Articles Posted in Tools

As posted previously, in-house counsel engage in various processes (See my post of April 27, 2006 on the term “processes.”). For all processes – think illustratively of contract review or preparation of responses to EEOC charges – lawyers develop methods and materials that help them accomplish the processes – think of checklists, bound volumes, precedent files, databases, and document assembly.

To the degree that it identifies processes and develops complementary tools, a law department becomes more productive (See my post of Aug. 8, 2006 on my recent article on productivity.). Just as soon as a law department thinks in terms not of bespoke artistry in its legal services but of substantially similar processes; whenever that law department appreciates and builds the tools to streamline those processes; at that time, productivity will jump.

Spell-checkers and redlining merged into word processing; electronic billing merged into matter management; graphics capabilities merged into spreadsheets. Likewise, software that serves the needs of a corporate secretary function will over time merge with software that helps Board members communicate (See my post of July 19, 2006 on Board software.).

Corporate secretarial packages such as Bridgeway’s Secretariat help a law department keep track of the company’s subsidiaries, their authorization to do business, their minutes, and related tasks. Packages for Boards of Directors emphasize communication; they help get out the Board books, schedule meetings, and allow messages among the members of the Board of Directors.

In the future, these two software tools are likely to merge, since their common thrust is corporate governance.

Legal Week, Vol. 8, June 8, 2006, at 12 reports that David Hickson, former “head of legal” at Lastminute.com (See my post of March 22, 2006 that differentiates “general counsel” and “chief legal officer.”) has become a consultant at niche firm The Legal Desk. The Legal Desk is one of several legal service providers that offer experienced lawyers to serve companies that have no in-house legal function as de-facto general counsel (See my post of Nov. 27, 2005 about “outsourced” general counsel.).

An excellent piece by Michael Kaminski, a partner at Foley & Lardner, describes patent metrics (See my post of July 8, 2006 that describes the paper.). His first metric is not a quantitative measure, but rather a “way to judge whether the patent department is conducting its businesses the way it should” (at 10-11).

Picture a two-column by four-row table. The left column of the first row states a patent policy; the column to the right describes the policy. The next row describes accountabilities, with a summary in the first column and a fuller discussion in the right column. The third row describes who is responsible for carrying out those tasks, while the final row describes more detail about the procedures to be followed.

While this tool is described here in terms of the patent function, it is a technique that could clarify policies, accountabilities, and procedures wherever they apply in a law department.

To opine credibly and scientifically on the degree to which law department practices bring benefits, such as assessment of cases within 60 days of the complaint being filed, someone would have to follow the disciplines of scientific experiment. Take 100 random law departments and require them to follow the ECA drill for the next year of lawsuits filed against them, and also take another 100 random law departments and prohibit them from doing the same. Several years later, gather data on all the companies’ external legal expenditures and venture some plausible conclusions about whether the practice has efficacy. Sadly, we can’t run experiments.

We are left with so-called natural experiments, in which two groups followed different paths and we try to draw conclusions afterwards from the destinations they reached. For example an article examines a natural experiment in Florida which clarifies the effects of the British ruled that the loser pays all the legal costs. Another article presents data on a natural experiment in the United States on compulsory expert arbitration. Both are cited in “Rising Legal Costs,” by Robert E. Marks and Russell Fox, Justice in the Twenty-First Century (Cavendish 1999) at 2.

It all sounds so smooth as the vendors croon, but the reality of a law department getting electronic bills from its law firms is fractious. Law firms that want to submit electronic bills have different time and billing system and different accounting or technology staff. They need to understand the LEDES format and be able to produce their invoices in conformity with it. They need to know how to fill in the null fields if you are not tracking task and activity codes, for example. They need to know to whom they should e-mail the files and with what file-naming convention. They need to know how to combine multiple matters in one electronic file.

On your side, your person who receives the bills needs to have a procedure for getting those e-mails. They need to know how to process the electronic file with your software – this assumes you are not using a third-party program to do this work – and to correct any error codes. They need to know how to set the various rules which you might apply against the invoices.

The smooth ice promised by sellers is, in fact, cracked, thin and variable (See my post of July 11, 2006 on e-billing vendors.).

Earlier I criticized requests for proposals (See my post of July 18, 2006.), without making mention of the older sibling, requests for information (RFI). An RFI precedes an RFP and typically confirms basic information about a herd of vendors and their offerings. Law departments that have a large group of vendors to slog through use the RFI responses to sift them to a more manageable number.

My feeling is that an RFI accomplishes little, but takes time, costs money, and justifies more meetings. Other than that, they keep paralegals busy and produce nifty tables.

Firms that specialize in recovering payments from class action defendants on behalf of claimants or, in their stead, as assignees have created a small niche. According to an interesting article in Corp. Counsel, June 2006 at A7 (James Morsch), such firms either offer to handle the claims filing in return for some percentage of the amount distributed or persuade the class action member to assign their claim to the firm for a payment.

The costs to a company of a class action settlement will undoubtedly rise if the recovery firms succeed in rounding up or taking over claims, since payments will therefore increase. One I found online is Spectrum Settlement Recovery.

The earliest economists, such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, wrote in natural language and used narrative to describe what they understood. Most of what we now understand about how law departments operate comes in narrative discourse. We read someone’s armchair ideas about good management and wade through anecdotes and descriptive articles and small aspects of the topic.

Later, more formal economists developed theories such as that of Keynes on government intervention in the economy. A theory specifies how the major elements of a situation fit together. For example, no careful theory explains how large a law department should be. Law department managers, academics and consultants have yet to articulate anything close to comprehensive, explanatory theories.

Most recently, mathematical models allow economists to specify the inter-workings of a system and quantify their roles. A model “must be stringent if it is to be of any use. Assumptions must be sufficiently simple and precise to allow the play of logic and mathematics, yet not so restricted as to eliminate the mechanism itself,” David Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery (Norton 2006 at 143).

One of the best furnished rooms in the cottage of law department vendors contains the companies that license law departments their matter management systems. Once the domain of CompInfo, Inslaw and custom software, the field now has to a number of well-established vendors. Here are some of them and their primary product.

Bottomline Technologies (Legal eXchange); Bridgeway Software (eCounsel); Corprasoft (Corprasoft Legal Desktop); CT TyMetrix (TyMetrix 360º); DataCert (Advanced Invoice Management System (AIMS); Economic Analysis Group (CaseTrack); LexisNexis Examen (CounselLink); LT Online (LAWTRAC Online); Mitratech (CLMS for Windows and TeamConnect Enterprise); Serengeti (Tracker); and Thomson Elite (LawManager). This list came from Tech Review 2006, a supplement to InsideCounsel, July 2006 at 26.