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Fenwick & West started a program in 2010 whereby the firm “put a half dozen standardized legal documents on the Web for free to help entrepreneurs streamline the process of funding their startups without generating big legal bills.” The quote comes from Bloomberg BusinessWeek, April 11, 2011 at 30. An entrepreneur quoted in the article said that the form documents allowed him to obtain $2.5 million in seed capital for $20,000 in legal expenditures instead of the expected $50,000 or more.

As law firms compete and market with good templates placed for free online, with annotations, updates, variations, and commentary inevitably being added later, law departments will be beneficiaries and their budgets will go farther.

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In-house attorneys around the world work varying numbers of hours each year, at least if you give credence to the combined effect of paid leave and paid public holidays mandated in each country. Consider one flagrant contrast summarized by Eduardo Porter, The Price of Everything: Solving the mystery of why we pay what we do (Portfolio/Penguin 2011) at 75: Portuguese workers get a total of thirty-five paid days off a year whereas US workers have no mandatory paid days off.

Granting in-house lawyers comparable paid time off, with such significant variance from country to country, to use 1,800 chargeable hours per year as a baseline from US law departments almost certainly overstates chargeable hours elsewhere. That distortion, for example in calculations of fully loaded costs per lawyer hour, understates the costs overseas. If lawyers in France, Germany, and the UK for example, log fewer hours, of which hours we assume the same percentage of chargeable hours as their US counterparts, then their cost to their company rises as compared to US lawyers.

The vexing question remains of what is the appropriate formula to figure out the carrying cost of internal lawyers (See my post of July 26, 2009 #1: difference it makes if you change chargeable hours; May 21, 2009: internal chargeable hours with 12 references.).

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I signed a consulting agreement this week that had strong language about consistent staffing. This was not, I repeat, from any guideline for outside counsel, but it does suggest a level of control that some general counsel might impose on their primary law firms.

“Any removal or reassignment by [Law Firm] of those of its employees assigned to perform services hereunder must be with one (1) month’s prior written notice to [Company] and with [Company’s] prior written consent. Unless otherwise agreed to in writing by [Company], [Law Firm] shall not remove or replace personnel provided hereunder. There will be no charge to [Company] for any replacement provided in accordance with the above paragraphs while the replacement employee acquires the necessary orientation which shall not exceed five (5) working days.”

This stringency will not work as stated for large law firms with many associates and paralegals eligible to work on a major matter. One’s month’s notice and replacement costs might apply to those few who are assigned virtually full time.

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For several reasons surveys don’t collect data on settlements paid by corporations. Often those amounts are kept confidential, and few within the defendant company know them. Other times settlement funds come from business units, sometimes more than one, and it may be difficult for the law department to assemble those scattered and embedded amounts.

At times, a settlement might be paid in more than one chunk. Most fundamentally, general counsel are loath to disclose to anyone the amounts, frequency or patterns of their settlements of litigation. Even aggregated numbers worry them. Disclosed, that sensitive knowledge they fear could give plaintiffs’ lawyers an advantage. Hence, practical, judicial and prudential obstacles thwart those who would like to produce settlement benchmarks.

PS. A scrupulous surveyor would ask not for gross settlements paid but net settlements paid.

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Reductionists try to explain a something with a single primary cause – it is common to both the religious and scientific ways of thinking. Astrology is reductionist, Marxism as well, and Freudianism offers another example. Single factors, such as gender or the march of material progress in history, appeal to us because they resonate with a hardwired function in humans, to reduce the number of unknowns.

Postmodernism advocates the opposite of a reductionist approach (See my post of June 7, 2010: plural grounding; and July 25, 2010: multi-dimensional spaces.). It stands behind multiple, inter-related causes. This point comes from Vlatko Vedral, Decoding Reality: the universe as quantum information (Oxford 2010).

To propose some all-encompassing theory of legal departments based on a single motivator would be reductionist, and fatuous. Power could be a candidate, but that is a broad stretch and all things human involve power. Control or elitist hegemony or capitalist gain can conceivably be over-arching constructs, even though laden with ideological correlates. I think the framework for understanding law departments theoretically is more complex. When you realize that physics has identified four fundamental forces (electromagnetic, strong nuclear, weak nuclear and gravity) and no less than 12 fundamental sub-atomic particles, how can you hope for a dominant organizing theme for law department management?

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Imagine if someone had outside counsel guidelines from a dozen Fortune 500 companies during the 1970s, from the same companies or comparables during the 1980s, and likewise for the next two decades. Such a collection would allow a historiography of guidelines: a study of how the guidelines changed over time.

I suspect each decade would produce guidelines that are longer. Longer because more ideas are in them, more examples, more requirements, appendices, all serving to increase the sheer number of words.

The formats would change. For example, as the concept of rules laid down by buyers of legal services became accepted and understood, the introductory statements would shrink. As detail and exceptions encroach, indentation and numbering would elaborate. A diagram or graphic might show up in the later years and URL links in the most recent.

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Since my last collection, several more posts have made points settlements. Some particularly concern law firms (See my post of April 9, 2009: advantage of fixed fee when negotiating settlements; Oct. 7, 2009 #4: empowering outside counsel to settle cases; March 16, 2010: fixed-fee arrangements; Oct. 3, 2010: heavier billing when firms sense imminent settlement; and Nov. 17, 2010: parallel settlement counsel.).

Other posts look at metrics associated with settlements (See my post of Dec. 1, 2009: delay of settlement for financial benefits; Dec. 3, 2009: insights from clusters of settlement amounts; March 23, 2010: litigation-loss bonds and swaps; Sept. 21, 2010: structured settlements; Oct. 27, 2010: data on settlements; Jan. 8, 2009: sometimes settlements are split among business units; and Jan. 20, 2009: settlement costs in relation to costs of outside counsel.).

Still others cover, well, other topics (See my post of Jan. 11, 2009: a policy never to settle; Feb. 7, 2009: e-discovery burdens may force settlement; Feb. 13, 2009 #4: blog by John DeGroote on settlement strategy; and Feb. 24, 2009: power-laws and settlement.).

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Trial.Com, the Network of Trial Law Firms, has launched its YouTube-platform CLE. The website allows in-house attorneys to watch videos and build their CLE credits in California, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, New York and other states in accordance with those states’ rules.

According to the Trial.com press release, “Currently 16 videos are online and more will be added shortly. The Network of Trial Law Firms has created dozens of videos in which defense trial lawyers from its 24 member law firms offer practical advice on managing the trial and litigation problems with which in-house counsel grapple daily.” Currently available programs cover keys to winning a case, relationships with in-house counsel, corporate compliance and ethics.

Each video runs approximately 20 minutes (panels run longer), and is divided into four short sections. Attendance is confirmed using codes embedded in each section which the viewer types onto the same screen that displays the video, following which a certificate of compliance is issued by the Network. The service also allows viewers to download course materials and slides while watching the videos.

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A simple formula allows you to calculate the number of relevant documents missed by reviewers, or the precedent cases missed by researchers, or the improper expense records submitted on invoices, or the number of typos in a brief. Curious?

As explained in John D. Barrow, 100 Essential Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know: Math Explains Your World (Norton 2008) at 11, you start by having two people do their best on a search for discovery documents, opinions, billing irregularities, or proofreading catches. You then calculate “the product of the number that each found that the other didn’t divided by the number they both found.” The closer the two people are to finding the same items, the more confident you can be that the unfound items are few; conversely, if each found many items not found by the other, the unfound items will be much more numerous. With this formula, you can at least size the gap.

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A second set of ten posts on columns I have written for InsideCounsel

Early on, I collected my first columns under Morrison on Metrics (See my post of Sept. 30, 2010: ten InsideCounsel columns, starting in May 2010.). Now I am back at it with an updated collection of ten more and their URLs.

Oct. 13, 2010: lawyers per paralegal as a staffing metric

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