Law Department Management Blog

Consultants love to recommend comprehensive processes through which law departments tell their key law firms how the firms are doing. In an ideal world, such full-scale evaluations need training, software, databases, forms, number crunching, meetings, roll-out plans, post-mortems, interviews, and complicated activities galore. Consultants thrive on all that hustle.

The trouble is, the value produced for the department too often falls far short of the investment. For all kinds of reasons, all that energy expended leads to tired results. Law firms don’t improve enough to justify the constant reminders, delay, time and money. The idea of law firm evaluations has obvious, intuitive appeal; execution torpedoes it.

So, let me propose a modest alternative.

An experienced marketing consultant, Dan Ross, said something worth pondering. He spoke about law firm brands at the conference two weeks past at Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession. Ross said that customers often choose a brand because of how that brand helps define the customer’s self view. You mean, Dan, I subscribe to the Times Literary Supplement because that flatters my self-image as erudite and cosmopolitan?

Perhaps so. On this reasoning, a general counsel might retain a name brand firm not just because it has excellent lawyers with much experience but because it bolsters how the general counsel feels about herself: “I’m a Bigge, Goóde, & Branded type of GC!” It stokes the GC’s amour proper” “BG&B’s impressive reputation rubs off on me!”

Fragile egos can purchase a bolster. Our emotional drives influence us much more than we acknowledge even as we invest our time and money in what outwardly looks like a rational choice. One could expect larger companies to retain larger firms, therefore, and not just because their legal issues are more knotty or their global reach more stretched. It may be that deep down in the individual lawyer’s psyche there glows pleasure that rubs off from mingling with stars. My Bentley is me.

Practice groups in law firms make sense for both them and their clients. If you are a law department lawyer, however, and a partner from a law firm touts the firms “[Fill-in-the-blank] Practice Group,” what should you find out about to determine the Group’s value to you and your client? Let me suggest some questions to ask, diligently.

Knowledge capital. “How would you describe and quantify the knowledge capital that the Group has codified?” This question goes to their efforts to memorialize experience in guidelines, samples, annotations, flow charts or whatever makes tacit knowledge more explicit.

Breadth of Knowledge. “What have you done, if anything, to combine the insights of third parties?” Some practice groups focus exclusively on the law, and quite logically, but others draw on business people, researchers, and consultants to complement the legal knowledge.

Much was said about law firm brands at an excellent conference organized by Mitt Regan of Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession. As summarized memorably by one speaker, a law firm’s brand is its “promise to clients,” in the words of several law firm marketers and researchers. Its implied or explicit promise needs to be credible, memorable, and useful to clients.

Despite the logic of branding as described, I don’t recall any general counsel I have consulted to who think of law firms they use as “brands.” They don’t say, “X firm is a global leader,” or that “Y firm puts clients first,” let alone that “Z knows Canada.” My sense is that inside counsel amalgamate impressions of the style and ability of individual partners they have dealt with from the firm mixed in with fragments of articles read or conferences spoken at by the lawyers of the firm all combined with some ads they have fleetingly glanced at as well as remarks made by peers and colleagues. The pastiche doesn’t rise to any level of “brand” clarity. Other than size or “AmLaw 100 I think” they don’t store impressions as overall brands.

When pushed, a general counsel can always dredge up broad impressions of a firm: “A has uneven quality,” “B litigates aggressively,” or “C mostly does patents,” but those are scattered attributes, not an overall, let alone distinctive, brand, and they are secondary.

At the recent conference of Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession, Lisa Hart, the CEO of Acritas, shared research data on why law departments retain the law firms they do. In the course of her remarks she said that Acritas has observed “an increasing focus on corporation-to-law-firm connection as compared to inside counsel to individual law firm partner.”

Since ultimately a human being speaks and gives counsel, I believe that most inside lawyers think in terms of a specific partner as their trusted advisor, not the incorporeal firm. But Hart makes a different, probably valid, point. If a law department chooses preferred counsel, it chooses firms and bases the relationship on each firm as a whole. If a law department intervenes in the firm’s delivery of services, be it with outside counsel guidelines or budgets or staffing constraints or tiered discounts, the interventions apply across the board at a firm. To the degree a law department needs coordinated services around the world or several legal disciplines to resolve a problem, it is the firm that is the locus, not any single partner.

So, with panels and management tools, as a consequence of legal complexity, global issues and volume discounts the leverage and negotiation rises to the firm-wide level, above any single partner in the firm.