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The law department of United Technologies has approximately 275 in-house lawyers.  Aside from those based at the company’s headquarters in the United States, approximately 250 work from 79 locations and 20 countries!  This information on geographic spread comes from GC Insights: What Multinational General Counsel Value Most (ACC 2012, supplement to ACC Docket) at 40.  For legal departments with many lawyers dispersed, what sorts of management challenges arise?

You need to stress clear communication.  You need to be cognizant of language limitations for some of your lawyers (See my post of April 27, 2005: second languages required for Kodak lawyers; Aug. 26, 2006: Mary Kay and poly-linguists among its lawyers; April 27, 2007: knowledge of a foreign language helps for job rotations; April 26, 2008: managing lawyers who do not speak English as a primary language; Jan. 11, 2009: reasons to hire your own lawyer for an overseas office; and Aug. 13, 2009 #5: translate only key provisions of contracts in a foreign language.).

You need to keep widely-different time zones in mind when you schedule calls.

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Below is a translation from Portuguese of an item about a Brazilian state (Maranhao) and its establishment of a minimum wage for in-house lawyers.  This came from a Brazilian consulting firm’s website.

“The controversy surrounding the base salary of lawyers seems to be in their final days in Maranhao. The Council approved the Bar Association of Maranhao on Thursday (21/6).  The … draft law shall fix the salary of the lawyers service providers in private companies. After preparation, the project will be sent to the Governor of the State for approval.  Lawyers who work 20 hours per week will have a base salary of $2,500. For 40 hours, the stipulated amount is $5,000. During the session, the majority of members present upheld the values ​​that had been suggested at a public hearing conducted in May.”

From this paragraph it is not clear whether the two base salaries are $30,000 and $60,000 a year (See my post of Jan. 6, 2011: base salaries of Brazilian in-house attorneys were much higher.).

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In the Asian Lawyer, Summer 2012, two lawyers from a Korean firm state that “the size of the Korean legal market is around USD 3 to 3.5 billion.  Excluding litigation, the market size of the transaction market may be about USD 1 billion.”   Elsewhere I have offered some data on law departments in Korea (See my post of Jan 14, 2011: around 16 listed companies per million population.). On the next page, a partner in another firm mentions that “previously there have been around 1000 lawyers admitted to the bar every year, but this is the first year that we will be seeing 2500 new lawyers.”   Graduation from law school is one thing, passing the bar is another in Korea (See my post of May 18, 2010: bar passage rate in Korea at less than 5 %.).

 

US law schools graduate around 40 times as many lawyers each year. If we multiply the Korean legal market by 40, it suggests approximately a $120 billion US legal market. Others have found roughly similar figures (See my post of March 27, 2011: perhaps $70 billion by the Fortune 500 and $60 billion to US law firms; Oct. 25, 2011 #2: $60 billion global and $200 billion U.S. litigation figures; Oct. 28, 2011: $100 billion U.S. corporate legal market as 20% of global market; and Nov. 21, 2011 #3: “American legal market” generated around $255 billion.).

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New South Wales is Australia’s largest state, population 7.25 million out of 22.4 million in the country, and home to the country’s capital, Sydney.  Of the 23,760 solicitors who held current NSW Practising Certificates in 2010, 11.6 % worked in government while 18.2 % worked in corporations.

The “2010 Profile of the Solicitors of New South Wales” (page 29) tells us further that as of October 2010 there were 4,327 solicitors working in 1,268 corporate organisations. Of them, 639 listed themselves as “overseas.”  That is 3.4 lawyers per company, which I assume to be per law department.  It is also 175 corporate law departments for every million residents (See my post of July 24, 2011: estimates 84 law departments per million residents of New Jersey.).  NSW might support a higher ratio of legal departments per resident than the other states of Australia, so if we reduce the ratio by a quarter, that suggests approximately 3,000 corporate legal departments in Australia.

At the same time there were 2,760 government solicitors in NSW working across 161 government agencies (page 27).  Those agencies averaged 17 lawyers each, five time larger than their private organization counterparts.  It also means 21 government law departments per million residents.  For Australia as a whole, the last ratio is probably not likely since they don’t have Federal agencies as much.  If we reduce the ratio by, say, one-third, that leaves 317 government legal departments in Australia.

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Interviewed by the CCCA Mag., Winter, 2010, the tub-thumping former general counsel of General Electric offers a grandiose view of the general counsel’s role.  According to Ben Heinemann, a trend that is more powerful than cost-cutting is “that business and society issues have become an important part of the CEOs job description.” Hard to dispute that.  However, he adds with a flourish, “CEOs need top legal talent with broad experience to deal with those issues.”

 

Why? No doubt, CEOs would like to have as excellent legal talent as their companies can realistically afford, but is there an expectation that the top lawyer should bring to the table such magisterial competence? Is it indeed the role of the general counsel to give guidance to the CEO on “business and society issues” and therefore to have the “broad experience” to do so in a constructive and insightful way? I don’t think so. Of course, good lawyering means thinking beyond narrow legalities of rights and responsibilities. Many times, that is fully challenging enough. If the expectation runs far beyond that – to dispense wisdom about complicated challenges that are peripherally related to the law – we have not just scope creep, but scope run.

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An article in the J. Empirical Legal Studies, June 2012 at 233, relies on box-and-whisker plots to describe large amounts of its data.  Since the whiskers show the minimum and maximum values for a given variable, the authors chose a convention for how to handle “outside values.”  “An outside value is defined as a value that is larger than the upper quartile plus 1.5 times the interquartile range, or smaller than the lower quartile minus 1.5 times the interquartile range.”  That is a convention that makes sense to define and depict extreme and odd values. They displayed outside values as separate points.

 

For example, a box-and-whisker chart would nicely convey much about the revenue of an industry in a benchmark report.  It would, however, have some companies who reported outside values.  Someone might have entered too many zeros or used a currency other than dollars but did not indicate that or was simply wrong.  The convention gives a way to collar outliers.

 

This blog has explained box-and-whisker plots (See my post of May 3, 2008: sometimes called Tukey boxes; and Jan. 15, 2009: box-and-whisker plots to display data.).  It has also explained inter-quartile ranges (See my post of Nov. 30, 2005: the average of the middle; June 30, 2006: inter-quartile mean; and Dec. 22, 2010: inter-quartile differences.).  As to how to handle outliers, even that topic has appeared in these pages (See my post of April 27, 2010: information theory, power laws, and odd data; July 1, 2010: standardized scores highlight outliers; and Nov. 28, 2011: Winsorize data.).

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I hope you like my blog make-over.  Through the excellent work of my friends at Justia and the steady encouragement of Geoff Gussis, this blog heads into the second half of 2012 and beyond as a WordPress blog.

As of July 4, 2012, a day after my new WordPress blog had its coming out party, these were the 14 categories for my posts and the numbers of posts in them.

Outside Counsel (1,574)

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The term “reverse mentoring,” new to me, it appears in InsideCounsel, April 2012 at 41.  They are programs “in which people who are in the earlier stages of their careers mentor more-experienced attorneys in the department to help them to see the organization from the eyes of people at an earlier stage.” The article does not give an example of a law department with a reverse mentoring initiative, although it mentions the legal departments of Gap Inc. and 3M as promoters of traditional top-down programs.

 

General counsel who want to take the pulse of their junior lawyers would be more likely to hold skip level meetings, arrange informal lunches, or learn by wandering around. One reverse-mentoring exception I can imagine would be on use of software, where an enlightened but technologically backward senior lawyer might welcome some tutoring by a computer-savvy younger lawyer.

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Thomas Lalla, the General Counsel of Pernod Ricard USA, makes a good suggestion about professional education. Writing in InsideCounsel, April 2012 at 10, Lalla urges law departments to “incorporate in-house training conducted by members of your legal team.” By this I presume he means that if your attorneys give short presentations on substantive legal or practice topics, they will become better at presentations and they will learn their material better.

 

That’s not all.  The material prepared might help educate clients or be posted to an intranet site.  Others in the department, furthermore, will increase their knowledge and perhaps become a bit more versed should they be called upon to back up the presenting attorney.

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Release 2.0 of the General Counsel Metrics global benchmark survey will go out in early August.  It looks set to have more than 500 participating companies, on the way to a thousand this year.

A benefit to be introduced with this Release is a collection of 110 of my blog posts on statistics for legal department managers.  It will include more than 48 pages of them, including a Table of Contents, index, and back references.  The posts are organized by topics and listed in chronological order.  For recipients of the Release, meaning all participants year to day, this will be a useful resource on a topic that is vitally important for benchmarks.

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