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Mark Roellig, the general counsel of Mass Mutual, has published several thoughtful articles recently about law department management. His latest appears in the ACC Docket, March 2012 at 53. Deep in the piece he mentions something a few readers might have encountered and offers some advice.

If a company selects you to come in as the general counsel, what should you do about your secretarial-administrative person? “My experience is that you are generally better off to assume the incumbent assistant than to take the risk of the two of you learning together – or to bring along your current assistant, which is a huge mistake.” If the person stays, and most do because they have risen to the upper echelon of administrative assistants, keep him or her as your guide and go-between.

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For some time, I have fretted about an under-discussed obstacle to successful cost reduction. Law department managers assume their reports will diligently keep the brakes on law firm spending. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, those same lawyers may willingly tramp on the accelerator.

My article last week in the National Law Journal lays out my thinking about the reasons for this ironic situation and some steps that might alleviate it. To learn more about this psychological reversal, click on this link.

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Here are metaposts on seven domains of mathematics that play a role in legal department management.

Bayesian statistics (See my post of April 5, 2009: Bayesian statistics with 6 references.)

Bell curves and normal distributions (See my post of March 12, 2009: bell curves with 8 references.).

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An item in the ACC Docket, March 2012 at asian briefings 1, notes that the Asian region of Deere & Company’s law department has grown from two to 20 legal department employees in the past five years. The lawyers for that global company are increasingly placed to match the footprint of the company’s revenue. For the very largest companies in the world, the ones that do business all over, their law department locations and numbers of lawyers at them will eventually line up with where they do the most business.

The exception will be the global specialists, such as securities lawyers and corporate governance specialists, as well as the heads of litigation and intellectual property. They may cluster where the preponderance of senior executives sit – but then again as executives disperse global legal specialists too might distribute geographically and the department as a whole will cover the map.

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A couple of suggestions not covered on this blog heretofore can help tame the unruly beast of e-mail. They appear in Law Practice, May/June 2012 at 63. The author leads into one practical suggestion – send fewer e-mails – with some data. “For every five emails you jettison into cyberspace, you will receive three responses.” Hence, she writes, for every message you don’t write, you will reduce the flow back by 10%. Simple, but effective.

The other tip, strengthen the subject line, has a new wrinkle. A clear subject line helps your reader, to be sure, but it can also help you make the body of your message more concise. Crystallize the gist of the e-mail in your header and you will have thought more clearly about what you write below it.

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You can find posts here on different conceptual frameworks. Each framework attempts to package and comprehend the multifarious components on law departments.

  1. McKinsey 7S model and similar frameworks. The alliteration is tiresome and forced but the terms cover a lot (See my post of Aug. 8, 2005: McKinsey 7S model.).

  2. Topics of this blog (Benchmarks, Clients, Knowledge Management, Non-Law Firm Costs, Outside Counsel, Productivity, Showing Value, Structure, Talent, Technology, Thinking, and Tools).

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A recent survey provided InsideCounsel with average total cash compensation for the five practice areas at the top. They were M&A ($288,962), Antitrust ($280,441), International ($257,097), Intellectual Property – Licensing ($252,948), and Tax ($250,209). These figures came from a data set that includes a fairly high proportion of large law departments, so the figures are likely to be higher than prevails across the board in the United States.

For the highest paid lawyers, by the way, M&A cash compensation works out to be $160 an hour, assuming 1,800 chargeable hours. For Tax, it is $140 an hour. If you add in some value for equity awards and a fairly standard 25% overhead, then it is easy to see reaching and breaching $225 an hour for these corporate lawyers.

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Regular readers of this blog understand, or at least have heard of, distributions of data that look like a bell. Many toward the middle hump; tails of less frequent amounts on either end. Invoice amounts for large law departments follow that pattern, for example. Some readers might even speak comfortably about standard deviations (See my post of March 12, 2009: bell curves with 8 references.).

Along with normal, bell-curves there exist many other mathematical distributions of data, several of which this blog has covered. Legal managers who aspire to sophisticated data analysis should familiarize themselves with these ways to describe and understand data.

For example, a power-law distribution has a dominant number, a significant drop off to the next number, a lesser drop to the third, and on down to the proverbial long tail (See my post of April 27, 2010: power-law distributions with 6 references.).

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“Despite the anecdotal perception that demand for alternative fee arrangements may have
grown stronger following the 2008 collapse, there are no publicly available longitudinal data to evaluate such claims. Comprehensive empirical data on the market penetration of alternative fee arrangements, and the demonstrable benefits of those arrangements to corporate clients, are lacking.” The damning quote comes from An Early Assessment of the Civil Justice System After the Financial Crisis (Rand Corp. 2012) at 34.

I agree. We lack empirical evidence regarding the touted growth of AFAs. Several times this blog has referred to putative “findings” about the increasing prevalence of AFAs, but the posts have been laden with methodological doubts. Most have to do with the definition of “alternative fee” – is a discount an alternative fee? – and some have to do with the bias injected by “right-thinking” respondents – who these days would say that their department does not make use of this trendy technique (See my post of Aug. 23, 2011: AFA posts since early 2009 with 35 references.)? Always, there is the question of penetration – if a firm says it uses AFAs but in fact only for a few small matters, does that support the claim? We need much better data.

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A recent survey asked respondents about the bases for raises to their in-house lawyers. By far the dominant reason was “merit,” with 94% of the respondents checking that reason. A lawyer perceived as adding more value to the company deserves a fatter paycheck.

Next came promotions, at 80%, where rising to a new level brings with it a salary bump. Third, “market-based equity” at 46% means that HR and the general counsel determine that someone’s pay lags what comparable lawyers make at other departments. Fourth, discretionary pay increases at 29% were far more common than “employee’s skills” (11%), “experience” (8%), “cost of living” (5%), and “tenure” (1%).