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A commonplace holds that half the lawyers practicing law privately in the United States, meaning not as an employee of a company, government agency or other entity, practice solo. Behind the shingle is a single. It may be that half the internal law departments – using an expansive term “department” – are also lawyers practicing solo.

One-lawyer departments make sense if there is a power-law distribution of law departments by size (See my post of April 27, 2010: power-law distributions with 6 references.). One lawyer departments make sense if that solitary lawyer wears multiple hats. One lawyer departments, finally, are necessary stages for all larger departments to have passed through; you have to hire the first one to get to two lawyers, three, and more.

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One point made by Boris Groysberg, Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance (Princeton Univ. 2010) at 54, concerns job tenure and productivity. From his careful study of equity research analysts who were top-ranked by Institutional Investor, he confirmed what others have found: “Empirical studies have found close links between tenure and performance.”

It may be that sheer speed of thought declines as lawyers move into their 50s and older, but if they have been at a company for a long time their extensive on-the-job experience means they are likely to understand the company better, its mores, and its key managers. The firm-specificity of that knowledge pays off in greater effectiveness.

The average tenure of in-house lawyers in the United States probably being more than 10 years, it means they can bring to bear a tremendous reservoir of company knowledge. Think of it as tenure and talent in tandem (See my post of Aug. 27, 2005: 70 years in one law department; Nov. 11, 2005: years in position in-house; Nov. 28, 2005: average age of lawyers in one set of departments; Oct. 19, 2007: uses average tenure of 10 years; Nov. 28, 2007: average tenure of lawyers and years out of law school; Nov. 29, 2009: talent combined with tenure boosts productivity; March 30, 2010: beyond lawyers per billion; and Feb. 17, 2011: GC tenure does not relate to spending benchmark.).

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General counsel who are inclined to transfer matters and service arrangements handled by a partner who moves to another firm should think twice. That would be the advice of Boris Groysberg, Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance (Princeton Univ. 2010) at 8. Based on an exhaustive study of stellar equity-research analysts, Groysberg concludes that “exceptional performance is far less portable than is widely believed.”

The knowledge- and relationship-intensive role of a law firm partner who gives good advice and produces excellent legal services may be assumed to reside mostly in that persons head and personality. Not so, according to Groysberg, since “the exceptional performance of stars at their prior employer appears to have been more firm-specific – more dependent on the firm’s resources and capabilities – than is generally appreciated.” Groysberg would give more weight to the contribution of the law firm as a whole than to the partner as an individual.

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Who, exactly, completes benchmark surveys?

I looked at the positions of the first 215 respondents to my General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey. 131 of them (65%) are general counsel. Another 30 (14%) are law department administrators and about the same number are direct reports to the General Counsel. In other words, nearly always the top legal officer personally completes the online survey or requests a direct report to complete it. The data, therefore, is more likely to be accurate and comprehensive.

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Earlier I discussed what I thought was established wisdom: people with wide-ranging “weak ties” tap into and benefit more from ideas than those who mostly confer with their relatively few strong ties who think similarly (See my post of Dec. 31, 2010: a network perspective on the strength of weak ties.). Not everyone agrees.

Clive Thompson, writing in Wired, May 2011 at 68, presents a contrary view based on others’ research. How often we talk to people in our network matters more than their being like minded (a phenomenon called homophily). Weak-tie acquaintances you rarely speak to shape your thinking much less than the strong-tie friends you share ideas with all the time. Frequency of contact tips the odds toward them being a more valuable source of news. The article describes them as high-bandwidth ties.

By this logic, in a law department, the person in the office next to you or your lunch buddies influence your thinking and creativity far more than the 350 LinkedIn connections you show. Social scientists will argue this debate for a long time.

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A full year has passed since my inaugural “Morrison on Metrics” column for InsideCounsel Exclusives. Quite a few of the columns (10) had to do with benchmarks: inside spend per lawyer correlated to outside spend; benchmarks across regions; are participants in benchmark surveys representative; anonymous participants; one country vs entire-globe department; normalized metrics; lawyers per paralegal by four regions; 2010 to 2011 on two metrics; paralegals and total legal spend; and matter management and benchmark markets.

Next most frequent were five columns on statistics: correlations; trimmed means and weighted averages; modes, maximum, minimum; inter-quartile, ranges, modes; and indices.

Two concerned compensation: lawyer compensation and performance and online sources of compensation data. The rest covered a variety of topics related to quantification: matter management and benchmark markets; cases vs FTE litigators; knowledge of metrics below GC; count cases and contracts not counseling; risk; inside spend means people; manipulate and game metrics; trend lines and equations; analytical discovery software; rhetoric, explanation, and analysis.

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Than Luu of the Public Law Research Institute published a very informative paper in 1995 on much touted “the litigation explosion” (See my post of May 14, 2005: other findings from Luu’s paper.). Among other points he debunked the unfounded claim about hundreds of billions spent each year on US tort litigation.

Additionally, in the course of his thoughtful and well researched paper, he mentions three cost-control steps that show the historical roots of methods often talked about today as fresh and innovative.

Budgets. In 1991, two decades ago, the Bank of Boston “created a formalized pre-approval process in which the law firm was required to estimate the cost of the services it was to provide for each matter. In terms of billing, the law firm was required to submit its bills monthly using the Bank’s format, noting each attorney and legal assistant by name, the hours of each timekeeper, and a detailed description of the services rendered. The bills were then compared with the estimates originally proposed by the law firm. If the law firm exceeded its proposed budget, the firm would not be paid.” (citations omitted)

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A piece in Met. Corp. Counsel, April 2011 at 13, brought to my awareness a new consideration: matter management systems that allow law firms to access them directly. Most typically, law firms log on to upload their invoices.

Mark Poag of Datacert warns that “Although collaboration is imperative, it should not come at the expense of security.” He warns against competitor’s SaaS (software as an online service) solutions that rely on only their internal permissions and precautions to prevent data security breaches. Passport, from Datacert, “supplies a secure pipeline and leverages advanced security technologies” for the interchanges between a law department and its firms on the matter management system.

I take no position on this issue (and don’t know what a pipeline is). It is good to let law firms make use of a matter management system; it is not good to put sensitive information on the system at risk. I wrote this post to raise awareness and perhaps to elicit comments.

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A law department I know has adopted a remarkable range of software for its specialized corporate needs. It uses EDGARizer (EDGARfilings, part of Thomson Reuters) and EDGARlink (SEC) for Edgar filings and EMMA (MSRB – Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board) for 529 filings. It has also licensed BlueWin (Bank of New York Mellon) for blue sky filings, and Comfiler (Bowne) for NSAR filings. Plans were afoot to use Clarity FSR (IBM, Clarity Systems) for meeting XBRL requirements. These packages are not familiar to me, nor are the competitors to them that must be out there. I welcome more information from readers.

I have noted other software available for corporate secretarial and related functions (See my post of June 7, 2010: two European packages for corporate secretary functions; Sept. 2, 2009: software for corporate secretaries with 11 references.).

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Save your telomeres. Telomeres stop chromosomes from fraying at the ends. From time to time chromosomes replicate and each time they do it shortens their telomeres. After 50-70 such divisions (a number known as the Hayflick limit after its discoverer), a chromosome can grow no shorter and it stops dividing. That’s bad news as it is one of the markers of old age.

Chronic stress causes premature shortening of a person’s telomeres, according to the Economist, April 9, 2011 at 91. The good news from the piece, for in-house lawyers chronically under the hammer, is that “stress management not only stops telomeres from shortening, it actually promotes their repair.” Another study in the same article “showed that exercise has a similar effect to counseling on the telomeres of the stressed” (See my post of May 18, 2007: stress and pressure with 7 references; June 11, 2008: stress with 18 references; and July 30, 2010: anxiety and pressure with 9 references.).

1.5 million lawyers on LinkedIn. Citing research by Corporate Counsel, Diversity & The Bar, March/April 2011 at 21, says that of the 50 million users on LinkedIn, “nearly 1.5 million are lawyers.” Approximately 5,000 law firms have business profiles and there are 4,000 groups with law as part of the title. As for my own Law Department Management Group, 150 have joined in the past two months and it has more than 650 members; we welcome you (See my post of Feb. 16, 2011: LinkedIn with 19 references.).

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