An interactive benchmarking tool is available on the IT Policy Compliance Group (IT PCG) site. The Group describes the tool as able to:
Find the maturity of your legal data custody practices [how progressive your practices are]
Determine how much money you can save by improving your practices (See my post of Feb. 7, 2009: costs of litigation hold practices.)
Law departments deserve information from prospective law firms and service providers and law departments have a right to ask them probing questions. Nevertheless, having reviewed several RFPs lately, I object to several questions. The following questions, modified only slightly, are blatantly intrusive and unfair. Even procurement managers should blush.
Whom do you regard as your major competitors?
How do you compare your firm or company against your major competitors?
Some 221 companies responded to a survey by iPerformance Group concerning their inventor reward and recognition programs. A summary of the findings appear in IP Law & Bus., Jan. 2009 at 12. Most of the companies that recognize the efforts of inventors provided financial rewards. What fascinates me is the assertion that follows regarding cause and effect: “Companies that rewarded inventors monetarily for an invention disclosure increased their invention idea submissions by 75 percent per inventor.” Was the only programmatic difference before and after the award of money?
Some benchmarks surfaced. “The average payments per milestone reported were: invention submissions, $568; patent application filing, $973; and patent grants, $1024.” For inventions that generate substantial revenue for the company, the reward to inventors includes a percentage of profit. That’s pay for performance!
“Larger companies that actively promote their [patent encouragement] programs gained 40 percent higher returns on their R&D investments than those that didn’t, measured by patent applications per dollar of R&D expense.” If that correlation is true for many companies, they will up their IP ante (See my post of Oct. 10, 2006: Dial Corp.; Jan. 27, 2006: incentives to researchers at H-P; and July 25, 2007: Halliburton Energy.).
General counsel and other managers in legal departments designate project teams for almost every conceivable task I define a “project team” as a group of people charged to accomplish a task in a timeframe and then to disband.
Beyond that goal, teams in law departments serve purposes other than the accomplishment of a task. For example, they help weaken silos as they mix team members together (See my post of March 22, 2006: solutions to silos; and March 28, 2006: PPG’s efforts to break down silos.). Team leadership can help a lawyer progress (See my post of Jan. 30, 2006: career development through leading teams.).
This first of two posts on project teams in law departments narrows the scope of the term (See my post of Feb. 1, 2009: the ubiquity of project teams in law departments.). The term “team” has many uses. Let me start with several uses of the word “team” that are not aspects of internal “project teams.”
Ideas for my blog posts materialize everywhere, especially from the books I read. Consultants travel all the time, and you will never guess what I do on flights….
I looked back and found most of the books I cited this year, listed here by author (See my post of March 16, 2008: Ian Ayres, Super-Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way to be Smart (Bantam 2007); Nov. 21, 2008: Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior (Doubleday 2008); March 16, 2008: Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society (Penguin Books 1995); Aug. 29, 2008: Frank Furedi, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone: Confronting 21st Century Philistinism (Continuum 2004); Sept. 9, 2008 #3: Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (Oxford 1999); and June 6, 2008: Theodore Levitt, Thinking about Management (Free Press 1991).)
Other books have been referenced in the past years (See my post of Sept. 9, 2008:.Richard B. McKenzie, Why Popcorn Costs so Much at the Movies (Copernicus Books 2008); May 2, 2008: John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Pear Press, 2008); Oct. 19, 2008: Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (Pantheon Books 2008); Aug. 27, 2008: Susan Neiman’s Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grownup Idealists (Harcourt 2008); Dec. 2, 2008: Michael Shermer, Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown (Time Books 2005); Jan. 4, 2009: David Sibbet, Best Practices for Facilitation (Grove 2007); and May 18, 2008: Edward Russell-Walling, 50 Management ideas your really need to know.).
A long questionnaire deters clients from responding to a client-satisfaction survey (or members of the law department to a morale survey). Even so, some general counsel want to explore how clients or employees feel about a large number of attributes. Is there a way to resolve these competing interests between responder fatigue and surveyor enthusiasm?
Yes, with a split survey. Take a lengthy survey with 20 questions. You can split the questions into two groups and randomly divide the people you send a survey to into two populations. Population one gets questions 1 through 10; population two gets questions 11 through 20. If you have enough respondents from both populations you can combine the results.
One other idea might help. Before you release the final version, send a draft to a small group and ask them to rank all the questions in terms of usefulness of results from them, ease of answering, scope, and clarity. Ask them what additional questions ought to be asked. With that feedback, you might knock out enough questions – while you improve the rest – that a single survey with a manageable number of questions will get the job done (See my post of July 21, 2008: survey methodology with 40 references and 25 internal references.).
Justia is the wonderful group that designed and runs my website. They also maintain a vast directory of law-related blogs. Under the category Corporate Law Department Blogs” 14 are listed. Justia gives each blawg a rank based on the number of visits to the blawg from Justia’s BlawgSearch search engine and directory listing pages (See my post of Feb. 16, 2008: top domains referring to this blog.). The number in parenthesis is the Justia rank, while the date is the day of the most recent post as of Jan. 20, 2009.
The D&O Diary (119) 19-Jan-09
The Patry Copyright Blog (133) 1-Dec-08
In fits and starts I run across blogs kindred to this one: on how best to manage aspects of law departments. Four more have recently surfaced:
InHouse Insider by Esq. Recruiting LLC
In-House by the staff of the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC)
One of ten “predictive analytic techniques” describe in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Winter 2009 at 32-35, attributized Bayesian analysis could be used by a law department. For example, the tool could clarify why an in-house lawyer selects firms as he or she does by examining the attributes of the law firms the lawyer likes or dislikes.
Attributes can be explicit (size of the firm, location of its offices, years out of law school of the responsible partner) or implicit (subjective descriptions such as “innovative” or “good chemistry”). Many attributes are available for law firms but a law department would have to collect data on the law firms it has used as well as prospective law firms for this analysis to give insights (See my post of Oct. 22, 2008: law firm attributes important for selection with 12 references.)
Similarly, this analytic technique and its associated software could give insights into the positive and negative attributes members of a legal department perceive about a software package.
A previous post on my spelunking among US patent filings for those that have relevance to law department managers lists two granted patents (See my post of Jan. 23, 2009: many more patents that pertain to legal department managers.). This post gives a quick summary of the remaining 14 applications I found among the first 100 matches I reviewed. I quote the first line of the abstract for each. Don’t feel bad if you can’t understand the attrocious writing.
Legal expense tracking and approval methods and systems — Application 20010034675 (“Methods and systems for tracking and approving legal expenses using a legal expense tracking system are disclosed.”)
Automated legal action risk management — Application 20020143562 (“A risk management method and system for facilitating analysis and quantification of risks associated with a legal action.”)
Law Department Management Blog