Articles Posted in Tools

A Six Sigma project at a manufacturing firm tackled the chaotic situation of too many corporate entities where too little was readily known about them. The project concluded that the lawyers needed to gather information on all the company’s Asian-Pacific entities. They created a database and prepared an ownership chart.
The database stores all the charter documents of the entities, lists the directors and officers, and includes some other information that is relevant to corporate governance and corporate secretarial responsibilities. The database is online for everyone in the region to access and has tabs for the categories of documents (See my post of Feb. 13, 2008: Six Sigma with 18 references.)

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) resembles some decisions about non-hourly fee arrangements in that both are efforts to match what is paid against the value of what is gained.

A thoughtful article in the Bus. Lawyer, Vol. 63, Aug. 2008 at 1187, analyses closing opinions of counsel in terms of standard CBA methodology and assumptions. Among many points, the author emphasizes the difficulties of deciding before legal services are provided what should be paid for them. “[I]n certain important respects we may not know the benefits of a closing opinion without incurring the costs” (at 1190). Likewise, law departments often cannot put a financial value on legal work without first incurring the costs of that work.

Cost-benefit analysis could help with some of the decisions general counsel make about the return on investment (ROI) of various management initiatives (See my post of May 1, 2005: bill review software; May 14, 2005: knowledge management; Sept. 21, 2005: Cisco’s discovery lab; Nov. 19, 2005: Google’s law department; May 4, 2007: Holcim’s law department; May 14, 2005: knowledge management; June 16, 2006: various management actions; Aug. 16, 2006: portals; Dec. 9, 2006: electronic repositories of law-firm work product; Feb. 17, 2007: products and services; Jan. 14, 2007 GE’s claims; Oct. 8, 2007: knowledge management initiatives; Dec. 11, 2007: DuPont’s EDGE system

Counsel to Counsel, Sept. 2008 at 18, has some findings on online professional networks. Based on a survey of 673 lawyers — including 449 corporate counsel — almost 50 percent are members of online networks and more than 40 percent are interested in joining a network designed specifically for attorneys. The corporate counsel are members of online social networks like LinkedIn, mySpace, and Facebook. Another finding is that conferences do not allow attendees to meet everyone they would like to, whereas online networks allow them to search and reach out to everyone who belongs (See my post of Sept. 21, 2008: online professional networks, with 7 references.).

The survey was carried out by a consultancy that creates professional networks, Leader Networks, and the sponsor, LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell, is creating its own for lawyers. To reduce the evident risk of biased conclusions, this was a blind study, meaning the respondents did not know the sponsor’s name, and anyone can download the survey.

Part of a comprehensive patenting program is to create maps of an industry’s and company’s patent landscapes. A patent landscape visually portrays the number, strength, and relationships between the relevant patents and a company’s own patents. According to IP Law & Bus., Vol. 6, Sept. 2008 at 44, “GE designed and built in-house an elaborate application called Matrixx that can analyze data on IP or mechanical and electronic arts and help determine what patents would be most useful. In addition it can examine the IP spaces in which GE operates and determine what areas are most open to future R&D.” That sounds to me to be an impressive capability.

Any law department that oversees a significant patent portfolio should welcome technology like General Electrics, assuming the cost can be swallowed. Software is available that can help automate much of this mapping and visualization work (See my post of Dec. 11, 2007: Microsoft’s software to classify large portfolios of patents.).

In an article on creativity, an author discusses postmortems held by Pixar, the movie studio, but his insights carry over to law departments. He believes that people learn from postmortems but don’t like to conduct them. Most people would rather talk about what went right than what went wrong. And after spending months and months on a matter, usually lawyers too just want to move on to the next one. These truths about retrospective review come from the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 85, Sept. 2008 at 72.

The author suggests three simple techniques for overcoming these problems. One is to try various ways of conducting the postmortems. If you repeat the same format, you are likely to learn the same lessons. Another technique is to ask each person to list the top five things they would do again and the top five things they wouldn’t do. The balance between praise and criticism stimulates thinking. Third, bring to the review as much data as you can. Data makes the retrospective more neutral. Facts and figures stimulate discussion and challenge assumptions that may arise from subjective impressions (See my post of May 27, 2008: postmortems with 7 references.)

A company called Corporate Counsel Exchange reached me yesterday and made me an offer I can certainly refuse. Some months from now, I can attend an event where I will be guaranteed 10 meetings with “general counsel who are interested in management consulting services.” Well, that is what she promised.

The earnest woman beseeching my participation said that as a “silver level” participant and one of only three consulting groups, I would have the privilege of these speed-dating sessions upon investing a five-figure fee.

Has anyone who reads this blog had any experience with such an arrangement? I am incredulous that any senior in-house lawyer would subject him- or herself to a daylong barrage of service providers, even if the lawyer’s expenses are all paid to a fancy resort.

Yup, I actually logged on to Twitter and rounded up the usual suspects. Pretty bleak, since when I searched “general counsel” all of 10 appeared. But that was much better than “law department” which came up with 1 hit and “legal department” had none.

I closed my session with a search for “lawyer” and 888 of them appeared!

My time Twittering will be very limited.

Patent lawyers in companies can retain a slew of service providers. Given the huge sums of money involved in patents and their strategic importance (See my post of Aug. 13, 2008: total legal spending related to R&D spending and patents.), it is not surprising that this blog has mentioned quite a few categories of patent support services:

1. Auctioneers (See my post of Jan. 16, 2006: Ocean Tomo.).

2. Consultancies such as ipCapital Group, described in IP Law & Bus., Vol. 6, Sept. 2008 at 42, as an “intellectual property consultancy. That is also the forte of Eyal Iffergang at Project Leadership Associates.

An earlier post covered the three most populous categories of sponsors at the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) Annual Meeting (See my post of Sept. 21, 2008: law firms, discovery, and compliance.). As I contemplated the group of sponsors as a whole it became clear that many vendors offer products and services that are hard to capture in a single term. A large consulting firms, to cite one example, might render services in “Billing,” “Legal Software,” “Management & Business Consulting,” and “Compliance.” Law firms are about the only pure play around.

Second, this particular group of sponsors ranges from start ups to Fortune 100s. It is quite common to be a small as a niche player; and yet consolidation has also created enormous organizations that sell to law departments.

Third, I suspect that the entrepreneurial cauldron is boiling. Most of the sponsors are probing other companies, strategizing about what direction to move, losing employees to spin-off efforts, seeking financing, and generally trying their best to grow and make money.

A huge source of information about the law resides in blogs. The ABA Journal, Vol. 94, Sept. 2008 at 54, drawing on responses of approximately 850 lawyers to a nationwide survey, states that two percent of American lawyers maintain a law blog. Since there are something like one million lawyers practicing in the United States, that would mean 20,000 law-related blawgs! If that number is even close to reality and a moderate portion of the blogs are active, it means an incredible amount of law-related material is available at no cost online.

The article adds that eight percent of all law firms in America “maintain a law blog.” The Journal may be confusing web sites and blogs, but either way it means that more explanations of statutes, regulations, and areas of law are online – not to mention tour de force blogs on law department management (See my post of March 9, 2007: the price of legal information is being driven to zero; Jan. 10, 2006: lawyer time online; Nov. 15, 2005: online resources; Jan. 13, 2006: free online information; Jan. 28, 2008: hard to find the right law firm through the internet; and Jan. 25, 2008: Martindale-Hubble and shared evaluations of law firms.).

Finally, the survey found that 15 percent of lawyers have joined a social network, while four percent of firms have joined one (See my post of Feb. 21, 2008: Texas Bar Circle network; Jan. 19, 2008: LinkedIn; Aug. 15, 2008: legal department management group on LinkedIn; Jan. 30, 2008 #2: LawLink; March 9, 2007: Legal OnRamp; March 25, 2008: PreCYdent; and March 16, 2008: Web 2.0 and in-house lawyers.).