Articles Posted in Talent

Every consulting project I hear, “We want to be the trusted advisor of our clients, a consigliore.” Those who bandy the term about don’t know its illegal roots. The most common association of the Italian term is with gangsters, Mafiosa, Cosa Nostra racketeers. Discomfiting, isn’t it, that the Knoxville Bar Association’s In-House Newsletter bears the name “Consigliore”? Odder still that the chief legal officer of a company would want to be described with the same term as the right-hand confidante of the Godfather.

Blogs have the privilege of recording even the most idiosyncratic items. From the Columbia Law School Report (Summer 2005 at 33):

“Edith I. Spivack ’32 has retired after 70 years with the New York City Law Department, where she was hired in 1934 as assistant corporation counsel under [Mayor] LaGuardia. Her remarkable legal career spans the terms of 23 corporation counsels [NYC’s general counsel] and 10 mayors.”

Some of us hope just to live that long.

True or false? “For large US companies and their general counsel, minimizing the risk of reputational damage is the biggest task confronting them today.” Magesterial words from the Financial Times (April 7, 2005 at 8), yet a thunderingly broad, and scary, assertion.

Everything a company does either polishes or scratches its reputation. Is the top lawyer that brothers keeper? CEO’s have no anchor to guide them in assigning responsibilities if the general counsel should principally be on guard against anything that besmirches a reputation.

Nor do I find comfort from Thomas Russo, GC of Lehman Brothers and one of the people cited in the article, saying that the “single most important aspect” of his job is to “create an environment … which maintains the highest integrity possible.” The article goes on to say later that “general counsel must execute policies that put ethics at the heart of business strategy. Ethics? Really? Breathtaking, admirable, almost theological, but is the gravamen of the chief legal officer cleansing corporate integrity and ethics?

The British firm CMS Cameron McKenna published this year the first ever law firm “human capital” report. As reported in April by the Financial Times (at pg. 9), the report provides some data that law departments might also track and ponder.

For example, secretaries took on average 6.6 sick days, down by half from a few years previous after a “regime of back-to-work interviews and physiotherapy sessions.” By contrast, the firm’s lawyers took just 2.9 days of sick leave on average. The firm also disclosed its salary levels (average: £42,893, which is about $80,000) (See my post of August 26, 2005 on releasing within a law department certain salary ranges.)

A law department that wants to baseline its own staff’s sick days taken will find this data insightful. The vastly more important learning from this firm’s innovation comes from two other points: its contribution to the classic balanced scorecard measures for personnel development and its recognition that in a law department, talent is royalty and ought to be attended to

Out of a total of 850 on the staff of Brad Smith, GC of Microsoft, 175 work on government relations (up from 75 in 2001). The Financial Times (April 2005 at 9), in its profile of Smith, added that more than half of the government relations staff are based overseas.

Putting aside the sheer bulk of the group and its international footprint, reflect on the appropriateness of reporting government relations – monitoring legislative initiatives, lobbying legislators, and influencing regulatory agencies – with the “chief corporate legal officer.” Twenty percent of his reporting group, yet its connection to legal advice giving can be tenuous.

My larger point: when every action of a company touches a law, how does the CEO decide which functions to place under the general counsel? Why not HR, with its legal underpinnings, or internal audit, which ferrets out wrongdoing, or distriibution? Smith of Microsoft is also the company’s chief compliance officer, which is another function whose structural ties could place it in several reporting lines

According to a 2003 survey, web sites of law firms are one of the last places general counsel consult when looking for outside counsel. This factoid from the 2003 Legal Services Spending Assessment, conducted by The Corporate Counselor and The Center for Marketing Effectiveness tells nothing, because many general counsel then and now are not internet-savvy. It certainly does not say that a firm’s web site tells nothing about the firm to someone in a law department who is searching for an Arizona firm with glacier expertise.

Besides, the survey’s data shows that law firm websites are used by general counsel to find counsel more than are bar associations and publications!

Corporate Counsel (Aug. 19, 2005) mentioned that in the past year, 36 of the Fortune 250 general counsel “ceded” their post. That works out to 14 percent of them departing, which extrapolates to an average general-counsel tenure of seven years.

The average tenure of a U.S. CEO may fairly closely match that of general counsel. (Chart 10-16 of my benchmark book gives some GC tenure data.) To the degree that is true, it reinforces my suspicion that the changing of the CEO guard ushers in a nerve-wracking period for a general counsel.

A large financial services company I have assisted has an HR representative interview all lawyers who leave the department. The notes taken during those structured interviews can turn up some opportunities for improving how the department runs.

People who leave may speak honestly, constructively, and objectively, especially if they are leaving on good terms and wish the department well. Or, people may be harshly critical, especially if they were terminated for poor performance or otherwise involuntarily. Either way, a thoughtful manager can sift through the interview notes and perhaps pick up a nugget or two. (See my post of June 15, 2005 regarding the costs of turnover.)

In May 2005, Eva Wisnik spoke to a the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Legal Marketing Association (LMA). One of her slides, missing any source reference, purports to show how lawyers score on the MBTI. Lawyers who are introverts – who get their intellectual energy alone, focus on fewer topics but deeper than do extraverts, and tend to reflect before acting or speaking – made up 57 percent of all lawyers.

In the general population, introverts make up half that percentage. Managers of in-house lawyers should understand the basic concepts of MBTI, better the scores of their lawyers, and ideally apply both pieces of information to getting the most from the team

Jeff Carr, the outspoken general counsel of FMC Technologies put forth ten rules for reducing the costs of litigation (Corp. Legal Times, Aug. 2005, at pg. 18). The rules struck me as savvy and iconoclastic. For example, recognize that litigation should never be a core competency and that it’s not about winning, it’s about resolving.

Here’s Carr’s zinger. Don’t hire a head litigator, for the reason that “the last thing that person wants to do is work himself out of a job.” Carr advocates making business lawyers responsible for litigation, presumably because they will take a commercial view of resolving a dispute as promptly as possible and with a view to ongoing relations or bottom-line effect.

I like the thrust of his point, while suspecting that Carr exaggerates to provoke. Litigation dogs all companies and litigation specialists know more about it than generalists. Having said that, however, I agree with Carr that business lawyers should have the primary management role as to cases and that business executives should be closely involved in resolving them expeditiously.