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The first 100 or so participants in 2012 in the General Counsel Metrics industry benchmark survey were eager to take part, as demonstrated by how quickly they did so. Do their metrics look fundamentally different from last year’s final group of 840, which clearly had some late-in-the-season participants? No, most of the early trends match the final results from last year.

Here are some other findings from the early birds. About 60% of the respondents are general counsel, while another 10% are administrators. Those characteristics are also in line with past surveys.

Two questions asked about matter management software and contract management software. So far, 14 different matter management systems have been implemented among the 40 companies who have given the name of their package. Serengeti and Bridgeway have the most among that group. As to contract management software, the respondents have selected 17 different packages, only one of them by two departments. As more companies take part, it will become clearer whether (a) fewer departments have installed contract than matter-management software and (b) the market for contract software is even more fragmented.

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We urge you to click on this survey link and take a few minutes to enter your 2011 staff numbers as well as your internal and external legal spend.

The first 105 participants in this year’s General Counsel Metrics industry benchmark survey let me start to gauge the eventual group. For one, the pace projects to more than 300 law departments in the first release, which will go out in early June.

Two-thirds of the initial group are U.S. law departments, slightly ahead of the 61% figure at the end of last year’s 829 participating companies. So far, three other countries each have 4 participants (Belgium, Canada, and the UK).

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We often use the term “equals” very loosely. “Her matter load is equal to his.” “Our paralegals-per-billion-of revenue is equal to the median for our industry.” In my column Morrison on Metrics: “Lies told by the equals sign,” I point out that “equal” rarely means what we think when we collect law department metrics. It was published on March 9, 2012 and you can click here to see the full discussion.

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In-house lawyers do most of their reading, listening, and giving advice – their primary ways of learning – within a relatively narrow cone of their practice areas. Further, while seated at their desk they do most of this. Time and facilities don’t permit otherwise, they would remonstrate. That rigidity takes a toll on creativity.

John Brockman, Ed., This Will Make You Smarter (Harper Collins 2012) at 101, presents research that shows we can learn more effectively through situational change. Periodically, read something from a field that is new to you and, here’s the odd part, read it in a different place. So, find out about Renaissance tapestries at a table in the cafeteria; delve into the international notation for opera singers in a conference room; learn something about Mongolian yurts in the reception area. That is, to fertilize your mind and store creative building blocks, we should “invest a few hours a week in reading research that ostensibly has nothing to do with our day jobs, in a setting that has nothing in common with our regular workplace.”

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Two schools of thought about ethics afford us a different way to think about value delivered by law firms. Consequentialism is the ethical view that what is right is what brings about good results. That is the summary in A.C. Grayling, Ideas that Matter: the concepts that shape the 21st century (Basic Books 2010) at 89. Deontology is the view that “rightness or wrongness of an action is intrinsic to the action itself, and is quite independent of whatever consequences follow from its performance.”

If we apply those two ethical concepts to the services of law firms, we could say that the value of those services depends on the outcome – the utilitarian assessment of what the company obtains as a result. Who cares about staff and processes (maybe even quality of work or cost) if the company achieves its goal?

Or, we could posit that the value of the services inheres in the work the firm does, regardless of the outcome. After all, the law firm may play a bit role to compared to business decisions and realities. Often outcomes have very little to do with the contributions of the law firm.

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The Am. Scholar, Spring 2012 at 66, reveals how we read. Our eyes make hops, known as saccades, and for the 20 to 30 milliseconds of each we do not perceive anything, and then they fixate for 200 to 300 milliseconds. Thus, the absolute fastest any of us can read – actually read each word – is 500 words per minute. That assumes no comprehension beyond just identifying the word. “In practice, most of us read about 250 words per minute.”

The author emphasizes that so-called “speed reading” reduces to skimming, and skimming means attention to detail and absorption of it falls apart. Moreover, note that “the speed with which we read something is linked to our ability to remember it later.”

Sorry, the better way to pick up your reading pace is to select what you read with more care. You can read more here on reading (See my post of April 27, 2008: speed-reading is a myth; and July 14, 2009: better meetings through reading during them; June 16, 2010: drawbacks of hypertext reading; Oct. 22, 2010: reading is one of the least effective ways of learning.).

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This quote, “leadership involves a delicate combination of plumbing and poetry,” struck me when James March spoke it during an interview (Acad. Mgt. Learning & Ed., Sept. 2011 at 504). Law department leaders have to get the basics rights, the water flowing and the heat heating. Contract review, timely filings, never a default, and few surprises for management. The top lawyer has to attend to the plumbing and both hire, motivate, and direct well.

At the same time, But the top lawyer also has deeper issues to grapple with, such as leadership, power, role modeling, culture, scope and goals. These are grander and more poetic. They call on artistic glow more than mechanical plodding. Both are necessary; general counsel should be poetic plumbers.

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A fascinating chapter in a recent book on natural experiments in history explains our country’s history of so-called free banking (anyone could set up a bank, rather than have to get government approval). According to Jared Diamond and James A. Robinson, Eds., Natural Experiments in History (Harvard Univ. 2010) at 98, in 1914 there were 27,349 banks in the United States, which sounds like fertile fishing for law departments. One-third of them were federal-chartered, and they controlled $11.5 billion in assets.

It’s unlikely, however, that in-house bank lawyers abounded, since almost none of the banks had branches. Stunted this way, most of them probably had no in-house lawyer. Still, even if only one out of a hundred was big enough to support an in-house lawyer, that leaves hundreds of possible departments. Was the first sizable U.S. law department (five or more lawyers) in a bank, a railroad, an insurance company?

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A previous post has used this cornerstone of statistics, the Central Limit Theorem, but did not explain it fully (See my post of July 30, 2011: the Central Limit Theory.). In George G. Szpiro, Pricing the Future: finance, physics, and the 300-year journey to the Black-Scholes equation (Basic Books 2011) at 186, Szpiro writes: “The theorem says that when many independent random variables combine, the resulted is distributed according to the bell-shaped curve.”

To illustrate: invoices arrive to be paid by law departments for all kinds of unpredictable (random) reasons (independent of each other). If you graph the distribution of those invoice amounts the shape will look much like the well-known bell. A few very small, a few very large, a bulging cluster around the average amount. Slightly more than two-thirds of all the invoices will fall within one so-called standard deviation on both sides of the bell’s center, which is about where the bell starts to curve outward.

Or consider lawsuits. Their number, timing, and differences each quarter over the past five years are to a fair degree determined by random and unrelated forces. The Central Limit Theory predicts that the quarterly totals will look like a bell-curve distribution if sorted high to low, and more so if the company has lots of litigation.

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A.C. Grayling, Ideas that Matter: the concepts that shape the 21st century (Basic Books 2010) at 63 discusses business ethics. Grayling states, matter of factly, that “the boundaries of legal permission in all capitalist economies lie outside those of moral acceptability.” If that statement is correct, that what lawyers can uphold as a legal action is often beyond what society would accept as moral, then it is difficult to hold in-house counsel up as the champions of integrity and ethical behavior. It means they constantly could say, “Legally you can do this even though ethically it is suspect.”

I like to think that the law comports for the most part with ethics, but that is a naïve and self-deluded view by some critics of our business mores and cultural values.