager two levels above is referred to as a “skip-level manager.” Only large law departments could even contemplate such depth, but it is a commendable notion, especially the skip level review (See my post of Dec. 26, 2007: 360˚ instruments with 5 references.).

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s General Counsel adds in Practical Law, Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 at 87, that the survey includes a “short quantitative section” and then asks three questions. “What is the person doing that you really like and want more of?” “What is the person doing that is ineffective and needs to be focused on?” “Is there anything else you would like to say?”

Excellent open-ended questions. They would also serve well on a client satisfaction survey.

These suggestions come from the website of Robert Half International (See my post of May 22, 2009: hiring interviews for lawyers with 6 references.). If and when you ever get a chance to hire an attorney again, these questions should help.

“Here are 10 to consider the next time you meet with an applicant:

1. “Why are you attracted to this job, and what skills and strengths can you bring to it?”

The website of MySalary.com presents compensation data for in-house lawyers in the United States. For example, it states that $199,361 is the median base salary for Associate General Counsel. The bell curve chart on the same webpage shows that the first decile of AGCs made $129,257 as a base salary; the first quartile figure is $162,351; the third quartile is $234,865; while the AGCs at the 90th percentile made $267,190.

According to the website, this data “was prepared using our Certified Compensation Professionals’ analysis of survey data collected from thousands of HR departments at employers of all sizes, industries and geographies.” If this data is as accurate as it appears to be, why participate in expensive compensation surveys of law departments if this level of detail can be had online for free or at a modest cost?

I read online that Morgan Stanley’s chief legal officer was to report to the company’s chief operating officer. The writer contrasted the situation with Thomas Russo who insisted on reporting to the CEO when he took the top legal role at AIG.

Then the writer noted that “it’s highly unlikely that the bank would have been able to bring someone in from the outside without having him report to the CEO.”

Then came the observation that warranted this post: “It’s a lot easier to swallow reporting to the COO when it comes with a promotion to GC.” If true, a CEO can promote someone internally to a general counsel position that doesn’t report to the CEO much more easily than with a recruit from outside. Sounds like a reasonable argument. Regardless, I still advocate that the top lawyer report to the top executive (See my post of March 8, 2010: upward reporting of chief legal officers with 15 references.).

It is hard for this blogger to escape US-centrism, given my background and primarily domestic consulting history. Aside from whatever blinders I wear, I do believe that law departments outside the United States have the same management concerns, perspectives, tools, and measures. Much of the time, general counsel of every country, language and industry face similar challenges of management.

National differences exist. For example, the absence of paralegals or the lack of attorney-client privilege or the reporting lines of general counsel. Thus, when I read that approximately half of the in-house lawyers in the Netherlands had never practiced in a law firm, the point was made yet again: amid the international similarities of operational issues and solutions for law departments there yet remain many variations. The Dutch data is reported in the European Lawyer, Sept. 2010 at 32. In this case, I doubt that as high as ten percent of in-house lawyers in America missed the joy of working for a law firm.

A study of Dutch law departments by Dutch law firm Houthoff Buruma found a steady increase by age cohort in the percentage of in-house lawyers who are women. Above age 51, only 15 percent are women; 30 percent – double the older decade – are women in the 40-50 year old bracket; but younger than that the percentage doubles again, to 60 percent. This data is reported in the European Lawyer, Sept. 2010 at 32.

For the United States, partial data, not broken down by decades, suggests that the demographics are similar (See my post of March 16, 2008 #3: 40 percent women in-house; and Feb. 16, 2010: 14% of Fortune 500 law departments.).The ranks of women practicing in-house has climbed year over year.