Articles Posted in Tools

Categorical “best practices” often leave me disdainful and recommendations made when the recommender does not know the context of a law department leave me dubious. Yet as a consultant of 20 years’ experience advising lawyers on ways to manage better, it turns out that I have written a passel of “how-to” posts. Each of the following 23 posts written since May 11, 2007, and some earlier posts cited during that period, offers a number of ideas for how to improve a particular management action.

Here are the posts with their topics in alphabetical order and for many of the them the number of suggestions I make (See my posts of Nov. 8, 2007: align with clients, 8; Nov. 8, 2007: create a balanced scorecard, 8; June 20, 2007: survive the arrival of a new boss; July 9, 2007: reduce conflicts among reports, 5; June 26, 2007: get individual lawyers to care about cost control; Aug. 26, 2005: measure delegation to paralegals; Nov. 7, 2007: be more productive with email and 10 references cited, 4; Jan. 6, 2006: calculate the fully-loaded cost per hour of inside lawyers; May 28, 2007: handle headhunter calls, 5; Dec. 11, 2006: learn more from invoices; Nov. 13, 2007: measure investments in knowledge management; Jan. 30, 2006: integrate clients with litigation; July 29, 2007: run better meetings, 6 and Nov. 18, 2007 and April 2, 2007 with 10 references; June 14, 2007: reduce weaknesses of performance metrics, 7; June 12, 2005: prepare for retirement of a veteran lawyer; Oct. 26, 2007: prepare better RFPs; Nov. 5, 2007: get more from software demos, 5, plus five references; Nov. 7, 2007: relieve stress, and March 9, 2007: evaluate the effectiveness of training.).

Previous posts have covered how surveys by and of law departments should attend to the quality of their methodology. Left out in those posts were any comments about surveys in terms of their larger effects. Here are four considerations beyond methodology.

Surveys may induce respondents to go beyond what they know (See my posts of May 17, 2006 and the US Chamber of Commerce ranking; but then my posts of June 6 and 7, 2006 with methodological attacks on it; and May 27, 2007 about an ADR survey that warped the responses.).

Surveys may push viewers to more extreme positions than they truly hold (See my post of Nov. 21, 2005 on the focusing illusion.).

Any day now, expect the grand opening of “Second Life: The Law Department,” the massively multi-player online role playing game (MMORPG) where anyone can be a general counsel and fire the CEO’s favorite law firm, where law firm partners can compete and win to provide legal services for the King’s daughter, where long-suffering associates can sign on to a startup’s fledgling law department and ride the IPO rocket to riches!

But that’s fantasy.

Any day now, expect to learn how to negotiate alternative billing arrangements by practicing online in a simulated setting! Step into the excitement of competitive bill reviews against other reviewers, to see who can find the most flim-flammery. Practice your interviewing skills on a polished applicant who is silicon based! Compete against others to restructure your law department in best alignment with clients! Recruit, build, improve and routine a crack team of e-discovery mavens, while circling vendors and consults try to lure them away!

One-size-fits-all solutions to management challenges offend me. To demand that each practice group leader reduce the group’s budget by five percent, or that everyone increase their contributions to the knowledge management system by 10 percent, or that every law firm accede to a six percent haircut, may sound equitable and clear. Mandates for everyone to do the same thing are certainly easy to mandate and to understand and perhaps are easier to monitor than individualize requirements.

But Procrustean fiats usually aren’t equitable. Not every group can or should give the same amount of blood. All circumstances are not the same. A crude “everyone do the same thing” means that the manager who promulgated it has abdicated some of her responsibility. It takes more time and attention, but better managers adjust their requests to different groups who are tasked to achieve similar goals. For instance, even with the same ratio of paralegals to lawyers, the litigation group might be asked to take out fewer of them in a reduction in force than the corporate group.

A brief statement in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, May 2007 at 41, by an Eversheds partner should give readers of this post a new idea. Paul Smith mentions that some competitive bids “begin with an RFD – a Request for Discussion – when the company seeks ideas for its projects from a number of law firms, before issuing the RFP.”

In other words, canvass your key law firms’ relationship partners and pick their brains for ideas on how to accomplish something. I have seen this done with outside counsel guidelines: ask a few partners to give their views on what the guidelines cover and the rules they lay down.

Several posts have referred to balanced scorecards, but this one collects ideas for how to compile one (See my post of Aug. 24, 2006 with references cited.).

1. To start, catalog the metrics that you currently maintain about the performance of your law department. These could include budgets, staffing numbers, CLE activity, cases pending, and many more (See my post of Dec. 14, 2005 on a metrics manual compiled by BellSouth’s law department.).

2. Second, speak to your senior clients and ask them what metrics they feel would best portray the activities of the law department.

The Economist, Oct. 13, 2007 at 10, makes a point that managers in law departments ought to take to heart. Generating ideas for what a law department ought to do is the easy part (See my posts of June 25, 2007 on innovation; and Oct. 29, 2006 on creativity and references cited; and my article on creativity in law departments.). Exploiting new ideas in a useful way has always been the hardest part.

The article discusses how companies have come to focus more on effective follow through and execution than on dreaming up innovative practices. One executive who is quoted suggests that “passion and vision” might account for only 20 percent of the total endeavor to raise operational excellence.

So, rather than invent a new budgeting process, a general counsel should take pains that the existing process works reasonably well. Rather than customizing contract management software, study the process and make sure fundamental steps are done well and continuously improved (See my post of Nov. 16, 2005 on kaizen.).

Previous posts have commented on SWOT analyses – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (See my posts of Aug. 28, 2005 with five criticisms of the method; Dec. 9, 2005 #1 with an example from a large department; and Jan. 13, 2006 #3 about SWOT’s historical roots.). An article in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Spring 2007, Vol. 48, at 96 adds another idea.

John Humphreys, a professor at Texas A&M University, explains that many leaders who conduct a SWOT analysis – and the consultants who advise them – hate to call anything a weakness. Everything is an “opportunity.” Does a law department have a crappy matter management system? Yes, but that is an “opportunity!”

A general counsel should recognize that some weaknesses can be ameliorated with proper efforts, while others can’t be changed. A law department can place a lawyer in Hong Kong to address a weakness in its support for Asian operations, but it can’t replace the CFO who harbors an antipathy toward lawyers. Furthermore, not all weaknesses are necessarily significant for the law department. Maybe the receptionist is grouchy, but so what?

Two posts on the blog of one of the leading offshore companies, Pangea3, raise points worth noting. First, Pangea3 takes umbrage at those who question whether the use of offshore law-related services trigger any practice of law issues. The post takes the position that stuck-in-the-mud opponents of change are simply trying to raise FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about a “dislocative industry.” The company will send you an opinion prepared in early 2005 by Professor Geoffrey Hazard, an authority on legal ethics, to back up the propriety of their services.

The second post attacks a competitor for copying Pangea3’s website material, and makes a deeper point. With so many competitors swarming into this offshore legal space, some law departments are likely to choose a service provider that falls short of expectations. When that happens, the entire niche gets a black eye. Some form of industry association and standards, Pangea3 believes, will be necessary to police the frontier of legal process offshoring.

The Texas General Counsel Forum in the summer of 2007 had a total membership of 425 general and managing counsel. According to an interview of its CEO, Lee Emery, in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, Sept. 2007, at 65, members “meet across the state for peer-to-peer sharing of best practices, networking, leadership training and education in best management practices.” Many other groups exist for management-level lawyers in-house (See my posts of May 24, 2005 on the GC 100; June 6, 2006 on ECLA and IHLA; Feb. 2, 2005 for a general review.).

The Forum also arranges a six-day leadership and management institute designed by its leadership in cooperation with SMU’s Cox School of Business (See my post of April 12, 2006 for similar programs for in-house counsel.).