Law Department Management Blog

Published on: May 2, 2012

The corporate security function under the general counsel of AmerisourceBergen

In the portfolio of John Chou, general counsel and secretary of AmerisourceBergen, fall four groups. The law department includes 21 lawyers and 24 other members. Those 45 are less than half of his total complement because it also includes government affairs, regulatory affairs, and corporate security. All told, the “law department” counts about 110 staff. These demographics emerge from GC Insights: What Multinational General Counsel Value Most (ACC 2012, supplement to ACC Docket) at 12.

The $80 billion pharmaceutical services companies has perhaps the lowest ratio of lawyers per billion I have ever seen for such a huge company. With a quarter of a lawyer per billion, it makes anorexic departments with but a lawyer or two per billion look hefty. That nano-metric deserves some explanation. Might there be a passel of hidden lawyers in the business units? Might outside counsel spending be very high?

My major point, however, has to do with corporate security. That function, I thought, was very unusual to be under the general counsel, although some late-arriving data suggest I am wrong (See my post of March 1, 2012: roughly one-out of three GCs in a survey also ran corporate security.). To my surprise, that post stands alone among the 7,203 published so far as a reference to the corporate security function.

Published on: May 2, 2012

Common reasons for people leaving a law department

By Rees Morrison

A survey now underway asks law department respondents, “What have you found to be the most common reason for people [presumably, just lawyers] leaving the business [presumably, the law department]?” The four choices offered on the survey deserve comment: “Career progression,” “s alary,” “join competitor,” and “redundancy.”

My supposition is that the most common reason why lawyers resign from their in-house position is that they have been offered a better position at another company. That would be “career progression,” and surely dominates the other reasons. The chance to become a general counsel lures many away.

When lawyers resign, it is unlikely simply to get paid more. They move to add responsibility or have more opportunity, which only coincidentally may bring a higher salary (See my post of April 26, 2012: external hires get 18% more pay than internal candidates.).

Published on: April 30, 2012

Languages spoken by lawyers in a legal department: three levels of proficiency

By Rees Morrison

When companies do business in many languages, their legal department can help more when it has lawyers who are conversant in those languages. Multi-lingual capability is a topic this blog has addressed (See my post of April 26, 2006: managing lawyers who do not speak English as a primary language; Aug. 26, 2006: linguistic diversity in the Mary Kay law department; April 23, 2007: challenges of foreign offices include language barriers; Aug. 13, 2009 #5: only translate key provisions from agreements in another language; and April 29, 2009: Peter Wexler, of French-based Schneider Electric, doesn’t speak French.).

What hasn’t been seen until recently is a survey that asks respondent legal departments to count how many languages its team members speak. So, I read with interest one that asks these three questions:

“How many languages does your team speak? [In how many languages are they] Able to communicate with business people? Able to draft legal documents in.” Those are three levels of fluency in a foreign language and the data will make sense as one indicator of the capability of a law department.

Published on: April 30, 2012

The positive side of law firm bills as marketing tools

By Rees Morrison

At a panel hosted this month by Canada’s Heenan Blaikie, a leading general counsel told the audience that “a law firm’s bill is its best opportunity for marketing its services.” He suggested that the bill can make clear the value the firm delivered that month and, indeed, give some insights into the how well it manages its services. The bill can show adherence to budgets and expectations and indicate the direction the matter is likely to take.

He is right, theoretically, and the positive messages from an invoice that he emphasized do have value. However, to show that time was written off does not inspire confidence and loyalty (See my post of May 20, 2011: invoice with mark-downs is not a shrewd marketing tool.). Even so, far more effective at marketing a firm’s services than any invoice content are such steps as offers of attractive fixed fees or superior and innovative offerings content.

Published on: April 30, 2012

Braggadocio if law departments hold themselves out as gifted, strategists, beacons of integrity, and patron saints of corporate social responsibility

By Rees Morrison

Lawyers, sometimes pummeled by non-lawyers as arrogant and prideful, bring that opprobrium on themselves if they try to elevate their department as grander and more influential than others would agree. A number of instances of inflated self-regard and self-promoting have appeared on this blog (See my post of July 24, 2011: all staff functions provide input to business managers, and legal is not special.). Let me pull together five culprits.

“We lawyers are deep strategic thinkers”: The GC argues that it should play a role in all corporate decisions of significance (See my post of April 13, 2012: no, don’t try to intervene in all strategic decisions.).

“Our legal team is unique and superior as a support staff group”: The law department that sets itself above other support functions earns no respect (See my post of April 19, 2012: uniqueness of law departments as serving others.).

Published on: April 30, 2012

Two unusual responsibilities of Ford’s General Counsel

By Rees Morrison

From GC Insights: What Multinational General Counsel Value Most (ACC 2012, supplement to ACC Docket) at 27, we learn about the law department of Ford Motor. It has 146 lawyers and 215 other staff. Among the 361 total people are Ford’s tax lawyers as well as internal audit.

It is unusual for tax lawyers to be part of the legal department as they more commonly report up to the CFO (See my post of March 27, 2009: tax lawyers and reporting with 7 references.).

https://www.lawdepartmentmanagementblog.com/a-breakdown-of-outside-counsel-usage-by-practice-area/

Published on: April 30, 2012

To clarify two contributions of outside counsel: specialized expertise vs. assistance with complexity

By Rees Morrison

A recent survey of in-house counsel, reported in Deloitte’s Global Corporate Counsel Report 2011 at 17, gave the three most common responses when they were asked to specify why they retained outside counsel: “Need for greater specialist expertise,” “need for additional legal resources,” and “complexity of the legal work.” Far more chose expertise (80%) than chose complexity (48%), and I wondered what explains the difference.

It could be that in-house lawyers read “expertise” as the outside lawyer’s deep knowledge of a specific legal domain. “Chris knows everything about Ohio environmental procedures,” or “Jean has years of experience with zoning restrictions in Florida.” Expertise connotes pinpoint knowledge of an area of law and its practice.

Whereas it could be that “complexity” has different connotations. The term conjures up the need to combine multiple legal domains, which few outside lawyers can do and is more the forte of the inside lawyer who coordinates outside specialists. To build a shopping center requires tax advice, real estate nous, construction-law depth, and perhaps labor knowledge. To hire outside counsel with all that ability would be quite hard, so the ranking for this reason was lower.

Published on: April 26, 2012

A third of your time on e-mail, and more ideas to be effective during that time

By Rees Morrison

Research by a company, admittedly one with a stake in highlighting e-mail overload, “found that most employees spend at least a third of their time at work on e-mail.” Inside counsel may log something like that, or at least feel that consumed by e-mail. Therefore, It has been a frequent topic for this blog to pass on advice about e-mail productivity. A few more are at hand from the NY Times, April 21, 2012 at B8. (1) Make one point per e-mail. This discipline pushes you to think about what takeaway you want the reader to get, not to mention that many readers never even read to the second and third points. (2) “Don’t over-use the high priority flag. It is the tragedy of the commons: if every message shouts priority, none has it. (3) Don’t forward chain e-mails.

The piece makes two other points not previously addressed by this blog. Consider how quickly you should respond. You can calibrate your timing to the importance of the message or the rank of the e-mailer. Second, consider this simple rule of thumb: “If you had to spend the price of a stamp to send this e-mail, would you?”

Published on: April 26, 2012

Higher pay, poorer performance for two years, and less job stability for external hires

By Rees Morrison

Good reasons can be adduced for why a general counsel hires a senior lawyer from outside the department, but drawbacks to that decision persist. According to research reported in the NY Times, April 22, 2012 at BU7, external hires, “on average, make around 18 percent more money than internal employees with similar positions.” They cost considerably more “And yet they perform less well in the first two years and are also more likely to leave or be let go.” Not to mince words – less for more.

Lawyers, quintessential knowledge workers, exalt individual intellect and experience and diminish the contribution of a team, such as institutional knowledge, trust and support. Plopped into a new company, it makes sense that new hires consistently take more time to get up to speed than employers project (See my post of March 24, 2011: stars are more dependent on their supporting cast than they acknowledge; and April 26, 2011: teams add greatly to an individual’s talents.).

Published on: April 26, 2012

Preferred management levers redirect behavior, they don’t try to reform culture

By Rees Morrison

The Economist, April 14, 2012 at 76, writes that the current CEO of Honeywell took over in 2002. Rather than try to change values of employees, which are harder to measure, he focused on how to increase the frequency and effectiveness of a dozen important behaviors. General counsel can learn from this veteran’s success.

We talk profusely about “culture” in a law department, but we will make more progress if we pay attention to desired behavior. A culture of stewardship, as one example, translates less well into cost control than actions (behavior) that, for example, obtain and review budgets of outside law firms. A culture of teamwork sounds wonderful to extol, but the actual monthly meetings of Centers of Excellence go farther to promote sharing and collaboration and are easier to direct and evaluate.

How people act manifests itself much more clearly and concretely than what’s in their hearts and minds. The beliefs and values espoused in a law department stay amorphous; actions speak louder than culture and managers can shape them more effectively (See my post of Nov. 20, 2007: culture with 13 references and 3 other posts cited.)