Articles Posted in Tools

To make sure initiatives in law departments are carried out, general counsel often appoint committees. For example, as described in 8-K, Vol. 4, Fall 2008 at 15, the legal division of Pfizer has a very active Diversity Committee. In fact, that Committee has a Steering Committee, which is a smaller group of people who direct the activities of the broader committee. Within the Pfizer Diversity Committee for example is the Communications Work Group.

Among other things, the Diversity Committee has set in motion are a “needs-assessment” task force and a mentoring program (See my post of May 29, 2008: mentor with 10 references, coaching.). A “needs-assessment” sounds like a scorecard for who has what competencies and needs what extra skills.

Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank appointed its first general counsel in January, an Olswang partner named Simon Copleston. When he arrived there were three lawyers at the bank who specialized in debt collection work, and oil was pushing $140 a barrel. Copleston quickly added seven more lawyers, thereby creating a legal team called the general counsel’s office, according to Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, Dec. 2008 at 111. In an interview he said that he has space for one more senior lawyer.

The busy general counsel also selected ten firms to serve on a general panel, one American firm (Reed Smith), eight UK firms, and one Middle East firm (Al Tamimi & Company).

All of these steps fall quite in line with what law departments do in the United States and Europe. Law department management knows no geographic boundaries. Today, however, with crude selling for $90 a barrel less, I hope that rapid build-up and investment of management time in Abu Dhabi gushes with productivity.

In Chapter 3 of Michael Shermer, Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown (Time Books 2005) at 38, Shermer considers six “heresies” that challenge deeply rooted scientific assumptions. He summarizes his discussion of the validity of the unscientific positions with a range. For “each of these heresies I have ascribed a ‘fuzzy factor’ between .1 and .9, from least likely to most likely to be true.”

Observers of our industry might assay an application of Shermer’s method: for a standard, 10-lawyer US law department, assign to various management practices a fuzzy factor, from least likely to most likely advantageous. Practices abound, so why not try to grade their effectiveness and speak in a quantified way about relative potency?

It seems extravagant (of time) and duplicitous (of integrity) at the end of a competitive bid to negotiate simultaneously with more than one law firm. Yet the ACC Docket, Vol. 25, Sept. 2007 at 43, offers some language to enable your department to do so, albeit in the context of contractual negotiations. “While we would very much like to seriously consider moving forward at this time with you, we are also pursuing a similar form of contract with an alternative vendor in order to receive their reaction as well.” If competition is the goal of an RFP process, have at it!

Tracing a visit to this blog from the ABA’s website and its compendium of blawgs, I took a few minutes to see how many of its categories pertain to law department management. Amidst the surfeit of substantive law blogs, here are the 17 categories I noticed that might pertain to my bailiwick and the number of blawgs purportedly in them.

Law Practice Management (268)

Legal Information (240)

My friend Ron Friedmann, of Integreon, was talking about offshoring legal services. He stressed that cost economies are not the only benefits of using resources in lower-cost locales to handle legal-related services. Ron made the point that when a competent LPO (legal process outsoucer) takes on a set of tasks it is likely also to think through how best to accomplish not only the task but also the handoffs.

Reorganization of tasks can bring more efficiency and quality control. Who does what, and when, goes to the heart of process improvement. As to handoffs, those are the key junctures where information or deliverables go from one group to another. An adept LPO can save money while it streamlines processes.

General counsel can legitimately fret that a process to select outside counsel through their responses to a Request for Proposal can careen off the tracks. The team that develops the RFP has a tendency to Christmas-tree it with lots of steps, controls, and questions. Too many cooks spoil the broth; too many law firms get invited to the feast. The cumbersome procedures and burdensome requests for content are then magnified by a bureaucratic nightmare of evaluations, reviews, presentations and negotiations of contracts. Everything about the RFP takes on a Frankenstein life of its own.

RFP processes should be surgical: get in quickly, remove what you must, and stitch the incision (See my post of March 30, 2008: RFP with 22 references.)

Bob Elliott, President of AKS-Labs in Raleigh, NC, sent me examples of his company’s balanced scorecards for legal departments. AKS-Labs offers software, Balanced Scorecard Designer, that automates the development of a scorecard:.

The AKS-Labs litigation scorecard looks at lawsuits from five perspectives, including cost and cycle time, and lets the user change the relative importance of each perspective (weighting their values between 0 and 10). Within each perspective are various “Goals”. The scorecard also has a “Performance” column that lets you change its values.

This litigation scorecard embodies the key ideas of balanced scorecards. Identify a suite of measurements that capture the essential aspects of an activity. In this instance, it is management of the costs, speed and leverage of litigation management. Then collect data for each measurement and weight the relative importance of the measurements. Finally, decide what direction – target – to aspire for as the measurements change (See my post of Feb. 26, 2008: balanced scorecards with 8 references.).

Rather than wading through a full RFP process, consider an abbreviated method. Explain to an experienced service provider the outlines of what you are seeking. Provide them with as much detail as you can and ask them to share with you what they think they might be able to do for you.

The advantage of this approach is that you can much more quickly make progress and you can shape an arrangement that is the most beneficial to both sides.

The disadvantage is that you lose a sense of what the competitive market offers. This disadvantage may not be as bad as it seems because quite often responses to proposal requests come across as quite similar. In the end, savvy practitioners can ask better questions and give better answers face-to-face in a dialogue then you can learn from the rigidity and slowness that may characterize some RFP processes.

A legal department I am familiar with has prepared a guide for non-lawyers to the negotiation of contracts. It makes sense for in-house counsel to articulate negotiation strategies and tactics, both for themselves and for their clients. Much time in contractual dealings goes to working out the terms (See my post of Nov. 22, 2008: Six Sigma project on IT contracts.).

That guideline document supplements efforts such as templates that have common language for key paragraphs, document assembly software, and contract management packages such as Procuri (See my post of Nov. 22, 2008: contract management software with 12 references.).