Articles Posted in Tools

I joined XING months ago, and other than one inquiry from a consultant, all has been silent. The social networking site has a huge following in Europe, but I have found little in the way of legal management material (See my post of Jan. 6, 2009: knowledge exchanges for in-house counsel: Legal OnRamp and LinkedIn.).

A group for legal department attorneys does exist, called “In-house-lawyers managing the interface law / corporation,” and 487 members belong to it. When I searched it I found ten articles under “management” but as to their quality, my German is nowhere near sufficiently gut

Try this at your next retreat. “Café conversations structure small groups of five or six around the host who stays with the table after the rest rotate to new tables to pick up on other conversations, deepen the chosen topics, and meet more people.” This idea comes from David Sibbet, Best Practices for Facilitation (Grove 2007) at 51. The host keeps notes of the discussion, which should last about 30 minutes. The host remains and summarizes the prior conversation for the next group, which pushes the topic further. You can rotate once more after the second session if there is sufficient time and enough participants.

According to Sibbet’s book, the key to successful café conversations is to choose questions that truly matter to the participants, allow time for genuine discussion, and adeptly report back the hosts’ conclusions. Examples might include a series of questions about outside counsel direction, knowledge management, productivity, or development of people. The technique sounds useful for rereats (See my post of Feb. 12, 2008: retreats and conferences with 8 references.). Click here for my article, “Sweet Legal Retreats”.

The corner offices of law departments are hardly immune to trends. Fashionable management ideas such as competitive bids, bill auditing, convergence, offshoring and global spread of offices deluge general counsel (See my post of May 14, 2005: Bain survey of management tools; June 9, 2007: later Bain survey; Nov. 20, 2007: Bain management practices; April 14, 2005: 18 common tools of general counsel; May 14, 2005: wannabe new ideas; Aug. 22, 2006: observations, trends and predictions; and Feb. 20, 2005: trends in law departments.).

Management trends overlap with best practices, in that both imply a spreading recognition of the validity of some management initiative, such as matrix reporting, mentoring, e-billing systems, or partnering with key law firms. I have picked at trends and best practices repeatedly so I read with interest a sidebar in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol., Vol. 86, Dec. 2008 at 74.

The sidebar pithily describes the underlying dynamic of the “pathology of management fads.” It highlights that “the label used to describe a trend may get stretched far beyond its original meaning.” Think of “partnering” or “preferred law firms” as au courant ideas so baggy they fit almost anything. Another point made is that when consultants – Rees Morrison, look in a mirror – codify some practice simply to explain the phenomenon, they further validate it. I write about expert systems, for example, and to that very small degree they become more legitimate.

A professor and a researcher collected court orders for professional fees in 101 bankruptcy cases and performed a regression analysis that unraveled the factors that went into the bankruptcy judges’ awards of fees. The article about this study, in ABA J., Vol. 95, Jan. 2009 at 12, mentions such factors as the bankrupt’s assets, the duration of the case, the length of docket entries, and the number of professionals. The statistical tool determined which factors made the most difference in the fees awarded and their relative contributions.

Multiple regression has and could shed light on many aspects of law department management (See my post of Aug. 14, 2005: regression analysis; Feb. 4, 2008: regression analysis of customer arbitrations; Aug. 27, 2005: litigation application; Feb. 12, 2008: make-buy efficiency curve; May 11, 2008 #2: correlation squared and the F-statistic; and June 26, 2008: lawyer experience against staffing levels and spend.).

The research, co-authored by Joseph Doherty (UCLA Law School’s Empirical Research Group), also confirmed a scale effect in bankruptcy fee awards: fees paid out end up being a declining percentage of the assets of the reorganized company as the assets grow larger. Perhaps the decline occurs for reasons that are similar to those that explain the decline in total legal spending as a percentage of revenue as companies grow. Reasons for the percentage shrinkage appear in my article in Legal Times, Jan. 28, 2008 (See my post of Feb. 6, 2008: decline of TLS with increased size.). The similarity of assets to revenue and professional fees to outside counsel fees seems plausible.

A recent piece by David Hechler, Corp. Counsel, Dec. 22, 2008, offers some details about the nascent – more like adolescent – industry of legal process offshoring (LPO). He spotlights UnitedLex and its CEO, Daniel Reed, and co-founder, Ajay Agrawal.

UnitedLex employs about 240 Indian lawyers. Those lawyers have earned their degrees either by completing a three-year program after college (as US lawyers do) or a five-year program after secondary school (like a joint BA-JD degree). What differs from the US is that Indian lawyers do not have to pass a bar exam.

Hechler’s piece stresses the careful hiring practices of UnitedLex and its emphasis on both training and supervision, including supervision by two U.S. patent attorneys. The article says that the sweet spot of LPOs are “repetitive tasks that can be taught on the front end, and measured for accuracy on the back. Not all companies have it, or have it in sufficient volume to justify offshoring.” Some of the examples in the article include proof reading patents, checking trademarks for renewal dates, reviewing warranty agreements, prior art searches, invalidity analyses of patent infringement claims filed against a company, and patent landscape analyses.

I commend the First Law Department Operations Survey, published by InsideCounsel and Blickstein Group, but, like anyone who digs into survey data, wish it would ask in the next survey a different style of question. My example is the question that asked respondents to check which of 16 cost-saving initiatives did their legal department use. The data shows that e-billing and flat fees were selected most often – 77 percent of the 26 respondents chose each.

The style of question I urge next time would ask “What percent of your bills paid came through your e-billing system,” and “What percent of your fees paid in 2008 were on a fixed fee?” The question is better, although harder to answer, because some department might have a single, small example of a fixed-fee arrangement but it could honestly check that it engaged in that initiative. Or its e-billing software covers only ten if its 50 firms and about a third of its total spending.

Susan Neiman’s Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grownup Idealists (Harcourt 2008) emphasizes that you cannot derive how things should be from the knowledge of how they are. That is, unless you hold very conservative views such as that our current situation is the peak.

Hence, benchmark data, which describes how things are, do not guide us to how law departments ought to be managed. All the posts on this blog, most of which describe something existing, do not extrapolate to how best to manage. The gap is similar to the shortcoming of inductive reasoning: all the instances in the world cannot prove that the next time the same thing will happen. Another way to put this is the difference between description and explanation. To describe something in a law department is not necessarily to explain it, which is the first step in appreciating what might be done to change it.

The term “change management” unnerves me. It claims to describe what seems to be a highly amorphous field (See my post of May 15, 2005: change management at the NLRB.). Even so, I have written about aspects of change in law departments.

Most of my comments dwell on the obstacles to change (See my post of Sept. 3, 2008: behavior change; March 26, 2008: changes of policies and resulting consequences; June 4, 2008: hyper-change in the legal industry; May 31, 2006: fear of change; May 30, 2007: working memory and the challenge of change; April 5, 2006: pace of change in law departments; June 5, 2006: carrots and sticks; and Nov. 26, 2006: bureaucratic challenges.).

Unintended consequences crop up after most changes (See my post of Aug. 28, 2005: trade offs when actions are taken; Aug. 1, 2006: second-order consequences; Dec. 17, 2006: all practices have pros and cons; and July 10, 2007: well-intentioned actions boomerang.).

Justia’s BlawgSearch has a category called “Corporate Law Department Blogs”.

I have listed the blawgs in that category with this month’s rank from the highest ranking down. Justia determines the rank of a blog based on the number of visits to it from the BlawgSearch search engine and directory listing pages (See my post of Nov. 30, 2008: legal management blogs on the ABA site and six references; and Feb. 20, 2008: blawgs.).

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In 2006, the General Counsel of Accenture, Douglas Scrivner, created a part-time position within his Legal Group specifically designed to focus on its internal and external diversity initiatives (See my post of Jan. 14, 2007: Accenture’s expectations of outside counsel on diversity.). At the time Scrivner created the position, the legal group had approximately 370 members (See my post of April 4, 2006: leadership councils at Accenture.).

“The person in this position spends 30 percent of his time working specifically on legal group diversity matters. He is responsible for advancing the design, development, and implementation of Accenture’s legal group diversity initiatives,” in the words of 8-K, Vol. 4, Fall 2008 at 15. Other instances I have run across of a general counsel assigning a lawyer to promote and lead an initiative include technology, knowledge management, and outside counsel control.