Articles Posted in Thoughts/Observations

Using a program called Concordance, I analyzed the headers of my first 3,700 posts, all 23,607 “tokens” – which includes entries such as “#45” – resulting from 6,064 different words (“types”). Linguists will note immediately the type/token ratio of 3.893.

But let’s get to the exciting revelations. Here are the 22 substantive words used most commonly. Law (1,248 times used), departments and department (476, 422, respectively), counsel (438), firms and firm (375,161), legal (307), lawyers (296), management (237), general (217), in-house (214), outside (152), litigation (145), costs and cost (131, 75), corporate (79), software (74), services (70), clients and client (69, 67), rates (67), inside (65), business (64), billing (63) and spending (62).

The manifest themes of this blog, based on the words used most frequently in its headers, are law/legal departments, general counsel, law firms, finances, and corporate clients.

Since way back on Feb. 20, 2005, when this blog was delivered into the electronic world, there have been almost 3,700 posts. Of that mass, fully 35 percent of them have cited no earlier post, a practice I call back referencing (See my post of Nov. 16, 2008: data on back references.). Several readers have taken me to task for not adding URLs to my back references, but I have remonstrated that finding and inserting the permalink for back references would slow my output to a crawl (See my post of June 16, 2007: no hyperlinks to back references; and Jan. 18, 2008 #2: references to previous posts.).

Now I have the facts for my refusal to hypertext references (other than metaposts). The data shows that as I have accumulated more I draw on earlier posts more. In 2005, I averaged 44.2 referenceless posts a month, in 2006 38.6, in 2007 24.8, and this year a paltry 11.9 posts a month without a pointer to a previous post. Increasingly, what I write has a plausible linkage to something written previously.

That is one of the motivators for me to blog: I want to relate ideas about law department management and create a conceptual and practical framework for those ideas (See my post of Dec. 5, 2007: the emergent, inductive path I meander along.).

Probabilities vs statistics. Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (Pantheon Books 2008) at 122, explains the distinction between probability and statistics. “The former [probability] concerns predictions based on fixed probabilities; the latter [statistics] concerns the inference of those probabilities based on observed data.” Ignorant of the two meanings, I have used “probability” 14 times on this blog, and probably should have used some variation on the idea of statistics. Probabilities apply to dice, since we know the possibilities. The distribution of outcomes from a group of lawsuits falls into the realm of statistics. Nearly everything that occurs to law departments rests on inferences of probabilities from data (See my post of Jan. 20, 2007: statistics with 28 references; and May 31, 2006: statistics.)

Managerial considerations when a law department has many international offices. In a recent article I took on the challenges general counsel face when they manage lawyers in multiple offices outside their home country.

Four-time general counsel. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, Nov. 2008 at 72, turns up another lawyer who has been general counsel at four companies: Guy Rounsaville, Jr. Rounsaville was for 21 years the chief counsel of Wells Fargo & Company, but then became the general counsel for Visa International (after serving as its acting general counsel for 18 months while at a law firm). Five years later he took the top spot at La Salle Bank, where he left in May and he has just begun his fourth general counselship at The Doctors Company.

Since Feb. 12, 2008, I have published on Law Department Management 580 posts. Of them, 91 (16%) refer to no earlier post. However, the bulk of the posts during that nine-month period – 519 of them – point to prior posts and do so a total of 3,036 times. Five of them – all metaposts, of course – have 40-some back references, 6 have 30-some references; and 17 have 20-some. At the other end in terms of back referencing, 191 of those 519 posts (just less than 40%) cite only a single earlier post.

What I really want to know is which of my posts I have cited the most. I can’t readily figure that out because I post in clumps, five to nine on a day. So I know the date of a back reference but that information only narrows the choice to one of several on a day, and I have to look at my short descriptions and the headers of that day to confirm the match.

My first post on this blog was February 20, 2005. One post from that inaugural day has shown up twice since then, one about procurement has shown up four times, and one on SEI and cubicles appears in eight back references. On March 5, 2005, my third day of posting, one on altruistic information sharing appears 8 times and a second post, on Google Desktop, appears 7 times.

A short profile in Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, Nov. 2008 at 61, about Markus Diethelm, the new general counsel of UBS, contains three nuggets. The first is that the predecessor of Diethelm, most recently the legal head of Swiss Re, was promoted in April 2008 to chairman of UBS. This post has noted several general counsel who report to the former general counsel (See my post of March 24, 2007: promoted general counsel with 8 references.)

In April, after the former general counsel became CEO, UBS filled his job “temporarily with a three-person team.” Some companies choose an interim general counsel (See my post of March 20, 2008: four examples of interim general counsel.) but I have never heard of a temporary trio running a law department. Three caretakers, perhaps vying for the top spot, during a four-month period!

The third nugget arises from the comment that Diethelm, while at Swiss Re, centralized the reporting of all practicing lawyers to him so that they no longer reported to business executives. “That gave the legal department more independence and authority, he says.” The profile adds that “Lawyers became more like business partners” who “no longer just advanced solutions on legal issues, but they also formulated policies.” I suspect that business executives do not feel that centralized lawyers are more like “business partners” than when they report to the executive. Loyalty flows from the barrel of a paycheck.

This blog comes to the attention of online searchers in a variety of ways. One way is that other blawgs cite to posts here. I have been collecting some of the referral sites from the last few days and mention a number of them below. Thanks, all of you!

Geoff Gussi’s wonderful blog on in-house jobs, and much more (InHouseBlog)

A blog on settlement techniques (Settlement Perspectives).

With this post I have reached 200 embedded metaposts with URL links (See my post of Oct. 3, 2008: Part XIX.), each of which shows the number of references cited within them.

1. Attributes of firms for purposes of selection (See my post of Oct. 22, 2008: law firm attributes important for selection with 12 references.)

2. Competitive bids (See my post of Aug. 15, 2008: competitive bids with 35 references.).

This blog comes to the attention of online searchers in a variety of ways. One way is that other blawgs cite to posts here. I have been collecting some of the unusual referral sites from the last few days and mention a number of them below. Thanks, all of you!

A blog on in-house jobs, and much more (InHouseBlog)

A blog on settlement techniques (Settlement Perspectives).

Examples of secondments. GC Cal., June 2008 at 23, has an article by Lorelie Laird – in which a noted law department blogger is quoted – that refers to several law departments that have taken advantage of secondments. Laird discusses examples from Bayer, General Electric and Cisco. The article doesn’t add much to what has been addressed in posts here, but it does note that Cisco pays for the salary of secondees as well as the costs of their benefits (See my post of July 17, 2008: secondment with 12 references; and Jan. 23, 2008: 10 references to secondment.).

Network for corporate secretarial services. An ad in Corp. Sec., Iss. 54, June 2008 at 43, promotes TMF www.tmf-group.com. TMF offers a global network of 79 company-owned offices in 61 countries. TMF helps with company registrations and registered office services as well as global entity management for multinational companies (See my post of Feb. 21, 2008 #2: law-firm networks with 7 references; March 23, 2008: ALFA; and Sept. 21, 2008: 5 associations at ACC conference, including the Bomchil Group.).

Fortune 500 legal spend. In 2007, the Fortune 500 companies surpassed $10 trillion in revenue, according to Diversity & The Bar, Vol. 10, Sept.-Oct. 2008 at 32. If we assume about five in-house lawyers for every billion dollars of revenue, a typical figure that takes into account all industries, these companies would employ approximately 50,000 in-house attorneys. If we assume 0.4 percent of their revenues goes to legal costs (excluding fines, judgments and settlements), a percentage that is middle-of-the-pack, that means about $40 billion, of which roughly 60 percent typically goes to outside counsel — $24 billion. A billion here, a billion there, soon we are talking real money!

Libor and a statistical technique for data. The London Rev. of Books, Sept. 25, 2008 at 11, explains that 16 banks call in their estimates of the interest rates at which their banks would borrow money. The group that calculates Libor [London inter-bank offering rate] “discards the lowest quarter and the highest quarter of the estimates, and calculates the average of the remainder.” The office that produces the Libor rates does not want the banks to be able to manipulate the average: “That risk is the main reason for the exclusion from the calculation of the highest quarter and lowest quarter of the input.” This could be a good way to calculate benchmark averages – drop the top and bottom quarter and average the middle half (See my post of Nov. 30, 2005: averages, medians and modes.).

A broader view of talent and what law departments need to strive for. The McKinsey Quarterly, 2008 No. 1 at 29, makes clear a sometimes overlooked point about talent. It isn’t just intrinsically talented lawyers that a law department needs. If you pay enough, you can generally hire the smartest and best lawyers. “The real challenge is making profits off those talented people,” says the article and I take that to mean the real challenge for a general counsel is maximizing the quality and productivity of the law department. A collection of all-star legal brains won’t do it. The piece argues that leading companies must combine talent and technology and organizational design to make the most from their employees at all levels of talent (See my post of Dec. 3, 2005: hiring stars for terrestrial jobs.).

Disadvantages of large law firms: high attrition rates. The Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 85, Jan. 2008 at 117, cites an ALP survey which shows that attrition rates at law firms with fewer than 100 professionals are typically 50% lower than at firms with more than 500 professionals (See my post of March 15 2006: turnover in law firms and loss of client knowledge.).