Articles Posted in Tools

Intrigued by the handful of patents or patent applications pertinent to general counsel that have come to light, I foraged on Free Patents Online. I searched in abstracts of a US database for the term “legal.” That term came up with 142,231 “matches,” which were ranked by some mysterious score that started at 1,000 and went down.

Wading in, I plucked out 16 from among the first 50 that each appear from the abstract to have some relevance to law department managers. Fourteen are applications for patents, which I cover in a later post (See my post of Jan. 23, 2009: some intriguing US patent applications.). Two of them are granted patents: one for a computer-based RFP system and the other for a web-based Legal Management System, which I believe GE may have patented (See my post of Dec. 23, 2008: GE’s web-based Legal Management System.).

Other patents of interest to law departments have appeared on this blog (See my post of Dec. 11, 2007: law departments with software to license and patents; Dec. 23, 2008: Chevron Texaco’s patent application; Jan. 25, 2006: American Express’ patent on law department method; Feb. 8, 2006: FMC patented process; and Jan. 23, 2008: strategic planning and analysis.).

“Legal strategic analysis planning and evaluation control system and method” is the euphonious, lapidary description of United States Patent 5875431. It came to light because a friend of mine, Stuart E. Rickerson, is one of the patent owners. My goal is to share it with the law-department management community. Proust could not craft prose better than does this pithy, Strunk & White abstract:

”This invention is directed to a strategic planning control system, and more particularly to a computer-based, closed-loop legal strategic planning system and method having iterative convergence to an optimal strategy and dynamic tracking of current prevailing legal climates. The system of this invention includes a computer-generated legal strategy for streamlining the legal process by converting it from a traditional task-oriented system to a process-oriented system. By so doing, predetermined objectives and tasks are defined according to a disciplined time schedule, cost targets are defined, and deliverables agreed upon prior to beginning the legal process. A key aspect of the system and method of this invention is a series of computer programs which provide a strategic planning template outlining the objectives and tasks, and their associated timing. The template is case category and case type specific and presents the “best practices” strategic process from which to launch a legal action. The “best practices” are taken from previously concluded well managed cases having a similar case category and case type as the instant case, and which have been identified as paradigms. Three closed-loop control systems are integrated into the system and method of this invention for dynamically monitoring and measuring legal cost reporting and billing, for dynamically monitoring and measuring attainment of objectives and milestone tasks, and for dynamically measuring and controlling the deliverables derived from the timely completion of the legal objectives and tasks. These control systems have special features for maximizing the likelihood of a desired legal outcome, increasing legal productivity, minimizing the cost to achieve that outcome.”

Words fail me.

A survey of 200 attorneys in 2005, “from the largest law firms and corporations in the United States and Canada,” asked about offshore services. Robert Half Legal’s Future Law Office report, “Client Service: Challenges and Strategies,” at 14, gave the percentages who selected one or more of six services.

Litigation support (60% selected it)

Patent development and filing (45%)

Ken Adams, who knows all there is to know about contracts and agreements, doesn’t think that my projection about contracts available for free online is, well, presciently drafted.

Ken writes on his blog, Adams Drafting,“YourFreeLegalForms.com is another docstoc. [Click here for his November 2007 post that criticize an early release of docstoc.] . The problem isn’t a shortage of free legal forms online. Instead, it’s that there’s available online for free a vast and ever-growing supply of contract models, most of them crappy, and separating what’s OK, in terms of language and substance, from what’s not OK is a gruesome task. Free online forms are hardly a panacea.

Furthermore, if I ever need to consult examples of a given kind of business contract, I’m going to go to the motherlode, the SEC’s EDGAR system. [Ken cites two of his previous posts]. By comparison, YourFreeLegalForms offers a puny assortment, and I wouldn’t bet on its getting much more plausible over time.”

If you build the knowledge, will they come? My field of dreams has been that this blog will attract consulting clients. “Hey, here’s a guy who knows a lot about how to manage things in legal departments, an attorney by training with years of consulting experience, so let’s ping him!” Nagging at the back of my mind, however, is the worry that every blog post I write nibbles away at my stock in trade, what understandings and experience I bring to my consulting projects.

Likewise, every lawyer who displays knowledge on the teeming Web bazaar probably worries after clicking “publish” that the statutory exegesis, explanation of a dissenting opinion, survey of the law, or tip for a practitioner eats up a tiny bit of what the lawyer would otherwise offer a paying client, charging by the hour. Or everyone who posts a form contract may thereby, shall we say, risk contracting his paying projects. Vendors who blog tell competitors about their techniques and strategies, not to mention work product. To blog is to give something away.

Traditional publishing also cannibalizes a professional’s stock in trade, knowledge. The Internet does no worse, because its greater reach and dialogue more than makes up for the anonymity and free loading of readers.

LexVisio includes 45 categories of service providers under “Practice Support.” I counted 22 categories that might point an in-house lawyer in the direction of a desired service provider.

Those 22 categories list 600 vendors, with the most (161) in “Court Reporters.” “Technology Consultants,” “Trademark Support, Copyright and Patent Services,” “Litigation Support,” and “Legal Process Outsourcing” followed in numerousness, each with about 50 entries.

The remaining 23 categories list 396 service providers. All of these service providers thrive as part of the broader cottage

I paid attention to the Small Law Department Compensation Survey conducted in the summer of 2008 by ACC and Empsight, www.accempsight.com, at page 9 of the Review Sample. The table on that page lists widely varying numbers of companies who gave data for seven benchmark metrics. For example, the number of attorneys is an “N” of 314 while it is an “N” of only 118 for “Other Law Department Professionals” (not attorneys, paralegals, or administrative staff). I assume that means 196 respondents did not have any Other Law Department Professionals, but it is also possible that some respondents did not fill in that question.

My deeper point is that the average number of attorneys is 2.3 whereas the average number of other law department professionals is 2.0, but from very different numbers of respondents. I don’t think you can reliably say anything about the putative ratio of 2.3 to 2.0. Likewise, the number of companies listed as giving data about paralegals (the “N” for paralegals) is 182, midway between the attorney N and the other professionals N.

Again, since 314 companies had at least one lawyer, did 132 departments have no paralegals? If so, the average of the entire group would be lower than the average for the 182 that reported one or more paralegals. The average given is 1.0, so I assume they divided the total number of reported paralegals by 314.

Some reader, who can thereby enjoy their 15 minutes of fame on this blog, should tell me where there is a comprehensive list of blogs that concentrate on legal-related offshoring. In the meantime I trawled some blog rolls and offer this list of 15, without comments and in alphabetical order. Let me know of others.

Aphelion Legal Blog

Blog From Bangalore (India) by Andrea Lee Negron

Legally Yours, an impressive blog site edited by Rahul Jindal, displays the results of a survey. The 287 respondents, of undisclosed source, answered the question, “Which service are you outsourcing/considering to outsource/supporting?” [Not the optimal phrasing for a question if you want crisp metrics, but set that aside.]

Legal Research 152 (52%)

Contract Review/Drafting/Mgt. 133 (46%)

The tumultuous saga of Borealis AG’s law department appears in the ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Nov. 2008 at 38. In September 2006, the team had a dozen members, “a mixture of lawyers, paralegals (contract manager and company secretarial), a law student, ethics officer, and support staff.” Highlighted by a relocation that year of the legal group from Denmark to Austria, which “precipitated the loss of almost all head-office based legal and support staff,” the general counsel, Ruth Steinholtz, was the only one to move (See my post of May 25, 2008: relocate lawyers with 7 references.).

The article speaks mostly about the benefits to a law department of a leadership development coach, many team meetings, and morale boosters. One of the team initiatives, and what struck me, was that somewhere along the line the legal department “developed a comprehensive legal department strategy document and its first five-year business plan.”

With no sense of irony, the authors brag about this long-long range plan right after they lay out the upheavals of relocations and unplanned departures of key lawyers. The wrenching changes of the Borealis business were the backdrop of intense pressures on the law department. In such a fix, indeed for any law department even in the most stolid industry, a five-year plan is wishful thinking and a feckless exercise.