Articles Posted in Talent

A previous post cited a Catalyst study in 2002 or 2003 (See my post of Sept. 25, 2005 about a PAR report and chargeable hours.). The law department study found in general that formal telecommuting arrangements (as opposed to occasional hours or days working at home) are uncommon. Two challenges to telecommuting stood out.

In a “culture of meetings” the lawyers feel they have to attend, in person. Second, “out of sight out of mind” when it comes to clients consulting them and ensuring that clients confer with them before making business decisions, lawyers have to be readily and physically available in the office.

These obstacles may have been muted over the past few years, as net conferences become more common, lawyers and clients are often located far apart (See my earlier post today about communications and dispersed departments.), and instantaneous access by Blackberry and beeper rules the day.

Increasingly, as law departments spread around the globe, managing lawyers and those who work for them are no longer in the same location. Gone are the days when an Associate General Counsel could walk down the hall to supervise the day-to-day work of junior counsel. The Financial Times (Aug. 26, 2005 at 7) raised the interesting question of which communication tools best fill the supervisory gap:

“Critically, managers must have a deeper understanding of when to use the wide range of communications that are now available. When is a phone call best? A teleconference? A video conference? An e-mail? A face-to-face meeting?”

The article urges law departments to start a far-flung, virtual project with an in-person gathering. It later observes that “face-to-face sessions are for intensive, real-time problem solving while virtual meetings are for efficient information sharing and assessing progress.”

Human nature what it is, we look first at the results of a lawyer’s decision. For example, in Fulbright & Jaworski’s Second Annual Litigation Trends Survey (2005 at 18), the top measure of law department success in litigation is “results.” Managing litigation consists of a complex series of inter-related decisions.

That concentration on outcomes, however, misses two other sensible aspects of decision-making. “A good decision process should include a mechanism for testing decisions against outcomes” (Financial Times, July 18, 2005 at 9). Retroactively assess the thought process to the consequence. How the lawyer came to make the crucial decision should count in the overall assessment of effectiveness, not just the result. The quality of law department judgment calls can be improved if managers pay more attention to decision-making processes. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but you can teach it orderly and objective steps to decide to jump. (See my posts of March 18, 2005 on intuition, Sept. 4, 2005 on using metrics in decisions and Sept. 10, 2005 on mental models.)

A study by Catalyst on telecommuting and law departments surfaced in a report by The Project for Attorney Retention (PAR), an initiative of the Program of Worklife Law at American University’s Washington College of Law (10 Wm. & Mary J. of Women & L. 367 (Spring 2004)). The Catalyst study “found that nearly three out of four of the female and over half of the male in-house counsel surveyed wanted to telecommute, i.e., to work some hours or days from home.”

If the survey question was along the lines of the summary above, namely “If it were possible, would you want to work some hours or days from home?” it jolts me that of the in-house counsel surveyed, there weren’t in fact more who answered yes. Most lawyers take care of some work at home in the normal course of a road or rail commute career.

A rigged question, by an organization that supports working rights for women, doesn’t help us with its proselytic findings. Had the survey question hit closer, such as “If it were possible, would you work from home regularly – such as two days a week in a telecommuting arrangement?” I would respect the findings more. (See my post of Sept. 25, 2005 on the same topic.)

My dislike for referring to people as “resources,” as in “We could handle this transaction in-house if we had more resources,” found an eloquent advocate in the Financial Times (Summer 2005).

Resources are things we draw upon and exploit. They are raw material we use as efficiently as possible, extracting value and preventing wastage. But people are not raw material. They cannot be described as an organisations’s most valuable resource, because they are the organisation. (emphasis in original)

Lawyers, paralegals, and support staff become the heart and soul of a law department. They are metaphorical ore, not ore to be extracted, refined, and dealt with like so many inert ingots.

It’s easy to say, “In-house counsel should spend their time on the highest-value-added tasks they can identify.” An unstated assumption shadows that view: lawyers like tough challenges, they enjoy sophisticated legal work that demands of them full attention and all their faculties.

Then I read that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has concluded that “the activities that yield the highest for satisfaction with life require the successful performance of challenging tasks.” (Financial Times, Jan. 17-18, 2004 at W2). He calls those moments “flow,” “when a person’s skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable.”

I do not believe that most in-housers yearn to be fully involved in overcoming challenges. That exudes and ratchets up stress.

Among law departments with lawyers stationed around the world, one goal might be to pay each lawyer an equivalent amount of salary, as adjusted for the cost of living in each location. If a certain amount of Euros paid to a lawyer in Rome buys a certain bundle of goods and services, that lawyer’s peer in Tokyo (all other things being equal) should be paid enough yen to cover the cost there of a comparable bundle. Hence the term, purchase power parity (PPP).

Relatively easy to say, much harder to figure out in the real world. Even so, law departments should strive for fair and equal pay around the world.

It seems inevitable that among the direct reports to a general counsel will be one or two who are jockeying for their leader’s position. It’s human nature to strive for the next rung up, even when it descends to sabotage, passive-aggressiveness, and other deleterious, competitive efforts.

A general counsel needs to be alert for struggles between two reports that go beyond the norm of healthy striving. The gladiators also ought to be told about their struggles being visible and that it will not advance their cause to be seen as overtly clambering over the other person. (See my posts of March 26, 2005 about promoting from within or hiring outside, and July 31, 2005 about handling succession planning – linking to a recent article.)

Working with a law department’s Latin American group, it became apparent that the continent has no paralegals as we recognize them in the United States. Instead, many of the lawyers, often paid minimal amounts by our standards, handle tasks that US paralegals would do. Or administrative staff, without specific legal training, step in. How can that law department build a paralegal layer?

One answer is to train people for paralegal-type roles where those positions do not now exist. The skills and career paths are well known, and there are training programs all over the US who could pitch in. (See my posts of March 18, 2005 about paralegals doing as much as lawyers, March 29, 2005 about international paralegals and metrics, June 28, 2005 about departments adding paralegals, June 28, 2005 about reporting lines of paralegals, and Aug. 26, 2005 about measuring delegation to paralegals.)

The Forbes 400 richest Americans in 1985 who had a law degree numbered 19 (4.75 percent). Twenty years later, that percentage had nearly doubled, rising to 32 (8 percent). That factoid in the New York Times (Sept. 25, 2005 at BU3) piqued my curiosity.

I assume nearly all of this year’s richest lawyers made their way into and fortunes in business. A couple might be Midas-touch plaintiff lawyers, but one or two might have practiced in a law department at some point along their gold-paved road to financial success. Then again, what about Google’s chief legal officer?