Articles Posted in Tools

Bet you didn’t analyze the 118 sponsors (as of Sept. 20, 2008 ) for the ACC’s Annual Meeting 2008! I think they tell us what management issues are bubbling.

ACC categorizes each vendor, so I have used their 17 categories. Of the sponsorship group, 37 are law firms. I counted five associations of law firms (The Bomchil Group, LexMundi, Meritas, TerraLex, and Worklaw Network (See my post of Feb. 21, 2008 #2: law-firm networks with 7 references; Sept. 21, 2008: two more law-firm consortia.).

The largest group of sponsors, however, consists of 32 who are listed either first as “Electronic Discovery” or 11 more who are in that category later – sponsors could list up to eight categories (Access Data, Attenex, Applied Discovery, Case Central, Clearwell Systems, Contoural, CT Summation, Discovery Box, Electronic Evidence Discovery, eMag Solutions, Discoverybox, Discovery Mining, Electronic Evidence Discovery, Epiq Systems, Fios, First Advantage, Guidance Software, H5, Hudson, Legal, IE Discovery, Index Engines, Integreon, IPRO Tech, Merrill Corp., Mimosa Systems, Providus, Recommind, RENEW DATA, Special Counsel, SPi, and Transperfect) (See my post of Feb. 9, 2006: hundreds of vendors at LegalTech 2007.).

As I shape a blog post, I spend a moment trying to fit the current item into the grander scheme of things. I am convinced that every idea about how to operate a law department hovers loosely in a multi-dimensional cluster of related ideas.

Having accumulated and organized my posts on internal budgets of law departments (See my post of Sept. 9, 2008: internal budgets parts I; and Sept. 12, 2008: internal budgets part II), let me illustrate this conviction by using internal budgets to outline how all concepts float in a hierarchy of concepts.

Above budgets, at a more encompassing level higher in the hierarchy, are several concepts that draw on budgets, such as client satisfaction, cost control, strategic planning, management reporting, and talent management. Each of these concepts represents a larger sphere of ideas and subsumes internal budgets.

Economics offers general counsel and other managers in law departments many concepts that collectively have great explanatory firepower: I have listed below alphabetically 32 important terms drawn from economics and my posts that introduced them, applied them, or referred to them.

Feb. 1, 2006: auctions; July 11, 2008: autarky; Sept. 4, 2005: behavioral economics; Jan. 17, 2006: behavioral economics; April 27, 2006: beta and levels of risk; April 27, 2006: comparative advantage; Dec. 21, 2005: diminishing returns and patent spending; Sept. 19, 2008: economics of information; Aug. 26, 2005: economies of size and scale; Oct. 1, 2005: efficiency and effectiveness as models; June 25, 2008: evolutionary economics; Feb. 18, 2006: fixed and variable costs; March 22, 2006: free riders; March 16, 2008: game theory with 6 references.); Sept. 7, 2008: information asymmetry with 7 references; April 27, 2006: marginal cost; Sept. 19, 2008: moral hazard; May 10, 2005: net present value of litigation expenses; and April 23, 2006: NPV and discounts vs rebates; Aug. 20, 2006: neuro-economics; March 12, 2006: nominal and inflation-adjusted metrics; Sept. 4, 2005: Pareto optimum; June 27, 2007: Pareto’s Law and team billings; Feb. 15, 2006: prediction markets; Jan. 16, 2006: principal-agent issues; May 24, 2005: profit margin as a benchmark denominator; Dec. 16, 2007: profit margins of seven global law firms; Jan. 10, 2008: profit margin discounts: July 20, 2005: Allen & Overy at 36%; April 27, 2006: monopoly power; April 20, 2008: choice of firms; Sept. 19, 2008: opportunity costs; April 27, 2006: price elasticity: March 28, 2008: three ways to deal with prices; Feb. 7, 2008: productivity; April 27, 2006: rents; July 29, 2007: economic rents; Jan. 13, 2006: risk compared to uncertainty; July 31, 2006: rival and non-rivalrous goods; Feb. 1, 2006: supply and demand in auctions; March 20, 2008: supply and demand and compensation in-house; July 31, 2006: transaction costs.)

This blogger also has a voice!

I invite you to join me in a series of down-to-earthy, nitty-gritty seminars, much like what I try to make of this blog.

Corporate Counsel and I introduce “Operational Effectiveness: How-To’s for In-House Law Departments,” monthly webinars custom designed for general counsel and managing attorneys in law departments.

A two-page, undated handout from CPA describes Microsoft’s use of that company’s people and facilities in India for a variety of IP services. The services include patent proofreading, prior art searching, and docketing.

Marty Shively, Associate General Counsel and Director of Worldwide IP Operations states that “This fiscal year [2007 I think] Microsoft will spend about $3 million on its patent LPO [legal process outsourcing] services in India.” Shively goes on to estimate that the same work would cost about $9.5 million at US prices, so he claims that his law department has saved $6.5 million.

A CPA team of four began supporting IBM’s IP practice in January 2005. “Since then it has grown to 30 engineers and six support executives.” If we broadly assume they each billed 1,850 hours during the previous year, a total 54,000 hours, their effective rate, ignoring disbursements, ran about $45 an hour. The US cost of equivalent work, on these numbers and the ratio between $3 million and $9.5 million, Shively must think would have been about $142 an hour (See my post of June 25, 2008: offshore with 27 references.). It seems that a fair amount of the services are paralegal level,

Ideas for this blog come from everywhere, but some sources turn up thoughts much more commonly than other do (See my post of Nov. 13, 2007: publications I cite regularly.). One of my troves is the series from K&L Gates (formerly Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham) where they publish relatively short observations from various general counsel. The firm calls its series top of mind.

Ten times I have drawn on points made in the series (See my post of Dec. 21, 2005: culture at Phillips; Dec. 6, 2007: contracts and offshore services at Sapient; Jan. 30, 2006: methodology comments; Dec. 17, 2006: ADVO and its solo general counsel; Jan. 30, 2006: attributes of outside counsel selection; Dec. 17, 2006: micro-managing outside counsel; Dec. 17, 2006: Radio One and “majors”; Dec. 17, 2006: Affiliated Computer and contractual flexibility; Dec. 21, 2005: Ascential Software and “majors”; and Dec. 21, 2005: cultivating regulators.).

Fascinated as I am with vocabulary, I relished this paragraph. It comes from a book by Laurance Urdang, a word-lover who died recently and was eulogized in the NY Times, Aug. 26, 2008 at C10 (See my post of Aug. 12, 2008: unusual vocabulary on this blog.).

“This is not a succedaneum for satisfying the nympholepsy of nullifadians. Rather it is hope that the haecceity of this enchiridion of arcane and recondite sesquipedalian items will appeal to the oniomania of an eximious Gemeinschaft whose legerity and sophrosyne, whose Sprachgefühl and orexis will find more than fugacious fulfillment among its felicific pages.”

But of course.

John Rawls, one of the foremost American philosophers, urges us to think about justice from a standpoint he calls the original position. As explained in Susan Neiman’s Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grownup Idealists (Harcourt 2008) at 212, the original position asks you, “How would you design a society if you didn’t know who you would turn out to be in it?”.

A general counsel of a like philosophical bent might thoughtfully ask, “How would I design my law department if I didn’t know who in it I would be?”

Since the general counsel might be reincarnated as a file clerk, that perspective should encourage open communication, merit-based promotions and assignments of responsibility, tolerance, encouragement of everyone to develop their highest and best capabilities, equity and fairness, and supportiveness.

Here is an example of how to use a survey of the law department. Boehringer Ingelheim began its pro bono program more than five years ago. Since the start of the program, approximately 30 percent of the legal department has participated. A piece in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, Aug. 2008 at 45, from which this post is drawn, explains that an Associate General Counsel coordinates the program.

“After working on over 60 different legal matters for over 40 nonprofits,” that lawyer (Bruce Banks) surveyed the entire legal staff – admins, paralegals, support staff and lawyers – to find out what kinds of pro bono opportunities attract them. A survey such as this, especially if the results are compiled by someone outside the legal department so that respondents can answer honestly, is a low-cost, excellent tool for law department managers.

More than 80 legal process outsourcing (LPO) vendors competed for recognition in this year’s Black Book Survey, according to Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, Aug. 2008 at 34. I have not seen the survey, but from the short announcement in the magazine, it arrays top-ten lists in a number of categories of LPO services. For example, Contract & Legal Document Review is one category and Overall is another category (See my post of July 16, 2007: comments on last year’s survey.).

Individual categories include innovation, training, trust, reliability, brand image, and marginal value adds. I have written with regularity on outsourcing, although I tend to refer to it as offshoring (See my post of June 25, 2008: offshore with 27 references.)