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Speculation here about a proliferation of apps for in-house lawyers was on the mark (See my post of June 15, 2010: apps that screen out distractions; Feb. 1, 2011: cottage industry of apps for matter management; and March 29, 2011: HTML5 enriched apps.).

Eversheds has released an app for the iPhone and Blackberry that provides answers to commonly asked questions regarding employment contracts, ranging from recruitment, to the contractual terms themselves, and to termination. Moreover, according to Legal Tech. Insider, April 2011 at 8, “the really interesting aspect is that this is a global app with answers covering 25 countries including the UK, EU member states, Hong Kong and the USA. The app also includes information on family friendly employment rights and restrictive covenants.” Will such informative apps cost money for in-house users? I suspect not, over time. Must they register for updates. Probably

Law firms and law departments take note! Multitudes of apps for the delivery of specialized material and FAQs will appear this year and out into the future. Soon, client versions will appear so that law departments can inform their internal clients through an app. After that will come customizable and annotatable apps. After that ….

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At irregular intervals I have collected posts from this blog about specific countries. Canada beckoned, and it turns out there are at least 28 posts related to law departments in that country.

A few of them cover Canadian matters in general (See my post of May 31, 2005: case loads of in-house lawyers from Canada; March 19, 2006: hours inside vs. outside in Canada; May 14, 2006 #4: Canadian data on lines of reporting; May 31, 2005: growth of civil legal spending by Canadian businesses; March 19, 2006: application of 40/60 ratio to Canadian law departments; May 10, 2006: Canadian in-house challenges; Feb. 14, 2007: retrospective on Canadian in-house numbers of lawyers; May 24, 2007: chargeable hours; May 26, 2007: litigation handled by Canadian corporations; and May 27, 2007: considerations of Canadian in-house lawyers when choosing outside counsel.).

Many more of the posts cite specific departments (See my post of April 18, 2005: Manulife and departing lawyers; Aug. 31, 2005: billing policies at the Royal Bank of Canada; Aug. 31, 2005: Schering-Plough Canada; Feb. 14, 2007: profit center with SAP Canada; Feb. 14, 2007: difficulties in hiring lawyers and contract staff at Petro-Canada; Feb. 14, 2007: SAP Canada filed 1,700 patents in 2005; Feb. 16, 2007: grooming a general counsel with business experience at TransCanada; July 29, 2007: beyond traditional RFPs at RBC Financial; July 29, 2007: software at BMO; Nov. 24, 2007: coaching and SAP Canada; Sept. 19, 2008: facts about Bombardier; Feb. 14, 2009: demand management checklist at Royal Bank of Canada; Oct. 24, 2009: claimed savings by GE Canada; Nov. 10, 2009: net rating evaluations of outside counsel at GE Canada; Dec. 21, 2009: Canadian patent cases cost millions less than US patent cases; Feb. 4, 2010: Kruger Products and Serengeti; Sept. 27, 2010: Bombardier requires technology investments by its firms; and Dec. 19, 2010: fixed fee for core agreements of Bell Canada;.).

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So-called micro-history “takes small events in the past involving inconspicuous people and a limited number of sources and teases out of them stories and meanings that presumably throw light on the larger society.” This quote from Gordon S. Wood, The Purpose Of The Past (Penguin 2008) at 127, holds for law department commentary. Blog posts are a bit like this. Small points, often larger significance.

At the same time that historians turned to micro-histories, anthropologists and ethnographers, led by Clifford Geertz, began promoting “thick descriptions” of ordinary events to uncover cultural meanings that required literary-like interpretation rather than scientific investigation. Reading cultural behaviors as if they were texts became more and more popular and insightful. Ethnography has become the discourse of the postmodern world. With law departments, specialists could “read” the rituals, modes of interaction, office settings, mores, and messages of internal legal teams as “texts” for insightful thick descriptions.

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Academy of Court-Appointed Masters (ACAM). This organization “is composed of judges, attorneys, and a few non-attorney subject matter experts who are often called in to serve as special masters” in cases that have significant e-discovery issues. I read about ACAM and extracted this quote from Met. Corp. Counsel, March 2011 at 21 (See my post of July 26, 2008: e-discovery with 24 references.).

Retrodiction. No, it is not speech from yesteryear – retro diction. Retrodiction looks back and applies a theory to fit the past, which is chronologically the opposite of prediction which looks forward and says that something will come about. You can predict the next solar eclipse based on our theories from astronomy and you can retrodict that a solar eclipse changed the course of a battle millennia ago. Good benchmark metrics should be able to retrodict.

Can a general counsel straddle both law and business development simultaneously?

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On Monday my column appeared on InsideCounsel.com regarding three uses of metrics. Grandly, the uses are analysis, explanation and persuasion, the latter also known as rhetoric. It is useful to understand these powers inherent in credible numbers used skillfully. If you would like to find out more about this topic, click here for my three-powers column published on April 11, 2011.

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Since I will be speaking at Mitratech’s Interact Forum next month, I looked back over some earlier presentations. In one of them, Steve Harmon, Senior Director of Legal Services at Cisco Systems, spoke on a range of topics, including the law department’s ongoing efforts to spend the bulk of its attorney time on “core, mission-critical activities.”

What does that portentous term mean? “We define mission criticality in terms of the notion that if we perform one of these tasks poorly, it creates immediate risk to Cisco’s business.” Consider several aspects of that definition.

It is only reasonable that the term recognize some quantum of legal risk. An immediate small risk means nothing to a company the size and clout of Cisco.

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A case study prepared by Bridgeway describes the past five years of Rockwell Automation’s implementation of matter management systems. In addition to a chronology of a successful project, the study offers a few specific points I would like to emphasize. If you would like to see the seven-page paper, write me.

Doug Hagerman, the company’s General Counsel, aspired at the start to create an “information-enabled department.” A nice phrase, that, with a more practical sense than “knowledge management.” Effective matter management software became a central pillar.

A second point gives historical perspective on how far we’ve come. As long ago as 2006 the law department told almost 150 law firms to submit electronic bills and “only one firm refused.” Those days are long past when a US law firm can decline to invoice a client electronically.

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The epistemology of the 19th century assumed that “facts” about the past were “out there” and that historians’ primary task was to collect and state them. Assiduous fact-gathering, they asserted, would bring us to know the truth about the past “as it really was.” In the 20th century this notion crumbled; postmodern thinking, as it is generally known, disagreed with “objective facts” from history. A similar split in beliefs, however, may still happen today when people write or speak about what law department managers purportedly did, and why

Postmodernists hold that no truth exists outside of what ideology creates. What people believe strongly shapes what they perceive to be facts. Truth is socially invented and consensually agreed to, not discovered. Postmodern thinkers deny there is a reality in the past beyond what is described by language, and the barrier of language, its inability to be clear, prevents historians from telling any “real” truth about the past. They also reject narratives of progress much as they scorn the absolutist world of 19th-century positivism. Postmodernism abandons the Platonic view of essences in favor or a socially constructed reality, as described in Vlatko Vedral, Decoding Reality: the universe as quantum information (Oxford 2010).

All this calls into question the quality, authenticity, and factuality of explanations regarding how and why things happened in law departments.

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  1. Anheuser-Busch InBev (See my post of March 28, 2011: Anheuser-Busch and InBev with 15 references.).

  2. Checklists, etc (See my post of April 4, 2011: guidelines, checklists and annotations with 13 references and 1 meta.).

  3. Decision-assistance (See my post of April 12, 2011: decision-making software with 10 references.).

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Watson’s triumph may be overplayed, but the PR coup points to a movement in which lawyers ally much more with software to become better decision-makers. So-called augmented cognition software has great allure in the law.

Integrated wetware and software can be generic (See my post of Sept. 4, 2005: computers can assist decision-makers; April 7, 2006: analytical software to assist experts; Aug. 14, 2006: statistical and linguistic algorithms to pick out key concepts in text; Oct. 21, 2009: collective of departments and shared decision software; Sept. 29, 2006: augmented-cognition software; Feb. 22, 2009: software to depict and quantify decisions; and Feb. 10, 2010: in future, software to help in-house counsel make decisions.).

Or the software can be domain specific (See my post of Dec. 8, 2009: global mapping of trademarks; June 11, 2008 #5: export compliance software at GM; and April 20, 2008: linguistic modeling software for invoice review.).

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