A publication from an insurance company offers some suggestions for how to deal with change, which I have paraphrased.
Get the facts about what is changing, what is not changing, and why. Rumors and speculation distort the actual changes that may be ahead.
Actively seek information from people you trust to get the facts and try to learn the bigger context. The broader your view of what is coming, the better you can cope.
Practices are the fourth and most common level of activities in my schema (See my post of Nov. 19, 2008: priorities; Nov. 19, 2008: programs; and Nov. 19, 2008: practices.).
Practices are people’s accustomed ways of working and working together. They include culture, and everything that ethnographers pay attention to such as dress codes, collegiality and cliques, and interaction in the cafeteria. Practices show up in many other areas such as management by walking around, informal communication patterns, recognition ceremonies, open and closed doors, silence, hierarchy, the dispersal of offices, dual reporting, legal leadership teams, and hiring patterns.
Some corollaries of practices deserve notice.
Projects are a third level of activities in law departments, defined primarily by their being one-off significant activities (See my post of Nov. 19, 2008: priorities; and Nov. 19, 2008: programs.).
Project examples of projects include relocation of the law department and the choice of a matter management system. Other one-time projects would be build-outs of new space, installation of filing cabinets, or selecting a consult to conduct a review.
Projects raise a number of considerations.
Having introduced priorities (See my post of Nov. 19, 2008: priorities.), here I turn to programs.
Programs are a law department’s repeated sets of activities that have defined objectives and similar steps done time after time. Programs, therefore, include evaluations of lawyers, client satisfaction surveys, monthly reports, quarterly budget updates, compensation decisions every year, and the bi-annual conference of the law department.
Some corollaries of programs stand out.
This series of four looks at the management activities in law departments at four levels: priorities, programs, projects, and practices. Each post defines a level, gives examples, and touches on some observations about the level. Let’s start with priorities.
Priorities are the fundamental contributions delivered or expected of an in-house legal team. Mission statements purport to summarize priorities. Priorities typically include people, quality, client satisfaction, cost, and roles (See my post of March 20, 2008: mission statement with 17 references.) but law departments that have not prepared a mission statement still pursue priorities.
Some corollaries of priorities occur to me:
Wired’s Business Trends 2008 describes four online services that use people in addition to algorithms to filter the Internet’s wealth of information: Brijit, Mahalo, ChaCha, and Squidoo. What this blawgster tries to do, with Internet material as well as hardcopy and my own consulting experience, is somewhat similarly to curate the domain of law department management.
Achievable, not for years; hubristic, yes; useful to some people, certainly if you judge by the couple of hundred people who read this site on any given day. Even more useful, I presume, to the ten or so a day who spend more than 10 minutes reading blog posts.
It keeps me pumped up that I am doing my small part to find, organize, and enrich ideas in a tiny niche. A miniscule niche in comparison to the vastness of all information out there, but vital to a few lawyers. “Dartmouth is a small college, but there are those who love it.”
Visualize a circle in the middle of a PowerPoint slide that has multiple arrows pointing inward to it. The circle might be a desired future state for a law department. Each arrow and text box it comes from represents a different aspect of that vision. This description of a “Mandala vision” comes from David Sibbet, Best Practices for Facilitation (Grove 2007) at 87. Mandala is a Sanskrit word for universal pattern.
For example, if your law department wants to imagine a better state of affairs with outside counsel, that would be the inner circle. Some of the factors along the arrows that influence that future state include the number of firms used, the guidance you give those firms, the amount of work you have to give them in different areas of law, your lawyers’ abilities to manage partners, procurement policies, and more.
If a reader attended one of the following four conferences and would be willing to share with me any of the conference proceedings on management topics, I will be glad to post about the ideas they contain. Or let me know what ideas were interesting to you. Anonymity fully preserved!
2008 Corporate Counsel Leadership Forum, Chicago, USA on September 17th, organized by the Executive Forum
2008 Corporate Counsel Summit Europe, Lausanne, Switzerland on September 23-24, organized by Legal Week
So far this year I have published nine articles, of which five concern relations between law departments and the law firms they retain:
“When Interventions Go Too Far” [interventions in law firm operations] (NY Law Journal, Feb. 28, 2008)
“The Road to Alternative Fees” (NY Law Journal, April 17, 2008)
At some point we will be able to analyze data on a moderate numbers off cases and predict the costs of similar cases. An inspiration for this forecast is a computer system that predicts which death-row inmates are most likely to be executed, as described in Scientific Am., Vol. 299, Sept. 2008 at 36. Software analyzed data on about 1,000 death-row prisoners, including their sex, age, race, schooling and whether they were ultimately executed. When given similar information about 300 more prisoners, the logic developed from the first set of data correctly predicted the outcome for 92 percent of those cases.
Someday, when a group of law departments contribute sufficient data on certain matters, someone will use similar software to predict the likely cost of such matters (See my post
Law Department Management Blog