Articles Posted in Thoughts/Observations

I quote and comment on two extracts from the online brochure of the US Postal Service’s Law Department.

“Over 220 attorneys make up the Postal Service’s in-house ‘law firm.’ Led by a General Counsel appointed by the Postmaster General, the Law Department is composed of a corporate headquarters in Washington, D.C., and 10 law offices strategically placed around the country.” The field offices together make up two-thirds of the Law Department’s complement. The US Postal Service has revenues that exceed $65 billion so it has a modest 3.5 lawyers per billion dollars of revenue (See my post of Feb. 16, 2009: FBI has 30 lawyers per billion of budget.).

“Attorneys with fewer than two years of experience are eligible for the Law Department’s Honor Attorney Program. This unique program provides mentoring and scheduled semiannual evaluations and salary raises. While in the Honor Attorney program, new recruits gain experience in a particular practice area. At Headquarters, the opportunity for exposure to other practice areas is available through workgroups and special assignments. At the end of the two-year period, attorneys are converted into the Attorney Compensation Schedule, in which they receive annual reviews and merit increases.” More frequent reviews and salary bumps as well as mentoring aims to help attract and retain good law students.

Fascinated as I am with Web 2.0 and blogs, I offer some more analyses from free sites on the web. Am I competitive?

How Rank figures out rankings of blogs, and my page rank is 3. What does that mean?

According to Feedburner, during the period January 16, 2007 – February 5, 2009, readers who have LawDepartmentManagementBlog on an RSS feed clicked back 39,023 times to the site on 2,010 blog posts. Those are imposing figures!

Here are the most recent embedded metaposts with URL links (See my post of Feb. 20, 2009: Part XXV.), each of which shows the number of references cited within them.

1. Academics interested in law department management (See my post of Feb. 25, 2009: academics with 16 references.).

2. ASP or SaaS software (See my post of Feb. 25, 2009: Application Specific Programs with 6 references.).

Information theory and leakage of information in law departments. According to information theory, each transmission of information diminishes the accuracy of what is transmitted (See my post of May 23, 2008: every relay doubles the noise and cuts the message in half.). Doesn’t that suggest that each summary of some idea for a knowledge management repository loses half its reality? Does it mean each time you refer a question the information quality diminishes? Or if a partner at a law firm tries to cross-sell a colleague, there is diminished effectiveness?

Legal and SG&A costs. The McKinsey Quarterly, 2009, No. 1 at 40, shows in a graph that the share of selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) costs to sales has climbed steadily over the past fifty years and reached about 28 percent in 2007. That sounds to me like costs other than costs of goods sold and compensation. It is a measure of administrative intensity and complexity that absorbs law department costs also.

South African Legal Process Offshoring. Adria Greene, Esq. is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of a South African-based LPO, lawpoint. Ms. Greene is a Founding Member of the South African Legal Process Outsourcing Association.

My funny American accent doesn’t come through on this blog, but previously I have called out terms that are distinctively British (See my post of Feb. 9, 2006: British terms and references cited; Nov. 30, 2007 #2: charge-out rates; and Jan. 4, 2008: more than 20 trans-Atlantic terms.). A recent book has tossed up a slew more of them.

Ann Page and Richard Trapp, Managing External Legal Resources (ICSA 2007) is written by two British solicitors, the latter being general counsel of Carillion PLC, and they scatter British phrases and terms throughout. “Locum staff” (page 18, instead of temps), “white-labelling” (9, instead of OEM or “our product but the retailer’s label”), “bog-standard” (7, instead of commodity, regular), protocols (43, instead of guidelines, codes), “away day” (56, instead of offsite or retreat) and “contact partner” (59, instead of relationship partner). I am indebted to Amanda Nelson of Diageo for her translation services.

I want to thank Ute Mehnert, my neighbor, friend, and excellent journalist, for her help with this transation.

Rees Morrison, ein erfahrener Jurist und Unternehmensberater, stellt seine Expertise in einem Blog zur Verfügung. Unter LawDepartmentManagementBlog.com sind mehr als 4000 Einträge aus 13 Kategorien abrufbar.

Seit über 20 Jahren berät Morrison, der zuvor als Anwalt in den USA tätig war, die Leiter von Rechtsabteilungen in Unternehmen und Behörden. Spezialisiert ist er auf das effiziente Management solcher Rechtsabteilungen.

After a slow start with posts that mention Research & Development (R&D), this blog has picked up the pace. So I did some research and developed this metapost.

The bulk of the posts have to do with benchmarks (See my post of Aug. 3, 2005: patents granted per million dollars of R&D spend by Microsoft; Dec. 21, 2005: IP lawyers per million dollars of R&D spend; July 13, 2008 #3: patents per R&D spend are increasing steadily; Jan. 12, 2009 #1: R&D spend is 7 times total legal spend; Dec. 8, 2006: financial performance doesn’t correlate to patent count or quality; Aug. 13, 2008: R&D spend may correlate to total legal spend; Feb. 18, 2009: Bosch’s R&D is 7.7% of revenue; and Feb. 6, 2009: higher ROI for R&D with inventor rewards.).

Other posts look at structural points (See my post of Feb. 19, 2006: should patent group report to R&D; March 23, 2008: Patent Review Committees; June 25, 2008: R&D should assign patent lawyers to inventions early on; and Jan. 8, 2009: if companies globalize R&D, why not legal.).

Through the expert assistance of Richard Ramos and LanguageTran, which specializes in Spanish translation services, Spanish-reading in-house counsel can find out more about this blog and Rees Morrison.

Rees Morrison, un experimentado asesor de departamentos jurídicos, escribe el blog LawDepartmentManagementBlog.com. Hasta el 1 de febrero de 2009 ha publicado más de 4000 notas organizadas en 13 categorías.

Morrison, ex abogado que ejerció en los Estados Unidos de Norteamerica, ha dado asesoría a directores jurídicos sobre cómo administrar sus departamentos jurídicos de manera más eficaz, por más de 21 años. Sus más de 275 proyectos de consultoría han comprendido la evalúación de departamentos jurídicos y sus operaciones, recomendaciones sobre métodos para reducir los costos de abogados externos, recolección y análisis de datos para estudios comparativos, recabado de calificaciones de los clientes sobre su satisfacción con los abogados internos, propuestas sobre mejorías a la estructura y flujo de trabajo del equipo jurídico, evaluación las necesidades tecnológicas de los directivos jurídicos y sus abogados internos, y análisis de la eficacia de las mejores prácticas y procesos. Morrison ha trabajado con proveedores de equipos jurídicos internos y firmas jurídicas para fortalecer sus relaciones con sus clientes.

So many management points popped up in a recent Legal Week article (26/06/2008) about ITV’s new legal chief, Andrew Garard, that I decided to choose juicy quotes and embellish them (See my post of Feb. 13, 2009: drastic purge of law firms.). The ITV legal team includes 87 lawyers.

“I decided that all lawyers should have a direct reporting line to me. It is necessary for good governance and was readily accepted.” Garard engineered this change to the most common reporting structure (See my post of Aug. 5, 2008: decentralized reporting with 7 references.).

“I operate an open-door policy where people are welcome to come in talk to me.” I smile at the phrasing “operate a policy” but the availability and accessibility of a general counsel, especially of a very large department, is crucial (See my post of Feb. 12, 2008: management by walking around and open-door policies.).

Snarky writing cleverly spoofs the powerful and respected. It pokes sophisticated fun at those in high positions and cleverly mocks them. But there is no snark in law-department land. No general counsel gets lampooned. Why?

Money muzzles snark. Simple. Service providers want to sell to general counsel; vendors want buyers; outside counsel peddle billable hours; consultants chase projects for general counsel; journalists sell ads and nurture sources; conference promoters seek panelists and paying bottoms in seats. No one bites the hand that feeds them, so we read nothing that roasts poor decisions, ineptitude, Dilbertiness, or blatant stupidity.

Snark isn’t underground, a samizdat. Snark would be business suicide for the writer. Even bloggers play the game and do not want to offend general counsel they wish to impress or quote.