Articles Posted in Talent

An optimally efficient law department – given an amount of resources such as lawyers, computers, and structural components – produces for its company maximum output. An optimally effective department delivers maximum value. Economic jargon only?

No, the distinction highlights fundamental differences between law department management perspectives and objectives. So-called “output managers” rely more on tracking numbers, watching staff ratios, controlling spending, and benchmarking. “Value managers” rely on subjective assessments such as client satisfaction, risks minimized, creativity, and revenue generated.

A high-risk, high reward tool for law departments is the so-called Johari window. The Johari window has four quadrants (panes): personal characteristics known by the person or not known by them are in two panes matched against those characteristic known by others (blind spots) and not known by others (hidden agendas). Hence the 2-by-2 window has 4 panes.

If members of a team, such as the direct reports to the general counsel, complete the Johari windows for each other, and present the assessments honestly, the resulting insights (and shared vocabulary) can help the team mesh and produce. Johari sessions can also unleash negative output (blind spots and hidden agendas and emotional confrontations.

A full-scale 360º evaluation program stumbles badly if the law department is small. The department simply does not have enough reports to provide anonymity and representativeness, by which I mean a sufficiently sizeable sampling of opinions about someone above.

What I have done in two different retreats, however, has been to include a question on an online survey that addresses the effectiveness of the department’s leadership team. The question asks the members of the department to anonymously evaluate the general counsel and his or her reports on a number of attributes. These attributes likely include decision-making, strategic planning, fairness and accessibility.

The composite results do not point fingers at any individual, unlike a 360º evaluation, but they can peel back some of the mystery.

A perspicacious article in the Harvard Business Review, written by David Nadler of Mercer Delta Consulting (Sept. 2005 at 69), explored the tensions of being the trusted advisor of CEOs. It listed some of the distinctions that make the CEO’s job like no one else’s in a company. Let me paraphrase and apply the distinctions to general counsel:

“No one else in the [law department] is so starved for unbiased information.” Direct reports to a general counsel manage up; everyone tries to muffle bad news; no one is completely honest with a powerful general counsel.

“No one else so needs to hear hard truths.” If the general counsel can’t get the complete, unvarnished picture, the company and the department are running down a dark, dark tunnel.

The Project for Attorney Retention (PAR), an initiative of the Program of Worklife Law at American University’s Washington College of Law published a lengthy report in December 2003 (10 Wm. & Mary J. of Women & L. 367 (Spring 2004). The report addressed telecommuting in legal departments (pg. 370).

“A recent study by Catalyst 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.” Yet PAR found formal telecommuting arrangements in legal departments “uncommon.”

I have detected no groundswell of desire by in-housers to work from home. The Catalyst findings make me wonder about how the question was asked and interpreted.

A previous post wrote about competency maps used by Altria’s Asian law department (CounseltoCounsel, May 2005 at pg. 11). The group developed a skills and competency profile (sometimes called a “competency map”) for each lawyer position. The profile captured the needed skills in four categories and ranked the competency level the incumbent needed in each for the position.

Pitney Bowes has thrown out the old competency models and exchanged them for “High Impact Learning Maps.” Is that just a new term for the same old thing? Definitely not, according to Dave Basarab, Director of Employee Development at Pitney Bowes, who is to speak at a conference [Sharing @ LearnShare, Atlanta, Georgia, Oct. 13-14, 2005 at Emory University].

According to the brochure, this talent development tool provides:

I am serious about this question, even after 18 years of doing nothing but trying to understand how to improve law departments. And Professor Jay Forrester, the world-famous emeritus professor at MIT who has studied complex systems for 40 years, offers an explanation why. “most social organizations … represent a far higher level of complexity and abstraction than most people can grasp on their own.” (40 Strategy + business, Fall 2005 at pg. 80, an interview of Forrester). Leaders who persist in making management decisions based on mental models – instinctive theories they have about the way their organization works – are “decidedly inferior to policies and strategies based on computer models of ‘system dynamics – the interplay of complex, inter-related forces over time.”

I have repeatedly bumped into difficulties assigning my posts to categories. Most posts could fall under more than one category; most of the categories overlap with other categories (for example, “productivity” could subsume everything and “talent management” could cover everything to do with people, which is everything). No taxonomy of concepts adequately and exclusively encompasses the manifold complexity of even the smallest law department’s operations.

Colin McGinn, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers, has concluded that humans have made little progress for millennia in solving the basic issues of philosophy because our mental capabilities are not up to the task. It’s not shameful to realize that a problem over-matches our abilities; it is embarrassing to claim falsely that we know the solution; and it cowardly to give up.

A piece in the National Law Journal (Sept. 5, 2005 at pg. 11) cited remarks by the GC of Walmart, Thomas Mars. Mars said that 82 of the relationship partners at the company’s top 100 firms are white men. Doesn’t that mean that 18 percent of the retailer’s top 100 firms are minorities (either not men or not white)?

Further, the 82 firms “get $142 million of the $200 million that Wal-Mart spends each year on outside counsel” so some undisclosed portion of $58 million goes to the firms with minority relationship partners. Feels like the minority glass is far from empty.

And, I wonder, isn’t it more important to have a plenitude of minority lawyers and paralegals working on the company’s legal matters, without regard to the protected status of the relationship partner?

Along with liberation from tracking time, lawyers who move from firm to department revel in their freedom from having to sell work. Work comes to the inbox, often over-spilling it.

The irony is that an in-house lawyer, having only one cast of client characters, is locked into their clients’ foibles, peccadilloes, and aggravating behavior. There is no way of leaving, or of finding other clients, of changing personalities.

So, the gnawing anxiety of selling can be replaced by the ulcerating aggravation of coping with a set client base. Better the devil you know than the devil you must sell to.

A law department in the U.K. just announced it hired a lawyer who had been a secondee from a major law firm (Legal Week, Sept.15, 2005). It is probable that some law firms, before sending their best and brightest to a client as a secondee, ask the client to agree not to recruit that lawyer.

I vote against signing that agreement. If an associate wants to try a law department career, why block them? And, if a law department likes the work of a secondee and wants to hire that person, the hiring forges a closer relationship with the law firm. Finally, most associates leave (at least from major U.S. law firms), so why not facilitate a desirable departure? No second thoughts on hiring secondees.