Articles Posted in Talent

Very large legal departments find it difficult to create a one-department culture. With hundreds of lawyers and as many support staff, often scattered hither and yon, professional cohesion dissipates, let alone social cohesion. The notion that humans evolved in small groups and can’t effectively sustain relationships beyond a certain limit is noted in Chris Anderson, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion 2009) at 40. The book refers to the Dunbar number – “the empirically observed limit at which the members of a human community can maintain strong links with one another.”

According to Wikipedia, Robin Dunbar is a British anthropologist and evolutionary biologist, best known for formulating Dunbar’s number, roughly 150, which suggests a “cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships.” If your department reaches this scale, you may need to nurture sub-groups, below the Dunbar number in size, to better cohere the department’s awareness of each other and shared values.

“Research has suggested that lawyers are by nature competitive and have a high degree of self worth. In other words, seeking help or supporting colleagues are not natural.” Thus saith Mark Prebble, Managing In-House Legal Services: Providing High Value Support for Your Organisation (Thorogood 2009) at 61. That Hobbesian view of the collective psyche of in-house attorneys bodes ill if it is true! By their nature competitive strikes a strong claim, which is a genetic determinism. More likely self-selection, law school, culture in Darwinian law firms, and such factors as a narrowing career path encourage in-house lawyers compete with each other. In fact, they may be less at each other’s throats than the sharp knives loose in firms.

It is good for some competitive juices to be present, but not a disabling level (See my post of Sept. 26, 2009: all-star law department would stumble; Oct. 2, 2008: competitiveness with 29 references.).

If effective management all comes down to people, why wouldn’t a legal department staffed only with Harvard Law Review editors not drive total legal spending as low as possible? They would think rings around other in-house groups in negotiations and strategy, they would extract the most from outside counsel – mostly using them for bulk tasks, and they would shrewdly and far-sightedly counsel clients.

True, high compensation would be the price, but off-the-charts pay would be trivial in comparison to the savings and risks sidestepped. True, the clash of egos might be titanic but the legal sparks would fly! True, the tenure of the standout lawyers might be short, but meanwhile the accolades, the acclaim! True, the management of that egotistical bunch might be nightmarish, but the brilliance in staff meetings …

Truth be told, it’s a rotten idea.

“Any technique of social control, however, involves human interests and the exercise of power over men. This means that any suggestion of a method for the solution of a social problem is shot through with normative implications.” Found in a book, Daniel B. Klein, ed., What Do Economists Contribute (NY Univ. Press 1999) at 32, this quote says to me that whenever general counsel manage others, their actions are “shot through with normative implications,” which means their values shape what they do regarding leading people.

Always observed keenly by their staff, general counsel eventually expose their operative values, and their staff adjust (See my post of May 31, 2006: all management reveals values; June 10, 2008: core values of Whole Foods’ legal team; July 28, 2008: a methodology for incorporating values into decisions; Aug. 27, 2008: Rawls’ “original position” and values; Sept. 1, 2008: ways our values sometimes obstruct us; Sept. 28, 2008: Enlightenment values; March 9, 2009: a general counsel’s core values; March 20, 2009: best practices presume a values foundation; July 22, 2009: false consensus and presumed shared values; and July 29, 2009: some of this blogger’s core values.).

Every practice written about on this blog, and all the practices not yet addressed here, rest on implicit or explicit philosophies of what motivates humans – those beliefs are the normative framework underneath decisions about people, even if they are rarely articulated or reconciled.

Headhunters account for only a small portion of all the law positions filled for legal departments, the most senior ones at that (See my post of Sept. 16, 2008: search firms with 12 references,including estimates of 10-15% of positions.). For the bulk of attorney openings, a large number of choices and approaches remain. Here are 10 of them.

1. Ads and publicity (See my post of Feb. 18, 2009: State Farm legal group uses Google AdWords; and March 17, 2006: a public announcement by Motorola as way to avoid recruitment fees.).

2. Alumni networks. The lawyers who have worked in your department may be able to steer excellent talent to you, and they know the strengths and weaknesses of the departments.

A piece in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, July/Aug. 2009 at 26, describes internship programs at the law departments of RSM McGladrey and Piper Jaffay. The lessons they have learned include, especially, that you have to plan for the internship, organize it well, and make sure there is “benefit to the student.” As to the latter, it is essential for the internship to benefit the student for it to comply with the Fair Labor Standards Act requirements for unpaid employees. Internships can benefit both the law student and the law department, so long as the law department provides interesting and appropriate projects and ample feedback (See my post of March 19, 2009: interns from law school with 6 references.).

A report three or four years ago by the General Counsel Roundtable found that frustration by in-house attorneys regarding career advancement had not created difficulty for legal departments in attracting, motivating, and retaining attorneys. To the contrary, many legal departments were found to be suffering from the opposite problem – “over-retention and the economic inefficiency resulting from attorneys who accumulate compensation without a corresponding change in the complexity of the work they are asked to perform.” The same point that applies to complexity of work applies to amount of work done – increasingly higher pay may not be matched by increasingly higher productivity.

Members of the Roundtable suggested such varied solutions as workload audits, forced ranking, alumni contractors, managed outplacement, and hybrid positions. I wondered about mandatory retirement policies. If readers know about any policies or laws governing mandatory retirement for members of legal departments, please let me know.

“More than 100 studies have demonstrated the correlation between employee engagement and business performance. … But only one in four employees, on average, is “engaged.” After that sad finding, strategy + business, Issue 56, Autumn 2009 at 49, continues with a description of the four factors that dominate the drivers of engagement.

“(1) whether employees feel respected, valued and recognized; (2) whether they perceive their job to be important to the success of the enterprise; (3) how much pride they feel about the company and what it stands for; and (4) how much trust and confidence they have in company leadership.”

A general counsel can shower members of the legal department with commendations, single people out for awards, make clear the contribution teams make (driver 1). Less directly, a general counsel can show the importance of a lawyer or paralegals work to the success of the company (driver 2). Only obliquely can a general counsel influence the third and fourth drivers – corporate pride and respect for corporate leadership (See my post of July 13, 2008: employee morale with 15 references.).

A late-breaking study of the electronic document discovery (EDD) market, by George Socha and Tom Gelbman, paints a grim picture about the ability of general counsel to develop and retain managers of EDD. “Hiring at corporations also has been difficult. Estimates are that by now maybe20 to 30 companies have been able to acquire or develop respectable in-house expertise, but many others are hard-pressed to find someone – anyone – competent, available and capable of taking the internal EDD helm.” This blog has mentioned several instances of internal teams for e-discovery (See my post of May 3, 2008: internal discovery teams with 8 references.).

The summary paragraph above comes from Law Tech. News (LTN), Vol. 16, Aug. 2009 at 28. The situation worsens: if you manage to find, nurture, and train someone on your staff to oversee electronic discovery, turnover is high. “Almost as quickly as those people are brought on board, others leave to join the provider ranks where they believe rewards will be greater and frustrations fewer.” “Provider” means vendors and consulting firms.

The report also mentions that the emphasis of internal EDD efforts is on “legal hold, litigation preparedness and compliance” (See my post of Aug. 27, 2008: litigation hold notices with 6 references.).

Two quite different definitions are possible for the term “dedicated IT support.” Most people define such a person as someone who reports up the corporate technology organization but who spends full time supporting the legal department. The information systems group has “dedicated” that person to support the law department (See my post of June 16, 2009: Information Technology staff group with 23 references and 1 metapost.).

But the term could also describe a person who reports up through the legal function and is solely devoted to choosing, maintaining, and spreading technology throughout the function – dedicated to IT support in the department (See my post of June 24, 2009: pros and cons of technology staff within the legal department.). Those staff members usually stay longer than IT employees, many of whom rotate from responsibility to responsibility every few years. “Dedicated support from IT” clarifies the term.