Articles Posted in Tools

If you belong to Linkedin, invite me to be one of your connections. I have been a member for over a year and have accumulated 53 connections.

This professional network might help in-house counsel find other counsel who share similar management interests. So I wondered what the membership might tell us about the likelihood of that being a potential resource.

When I recently searched for “law department,” Linkedin had 203 users with that term somewhere in their profile. A search for “legal department” turned up 484 profiles, “general counsel” turned up more than 500 profiles, and “chief legal officer” had 106 profiles. Clearly, an abundance of possibly kindred souls.

If a law department takes part in any cross-functional team to address electronic discovery, or if the law department sets up its own team (See my post of Nov. 13, 2007.), the group needs to have representation from three primary constituencies.

The team needs somebody with a legal background, somebody with a technology background, and somebody who understands the business and its sources of information. It also helps to have a project manager. Or so I thought.

But then I read in InsideCounsel, Jan. 2008, Spec. Rpt. at 4, that one commentator advocates an “external-facing person who is responsible for managing relationships with vendors and outside counsel.” No wonder it is hard to set up an internal discovery team (See my posts of May 13, 2007 about the immensity of electronic documents; June 18, 2007 on document review; and Oct. 8, 2007 on an in-house guide to e-discovery.).!

Having recently skewered a paragraph in an article that described and mangled a mythical situation about choosing a lawyer as a CEO (See my post of Jan. 4, 2008.), I soon stumbled upon another bizarre paragraph. Deconstruct this one from the McKinsey Quarterly, 2007 No. 4 at 118, in an article entitled “Inventing the 21st century purchasing organization”:

“At another company the intelligent use of purchasing helped rein in rising legal costs by separating legal services into commoditized segments (including paralegal and research needs) and creating sourcing strategies for each individual segment. Meanwhile the company introduced systematic performance metrics – such as indemnity averages – and created an independent general-counsel office staffed with lawyers trained in purchasing basics. Through these measures the company consolidated its provider base to 9, from 900, capturing significant savings in the process.”

Legal research is not commodity work by itself, since it usually means the answer was not easily know or readily available. That aside, my amazement mostly is directed at the statement that the company created a law department, one that was “independent” (from what?), and that the department hired lawyers “trained in purchasing basics.” What? First, get good lawyers; second, show them how to manage outside counsel. Then, unbelievably, the nascent law department slashed its law firms (“provider base”) from 900 to 9 law firms. I just don’t believe that paragraph accurately describes what happened.

Wikipedia has this to say as its introduction to ethnography. Ethnography is “writing that presents varying degrees of qualitative and quantitative descriptions of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork. Ethnography presents the results of a holistic research method founded on the idea that a system’s properties cannot necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other. … “

Let’s unpack that quote. Law departments are systems and ought to be looked at holistically (See my posts of Aug. 28, 2005 about the McKinsey 7S model; and Feb. 6, 2007 on models generally.)

Law departments are ripe for ethnographic field research (See my post of Dec. 16, 2005 on ethnographic studies of law departments.). Companies would benefit from people trained in the discipline who could combine an understanding of how in-house counsel spend their time, what their offices and locations say about work (See my posts of March 23, 2007 about proximity and knowledge exchange; May 24, 2007 #3 on open offices; June 5, 2007 on office layouts; and Dec. 17, 2007 on art work.), social and demograhic networks (See my post of Jan. 6, 2006.), dress codes (See my post of Oct. 22, 2005 on dress-down choices.); and technology or tool use (See my post of Nov. 27, 2007 about my work-in-process definition of “tools.”).

As befits my two-decade career as a consultant I perceive many benefits for general counsel who retain consultants (See my post of Jan. 1, 2008.). Still, it has not escaped my attention that some general counsel choose not to enjoy those benefits. Why would that be?

1. Consultants cost money, sometimes lots of it. Hourly rates of management consultants, less so technology consultants, match the hourly rates of good lawyers.

2. Consultants can bring to the surface difficult issues which may have no good solution. Sometimes it may be best to let sleeping dogs lie.

For two decades I have thoroughly enjoyed my career as a consultant to law departments. Many of my posts on this blog draw on this experience. Given that background, it is not odd that I have written from time to time about aspects of law department consultants. At times I have mentioned a few consultants (See my post of Nov. 26, 2006 on Lawyers in Business; May 3, 2007 #3 about Lexvista Partners; and March 4, 2007 about Jim Wilber.).

Here and there this blog has offered ideas about the niche of consulting to in-house lawyers (See my posts of April 5, 2005 on the unsuccessful Association of Consultants to Law Departments; July 31, 2005 and Aug. 26, 2005 on former general counsel who try their hand at consulting; Nov. 22, 2006 and Oct. 12, 2006 and Dec. 22, 2006 #2 about some law firms that have dabbled in consulting to law departments; Feb. 24, 2007 regarding document assembly consultants; and Feb. 2, 2005 about the incursions into consulting of the General Counsel Roundtable.).

Mostly I have tried to present fairly the benefits consultants can bring (See my posts of Aug. 28, 2005 on why law departments use consultants [“to organize … disjoint and jangled impressions of the department’s issues, tell them how and in what order to address them, and bring to bear lessons from other sources”]; and Oct. 6, 2006 [“guide a law department to see its own patch of turf in comparison to the wider field … guide your process … translate and mediate for the techies and the lawyers. Extra hands and minds … bad cop with vendors.”]).

Sniffing around on Wikipedia, I realized that no one has written about that topic über alles, that sine qua non, that ne plus ultra – law department management. There are snippets under “general counsel” and “chief legal officer” and I did stumble upon “legal administrator,” but recoiled from the fact that it refers only to those who hold that position in a law firm.

Well, I could not let that effrontery stand (See my posts of Jan. 27, 2006; and Aug.1, 2006 on law department administrators.). In a moment I became Wikipedia contributor number 40,590 as I added a sentence or two to introduce the world to law department administrators.

It’s a tad self-destructive for this blogger to urge readers to add to Wikipedia anything about how to run a law department better, but our industry would benefit if they did.

In a backhanded way this blog has already identified the publications that put out on a regular basis articles that help managers of in-house counsel. I listed the most common sources for my own reading and, inevitably, blogging (See my post of Nov. 13, 2007.), of which 14 of the 23 aim for a target readership of company lawyers. The 14 are listed below.

ABA Journal, ACC and ACCA Docket, Canadian Lawyer InHouse, Counsel to Counsel, Corporate Counsel, InsideCounsel (formerly known as Corporate Legal Times), Legal Week, Metropolitan Corp. Counsel, National Law Journal, GC Mid-Atlantic, GC New York, Law Practice, Law Department Quarterly, and Law Firm Inc.

Executive Legal Advisor is another good source of law-department management writing but it did not make my original list just as top of mind and Legal Week did not. Some of my good sources have not been seen for a while; Inform: Life, Law & Business and Legalaffairs no longer show up.

As my 20-year consulting career testifies, many general counsel turn to consultants from time to time. A few general counsel are inveterate consumers of consulting. The plurality looks to outside advisors every now and then. But many law departments these days, I sense, bear an animus against consultants.

Possibly the company has banned the use of consultants or made it very difficult to obtain approval to retain them. Possibly the culture of the company eschews third-party assistance: “We are a can-do, self-sufficient company and have ample internal capabilities.” Some general counsel do not believe that consultants deliver sufficient value (See my post of June 4, 2007 on the value delivered by consultants.), especially as the fees charged by consultants have gone up like those of other personal service providers.

The free and easy availability of ample ideas and information about law department management (See my posts of April 27, 2007 on the internet and four generations of resources; Aug. 19, 2007 #4 for a sample of conferences; April 15, 2006 on groups for general counsel; and Dec. 26, 2007 for publications that address legal department concerns.) has made it easier to bypass consultants. All in all, the niche industry of consulting to law departments seems unlikely to grow.

Contributing author Brad Blickstein has defined and compared the terms “offshoring” and “outsourcing” (See the post of Blickstein of April 27, 2007.). What readers may not have realized is how frequently this blog has turned to the topic of offshoring.

Readers can track down at least 18 substantive references to the field of offshoring (See my post of Nov. 14, 2005 about offshoring and 4 references; June 11, 2007 #3 and 6 references; Jan. 28, 2007 and 2 references; Feb. 25, 2007 and some additional providers; March 23 2007 on some drawbacks to offshoring; Oct. 19, 2007 about paralegals; Nov. 4, 2007 on the challenges of so many recent entrants to the field; Nov. 27, 2007 about Israeli offshoring; and Dec. 6, 2007 regarding Sapient and offshore contact services.). The number of references reflects nicely the energy and growth of this tranche of service providers.