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Journalists call me from time to time and I always like talking with them. They usually know about some situation that is new to me and they ask good questions. They make me think. Sherry Karabin called a while back regarding a piece on consultants to law departments, which appears in Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, July 2008 at 22 and quotes me. The article emphasizes how consultants to law departments continually evolve new services.

The article refers to Jeff Nielsen of Navigant Consulting (investigative services), Scott Rosenberg of Huron Consulting (e-discovery), Pamela Woldow of Altman Weil (compliance), me on outside counsel spending and about leaving Hildebrandt International, John Wallbillich, and Elizabeth Davis of CRA International (See my post of Jan. 1, 2008: consulting with 15 references.)

A previous post listed more than 20 ways to bring down legal costs, each with some percentage estimate or dollar value of the saving (See my post of Aug. 21, 2008: estimates of savings from techniques.). Other methods of saving money have shown up on this blog, but the initiatives have not had any quantification (See my post of March 6, 2007: get accreditation for internal CLE courses; Jan. 28, 2008: reduce maintenance contracts; and June 14, 2007: Citi relocated lawyers to a lower-cost city.).

Some items on this blog have addressed return on investment (ROI) estimates for various initiatives (See my post of May 1, 2005: bill review software; May 14, 2005: knowledge management; July 31, 2005: implausible assumptions; Sept. 14, 2005: 20% for e-billing; and Aug. 5, 2005 for returns on other techniques.). Other items address how to calculate savings and the legitimacy of them search savings (See my post of May 26, 2007: shift work and percentages for cost saving techniques; and Aug. 5, 2005: ACCA list of methods and percentage savings.).

General counsel read and hear that they can reduce their spending by plunging into all kinds of techniques. True, at least to some extent, but some of the claimed savings are grossly exaggerated. I have collected a startling range of savings estimates or claimed actual amounts from more than 18 techniques. My wish is that we had cool-headed appraisals and reliable metrics for the financial results from all of them.

The 27 posts are in alphabetical order by quantified cost-saving technique (See my post of Jan. 13, 2006: in the average case, ADR reduced about six months of litigation time, saved about $10,000 per case in litigation costs, and achieved better settlements; Jan. 14, 2007 #3: savings of 10-35% from use of auctions; March 4, 2007: on average “companies save 30 percent to 50 percent by using contract attorneys and paralegals instead of sending the same work to a law firm”; Aug. 5, 2005: savings of 20% from budgets; May 24, 2007: ‘the insurer is saving an eye-popping $1 million over two years on continuing legal education classes”; Aug. 5, 2008: savings from convergence at GE and from ECA; Aug. 3, 2005: convergence saved Merrill Lynch in 2004 more than $16 million; Sept. 14, 2005: early case assessment yields 20 percent cost savings; March 15, 2006: savings from ECA by DuPont; May 14, 2005: vendor claimed “typical savings” from electronic invoice processing: “2-5% of total invoiced initially, 8-10% after tuning”; Nov. 3, 2005: Microsoft saves 2-3% a year on legal costs because of e-billing; Aug. 5, 2005: share discovery costs with other parties, and “savings typically range from 40% to 60%”; May 9, 2007: Pitney Bowes estimated “the company saves up to 15% on fixed-fee matters”; Jan. 30, 2006: hire former employees for litigation support – a department saved $1.5 million in legal expenses; Jan. 23, 2006: insource work and, for example, pocket $200,000 a year in outside counsel costs on EEOC-related matters “by training HR staff in how to investigate and respond to employment-related complaints”; Jan. 16, 2006: Honeywell’s “spending on legal services had fallen by at least 25 percent as a result of using” a legal research firm; March 23, 2007: litigation support vendors, and a law department that claimed “a 50 percent reduction in data processing charges and a 70 percent reduction in hosting charges.”; Aug. 5, 2005: return on matter management systems; April 13, 2007: average savings from matter management systems; Nov. 27, 2007: “cost savings of about 30 to 40% can be achieved through Israel offshoring and about 50 to 60% in Asia”; Jan. 3, 2006: GC saved his previous employer “hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by hiring experienced paralegals”; Nov. 13, 2005: Dow audit and pruning of patents saved $40 million; Nov. 24, 2005: Cisco built its own storage array and other litigation support and “reduce[d] our costs of discovery by approximately 97 percent” and “the expense of outside legal review by 30 percent”; May 8, 2007: with Ford’s policy to go to trial “the business decision to litigate means that settlements are usually 20-50 percent lower than they would be if they paid plaintiffs’ lowest demands.”).

I would appreciate it if you would send me any data on other savings projections or findings (See my post of Aug. 21, 2008: other comments on techniques and savings.).

Vendors of software have conjured these two terms to imply a difference. In Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, June 2008 at 52, both terms — matter management and legal spend management — appear but my feeling is there is much ado about nothing. All matter databases worth talking about keep some information about what the law department spends on at least some of the matters. Legal spend management has a broader reach but all spending relates to matters. The two terms as they refer to software have no distinctions.

As to the clumsy and ugly term “matter-centric,” how do I really feel about the word? The neologism appears in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, June 2008 at 51. All matter management systems focused on, hold your breath, matters. Matters are the center of a matter management system (See my post of April 17, 2006: how accounting standards dictate some matters.). What does the new term add? We might just as well talk with fresh amazement about legal-centric law departments.

The 2007 ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey asked a group of questions about law departments and compliance. As summarized in ACC Docket, Vol. 30, March 2008 at 12, “less than half of law departments have the following specific internal controls for validating the accuracy of the data in their compliance reports: audit trail of changes to reporting data (18%); verification that data has been correctly entered (23%); and verification of spreadsheet formulas (10%).”

Actually, I am surprised that one out of ten law departments in the survey verify the formulas in the spreadsheets that they use to prepare compliance reports. And, does “verification that data has been entered correctly” mean extra precautions like re-keying for accuracy checks or reading data entered against the original source?

If you belong to LinkedIn, consider joining the group I host there for in-house counsel. More than a score of members have joined since I started the group a few months ago and the group holds promise to offer benefits.

If you belong to LinkedIn, I would be honored if you would invite me to join your network of connections.

I previously mentioned LinkedIn (See my post of Jan. 19, 2008.). Since then, I have reached three digits of connections (102, to be truthful), which are known in LinkedIn jargon as first degree connections. Those people make me two degrees away from 12,500 other people – members of LinkedIn who are direct connections of my direct connections and thus people I can more easily reach out to – and three degrees away from 899,200 people. Wow!

This gathering of in-house counsel from all around the world is organized by the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association (Association canadienne des conseiller (ères) juridique d’enterprises). Another ten in-house groups support the gathering, to be held January 25-27, 2009 in Vancouver, Canada (See my post of Aug. 19, 2007 #4 for a sample of conferences that targeted lawyers in corporations.).

Australian Corporate Lawyers Association (ACLA)

Association Française des Juriste d’Enterprise (AFJE) from France

According to Legal Technology News recently, to kedge a ship was to move it by dropping a small anchor ahead and hauling on it to pull the ship forward. For ships becalmed, this arduous process inched them forward until the wind picked up. General counsel may feel that they are kedging when they set in motion a cost-saving technique.

Every accomplishment worth striving for takes time, persistence, and hard work and even then usually progress is slow and painful – very much like kedging.

In early 2007, 84 general counsel of companies mostly headquartered in Northern Europe or the UK and Ireland ranked five techniques to train people on compliance issues. The survey findings are in PLCLaw Dept. Quart., Vol. 3, April-June 2007, at 31.

The methods the respondents had to to choose from were “face to face,” “circulation of printed material,” “circulation of materials by email,” materials on the intranet,” and e-learning.”

For each of the five groups of people covered – lawyers, Board members, management, sales, and other staff – the distribution of training techniques relied on were fairly similar, although face to face dominated, followed by email distribution (See my post of July 5, 2006: online legal and compliance training vendors; March 25, 2005: case studies for compliance training; July 14, 2005: methods for training clients; and Dec. 19, 2005: training clients of classroom, online and paper.).

In September 2006, I wrote an article for Legal Times about the number of groups affected by a matter management system (MMS). Scouring the 3,400 posts on this blog, I find that I have returned to matter management systems frequently.

Several writings have explored the various solutions at hand (See my posts of July 24, 2006: the cottage industry of MMS vendors; Jan. 16, 2006: McDonald’s and its software; Aug. 10, 2007: barebones databases in Excel; April 26, 2006: ASP or self-hosted software; Dec. 5, 2005: rare situation where customizing a MMS makes sense; and Feb. 6, 2008: a system from Brazil.).

Other posts delve into nitty-gritty aspects of matter management software (See my posts of Sept. 5, 2005: currency conversion dates; Sept. 14, 2005: attorney-client privilege; Sept. 14, 2005: when to put a matter into a system; May 8, 2008: exporting data to spreadsheets for reports; May 18, 2008: go beyond just collecting data; July 17, 2005: handling taxes on legal services; and June 26, 2008: what internal audit looks at in an MMS.).