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One of the most profound conclusions I drew from Boris Groysberg, Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance (Princeton Univ. 2010) concerns the ageless debate: should a law department base retentions on the law firm or the individual partner. The iconic strip serves as a useful metaphor.

Groysberg’s fundamental point applied to this debate would be that law firm partners with big books of business, who pride themselves as portable because they themselves are the brand and the brains, are misguided. In fact, to a degree they typically do not recognize, their success comes from and depends significantly on the team and firm they belong to.

Like the famous one-sided helix, neither the firm nor the partner holds the upper hand and all the labored debates over which enjoys primacy will eventually merge in recognition of the other side.

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Change comes so hard between a law department and a law firm because they have to be in reasonable synch. Their respective champions of change need to be in roughly the same psychological space.

Imagine two bell curves of willingness to embrace change, one for law departments and one for law firms. At the top of each curve we find willingness under the right circumstances to move forward with something new. Off to the left we find reluctance, a general sense that what we have going works pretty well and that the risks of upsetting the status quo just aren’t worth it. Off to the right of the bell curve, with fewer and fewer firms or departments – depending on which curve you look at – as you move right, are those that see promise in change and want to explore something different.

When you superimpose the bell curves and plot the specific department and specific firm on them, you need both sides in roughly similar positions of change acceptance for there to be a hope of, shall we say, a ringing endorsement.

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When a British newspaper obtained an enormous pile of receipts from politicians who might have filed bogus personal expenses, it put them online and invited the public to help spot abuses. A clever app let anyone look at a receipt and flag it as dodgy. The paper honored those with the most finds and published the best so the “game” attracted widespread participation. “In less than four days, some 20,000 players analyzed a stunning 176,000 pages,” according to Wired, March 2011 at 52.

Now, take a deep breath. Assume a law department could anonymously post online invoices that have been redacted of identifying details. Assume participants could flag billing practices that deserve review. Or imagine if online reviewers were asked what value they would assign to the work or how the firm might have staffed and managed it better. With some recognition to those who pored over the bills, maybe even cash rewards, there could be a crowd-sourcing “game,” with serious intent, for invoice review and outside counsel management.

Don’t everyone FLAME!! me at once. Harmful disclosures, too much work, risk of attorney-client privilege, embarrassment all shout out to be addressed. “It will never work.” Yet, while not initially for the faint hearted, to unleash many minds in a competition to ferret out better legal services practices may become a practice when entrepreneurs iron out the impediments. Perhaps only disbursements would be scrutinized, or perhaps only certain reviewers would earn the right to take part. Software may speed the process and increase security.

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“Everything in moderation” echoes Greek philosophy but for law departments, even mothers’ milk curdles if overdone. Consider several assuredly good things that turn bad if overdone.

Law departments want excellent client satisfaction ratings, but if they rise too high something is amiss. If lawyers never rein in clients, what good are they?

Timely calls by clients for legal counsel mean they recognize legal issues and want help, unless they are too hair-trigger and lawyers waste time prematurely (See my post of March 22, 2011: measuring the timeliness of client calls.).

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I will be speaking at Interact, the conference organized each year by Mitratech for law departments. My panel will include Verona Dorch, AGC at Harsco Corporation, and Kim Rivera, GC of DaVita, Inc. Interact 2011: The Legal & Compliance Technology Forum, will take place Sun, May 15 to Wed, May 18 at Fairmont Turnberry Isle, in Miami.

It would be my pleasure to meet readers and others there. If you are interested in attending, I believe I have some complimentary tickets that I can offer. Drop me a line.

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It is quite conceivable that lawyers in a law department can estimate how promptly a client called them on a new matter. When a matter first becomes recognized, the responsible lawyer could give it a number that reflects how timely the lawyer was brought in. A scale would suffice from 1 (“late in the game”) through 3 (“par for the course”) to 5 (“very early, even too soon”) and everyone could assign a number for a matter: half-baked, nicely done, a bit burnt.

It might take a discussion or two among the lawyers to calibrate their ratings of timeliness. As a subjective assessment, it deserves definitions and examples so that the scale scores mean roughly the same thing. After a quarter or two of tracking this data, it may be useful for a senior lawyer to bring up their pattern of delay with dilatory clients or, as important, point out jumping the gun with dashing clients.

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Mark Harris, the CEO of Axiom, referred to a surprising finding from one of his company’s projects. Speaking at Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession conference on March 9th, Harris referred to long-term contracts and their “revenue leakage.” One company, he said, spent more than $100 million a year on its commercial contracts suffered revenue leakage from them estimated at 5-7 percent. Harris did not elaborate, but it may be that failures to renew or to raise rates or shift costs accounted for that lost income. Nor did he claim that typical companies endure such a hemorrhage.

My reaction to Harris’s vignette stems from a law department’s involvement with contracts, or as importantly with contract administration. If losses of such a magnitude afflict many companies, lawyers are letting down their clients. Somehow, better contracts should put fingers in some of those dikes, savvier interpretations of their client’s rights, or better oversight of executed contracts could turn law departments that can claim a portion of the saved money as profit centers. We need to know if revenue leakage from contracts happens at that rate and what the law department can do to apply a tourniquet.

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As if Rich Baer, Qwest’s energetic and outspoken General Counsel, were not busy enough, he has seized the keyboard and joined the fray as a blogger. Please welcome Baer to blogdom and take a look at his Reliance on Counsel.

I like the first several posts, especially his self-effacing observations on how much being promoted to the GC pedestal increases everyone’s assumptions about your IQ and acumen. His thoughts on that and other elements of the chief lawyer position will be most welcome.

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A piece in the London Rev. of Books, March 3, 2011 at 11, wrestles with the claim of a recent book that over-use of the Internet robs us of intelligence, happiness, memory, and creativity. The reviewer disagrees regarding all but creativity. My reduction of his discussion goes toward mini-Internets: knowledge management systems in law departments.

If a law department pours much of its professionals’ learning into a retrievable database, will that over time dumb down them down? Creativity seems to consist of deep engrossment over time with a full stock of stored facts and frameworks. Out of that stew a mysterious bolt of neural lightening inspires a new idea.

If the Internet’s vast storage and instant retrieval atrophies these mental faculties because we ourselves don’t master the material and ponder it, even sub-consciously – a big if, according to the book reviewer – might the same degradation take place as law departments store more learning electronically than neurologically? The reviewer thinks that creativity, where cranial crumbs over time mold into new bread, suffers most from excessive reliance on the Internet, and perhaps a similar risk looms for KM systems.

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“We know that creative genius is not the same thing as intelligence.” The quote comes from a book review in the London Rev. of Books, March 3, 2011 at 11. Like idiot savants know a huge amount about a small area of knowledge, creative types may be hopeless intellectually outside their domain. Consider, next, the reverse: how likely is a very smart person creative?

“In fact, beyond a certain minimum IQ threshold – about one standard deviation above average, or an IQ of 115 – there is no correlation at all between intelligence and creativity.” The valedictorian may well be pedestrian.

Highly-regarded law firms recruit highly-intelligent law school graduates: law review editors, Order of the Coif, rarified clerkships, real brain boxes. That may tend to be true, but those with Stanford-Binet firepower don’t necessarily produce new solutions to difficult legal problems. In turn, when law departments cherry-pick the best of the brightest, there is no guarantee that those agile minds will spring open new legal strategies.

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