Articles Posted in Tools

On Google’s BookSearch on October 26th, the term “law department” turned up 3,260 hits. Many were addresses to graduates of law schools and a wide variety of other cites. The term “legal department” returned a mere 2,550 hits.

What interested me as I scanned the pages of results were the four aged treatises that showed up on law department management (See my posts of Aug. 17, 2005 with other management books; Feb. 23, 2006 that relates a similar search of Amazon; and July 18, 2006 with some early publications.).

Guidelines for a Corporate Law Department Manual

My long-time friend Eric Little, the founder a number of years ago of one of the most successful document-assembly companies (Analytic Legal Programs), has recently joined the world of blogging. Eric and I got back to the early days of Wynn Smith and others in the ABA Law Practice Management Section and its Document Assembly Newsletter (See my post of Jan. 28, 2007 on some other historical reminiscences.).

I urge readers who are is interested in the technology and practice of law-related document assembly to visit Eric’s site and say hello.

Law Firm Inc., Vol. 5, Sept. 2007 at 43, lists 29 vendors (software packages) cited by 115 of the Am Law 200’s technology executives. The respondents could list more than one provider used by their firm.

The relevance of the following list to law departments is that they may want to choose one or two of these vendors and force their litigation firms to use that vendor (See my post of July 31, 2006 on national vendor arrangements.).

Here are the vendors listed and the percentage of law firms that mentioned them. Kroll Ontrack (62%), Lexis Nexis (38%), CaseCentral (26%), IPRO Tech (25%), FTI Consulting [Ringtail] (24%), Electronic Evidence Discovery (24%), FIOS (23%), Stratify (23%), DTI Global (22%), OnSite E-Discovery (21%), Renew Data (18%), Encore Legal Solutions (18%), Attenex (17%), Merrill (17%), Zantaz (16%), Pitney Bowes [CompuLit, Ibis Consulting] (16%), Guidance Software (14%), CaseData (11%), First Advantage Litigation Consulting (10%), Daticon (10%), Cricket Technologies (8%), Syngence (7%), Spi (6%), Alpha Systems (5%), Discovery Mining (5%), Dolphin Search (5%), and Capital (4%). Another seven percent use a custom in-house system and 21 percent use some other package.

Sometimes, law departments who are acting in good faith ask vendors to respond to a request for proposal. For example, a law department might think that it could be advantageous to offshore some service. When the proposals come back and the law department thinks further about logistics and economics, its managers might conclude that it will not proceed with any of the vendors.

Naturally, the vendors feel used. They have toiled on their proposal and they have built some level of expectation of a sale. Bitterly, they feel that the law department cavalierly tossed out a request, mindless of the work it requires.

That sort of insensitivity is rare, because law departments do not want to take the time to prepare their facts and RFP unless they think there is a good chance of a successful solution. But sometimes the responses tell them that the time is not right, the cost too much, or something else is missing. At times, there was no approval of a sufficient budget.

I am constantly dismayed at how many articles and presentations about managing law departments repeat what has previously been written about ad nauseum. Hundreds of articles have talked about alternative billing, and they all bemoan hourly billing and describe the usual suspects for replacement. We don’t need to read or hear yet again about the DuPont model and the same reasons for using fewer law firms. We heard enough about the benefits of tracking information regarding the matters a law department handles.

The same material is regurgitated and rarely does a new idea appear. I may be jaded because I pay attention to law department management and because for 20 years I have been consulting in this field. Perhaps, too, there is nothing new under the sun. I hope that I am not a hypocrite for writing this.

Even so, if there are approximately 80,000 in-house lawyers in the United States and they have an average tenure of 10 years, each year there are 8,000 new faces eager to read new articles – even on very old topics. Furthermore, each year some law departments come to the realization (new to them) that they need matter management, alternative billing, e-billing, discovery management, cost control, and they look upon what is recently written or presented as if it were fresh tablets from on high.

The Harvard Bus. Rev., Vol. 85, Sept. 2007 at 18, describes a technique whereby a law department’s managers, about to start an implementation of e-billing, a total revamping of the records management process, or some other significant project, imagine that the project fails. Yes, fails, and spectacularly.

The key step for the participants in the Cassandra meeting, each on their own, is to “write down every reason they can think of for the failure – especially the kinds of things they ordinarily wouldn’t mention as potential problems, for fear of being impolitic.” Next, in my improvement on the recommended procedure of Gary Klein, everyone turns in their suggestions and one person reads them off, thus protecting to some degree the identity of the person who suggested a particular hypothetical cause of the imagined failure. After all, who wants to be identified as the one who wrote “The General Counsel is too stupid to pull it off.”

The team or its leader can then evaluate the warning ideas and look for ways to minimize their risks (See my posts of Dec. 10, 2005 about litigation studies at BellSouth; April 2, 2005; April 27, 2005 on knowledge management; Nov. 6, 2006 on “after action reviews; and April 7, 2006 on litigation.).

Verizon Communications’ law department was recognized by InsideCounsel, Sept, 2007 at 58, for its innovation in the area of e-discovery. The law department created a 36-page guide that has 16 chapters. According to the article, the lead attorney for the project estimates that he took about 160 hours to assemble the guide and spent less than $100,000 to do so. He used representatives from the IT department, other Verizon lawyers, and outside counsel.

This effort is an excellent example of the value of codifying practices and procedures (See my post of Sept. 5, 2007 on codification generally.). It is also an instance of something that many law departments could use and yet they each have to reinvent the wheel.

My post of June 18, 2007, in which I wrote about the impossibility of calculating an ROI for knowledge management projects, elicited a long comment from Dr. Dan Kirsch, CKM, MKMP, CKMI COO & Board Member Knowledge Management Professional Society (KMPro). I have shortened his remarks just a bit, but otherwise offer them in their entirety.

“Firstly, ROI is really a pretty lousy “metric” to begin with. Sure lots of folks use it — but it is a quick ratio and there are more games to play with ROI than with employee performance appraisals and curves. In short, tell me what you’d like ROI to be and I can come up with a dozen legitimate ways to game it to accomplish that goal. Secondly, most organizations that insist upon ROI metrics from something like KM don’t really “get it” to begin with. Implementation of KM is all about ….organizational change. If you’re not currently creating, transferring and utilizing knowledge…then you’re implementing a change to get the organization to do so. And the significance of that is that an organizational change cycle is typically going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-8 years. So in short, you cannot sit down and begin KM implementation today and utilize traditional ROI measures which seek to … prove that return in 6-12 months. One reason that this takes place with regard to KM is that most organizations still don’t seem to understand that KM is NOT about implementing IT (information technology).

Now having said that, let me suggest that there ARE in fact great ways to measure a sense of ROI in KM. We use things like “Knowledge Value-Added” (KVA) for that. KVA is based on the basic concept that if the knowledge within a process increases and that results in a increase in the outcome, then you can in fact measure the contribution that knowledge has to the process.

At a recent PLI conference, the formal general counsel of Tyco International, Bill Lytton, spoke about corporate compliance and an “ethic of integrity.” He suggested that law departments that are of some size allow everyone in the department to complete an assessment of the ethics of their superiors.

This 180-degree data helps to educate those who complete the assessment, helps to inspire more ethical practices or at least open up discussion of ethical decisions, and signals to the leadership whether their behavior is a role model of ethical beliefs and behaviors (See my post of May 3, 2006 on the law department as an “ethical beacon.”).

An online poll by a leading trade journal, InsideCounsel, Sept. 2007 at 13, asked its readers “Have you ever used Six Sigma to better manage your department?”

The brief item does not state how many people responded, but does say that 18 percent answered “yes,” 55 percent answered “no,” and 27 percent answered “don’t know.” I interpret the “don’t know’s” as negative since if they had heard about a Six Sigma project the respondents would not have answered this way. Second, because the question extends many years back in time, even the approximately one out of five respondents who answered “yes” could have been thinking of a project a number of years ago, rather than a relatively recent initiative.

It is also apparent that more than one person from a law department might respond, which means that a large law department that had a visible Six Sigma program might account for a disproportionate number of “yes’s” (See my post of Sept. 5, 2007 on probability-weighted samples.). A methodological purist might point out that those who have experienced Six Sigma might be more prone to respond to this survey than those who had no knowledge of it or had found it not useful. Finally, it is possible, I suppose, that Six Sigma techniques might be used in a law department for some purpose other than to better manage it. I can’t think of a situation, but I suppose that is possible.