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The data reported in Exari’s white paper, Corporate Counsel Contracts Survey Report, Dec. 2011 at 8, appears impressive but upon reflection offers little insight. The company’s recent survey of approximately 100 legal departments asked them to estimate the average time they spent reviewing each contract. A chart shows four choices and what percentage of the respondents selected each choice. Roughly speaking one quarter chose each of about one hour, four hours, eight hours, and more than eight hours.

The distribution of those responses is so wide, a range of more than 8-to-1, that the results tell us little. Perhaps the question should have posited a representative contract and asked about that because the data as given leaves you scratching your head. It just cannot be that some legal departments average an hour per contract they review while others require more than a day. Something else is going on that distorts these response.

Quite possible the kinds of contracts being thought of are not the same. For example it may be the review of a routine sublease takes hardly any time at all by an experienced lawyer and some law departments mostly have similar commodity contracts. On the other hand the review of an agreement to construct a nuclear power plant justifiably deserves days and days of careful thought.

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Exari’s white paper, Corporate Counsel Contracts Survey Report, Dec. 2011 at 7, draws on responses from approximately 100 companies. They report that “an average of 67% of their contracts is created on their own paper and 35% of those agreements are renewals. Roughly 72% of contracts created by the respondents are reviewed by legal.”

It would make sense that the larger the company the higher the percentage of contracts, at least on the sell side, would be on their own paper. They have the clout to prevail, which is yet another advantage of scale. Second, renewals are undoubtedly much easier to complete – at least in terms of legal approval – than the initial contract. Finally, although contract review occupies a significant chunk of many in-house lawyers’ time, from this data something like a quarter of all contracts created within a company is handled solely by the business units. That speaks to the plentiful supply of form contracts and fall-back provisions that clients can draw on by themselves. On the other hand, law departments review a much higher percentage of contracts that come on the other side’s paper.

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UK matter management software. The UK’s largest friendly society LV= (aka the Liverpool & Victoria) has implemented Proclaim case management software from Eclipse Legal Systems for its inhouse legal and secretariat team to support internal clients. This item comes from Charles Christian’s Orange Rag, January 2012. Also, the legal services team at South Lanarkshire Council has implemented the Civica Legal system to improve case management, time recording and court bundling (See my post of Feb. 5, 2012: 11 matter management systems at LegalTechNY.).

CPA Global acquired by private equity firm. European private equity firm Cinven is to acquire the global IP management, offshore document review, LPO, and LSO (legal services outsourcing) business CPA Global for an undisclosed sum. The transaction is expected to be finalised over the next couple of months, according to Charles Christian’s Orange Rag, January 2012 (See my post of Nov. 1, 2011: Mitratech acquired by private equity firm.). Project Leadership Associates, which has a legal business consulting arm under partner Dan Safran, also sold itself to a private equity group in late 2011.

News of executives in the law department vendor space. Jeff Hodge has left doeLEGAL where he had served as Executive Director, Corporate for about a year. In late January, Wolters Kluwer promoted Richard Flynn to Group President and Chief Executive Officer of its Corporate Legal Services (CLS). CLS is a portfolio of businesses offering legal compliance and performance management solutions under brands that include CT Corporation, CT Lien Solutions, Corsearch, and TyMetrix.

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Very commonly general counsel and business executives complain vociferously about “regulatory overload.” Spewing out every year hundreds or thousands of new laws, regulations agency practices hobble business. The burden rises – but you know about every cloud. Four silver linings balance the picture a bit.

Were it not for governmental regulations and their enforcement, many in-house lawyers would not have their current jobs. If specialists in environmental issues, utilities, power transmission, food additives, transportation systems, or insurance products, to name but a few domains of ubiquitous regulations, were able to abolish their agencies and output, their jobs would diminish or disappear. Regulations protect the careers of regulatory lawyers.

Regulations clarify or set rules, so that businesses can plan, can design their products and offerings, and can rely on competitors honoring them at least partly. No executives thrive on chaotic unknowns; all of them like some anchor points because there still remain multifarious opportunities for innovation and improvement. As appellate decisions resolve legal tangles, regulations resolve business-practice tangles.

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ALM Legal Intelligence compiled responses from 107 senior in-house counsel, about three-quarters of which were general counsel. The summary of the report, in Law Tech. News, Feb. 2012 at 24, says that almost two out of three of the respondents come from companies with annual revenue of less than $1 billion, so many of the respondent departments have only 1-5 lawyers.

Size matters when it comes to e-billing software and its advantages. So, perhaps it is not as surprising as you first think to read that of the 107 law departments “none plan to install e-billing software to track outside counsel and fees.” You don’t benefit sufficiently if you are only two or three in-house lawyers if you have to choose, install, learn, roll out and maintain e-billing software. Even with larger departments the respondents might have thought of matter management software packages as more suited to “track outside counsel and fees.” They might have read the question as speaking merely to the method of transmitting invoices of outside counsel. The short summary also does not indicate what percentage of the respondents already uses e-billing and so don’t “plan to install” it.

In short, a survey finding that suggests an utter lack of interest in e-billing software among law departments may be an artifact of the respondents’ smallness, the question’s ambiguity, or the absence of a revelatory, complementary question. Other data tells us, after all, that e-billing capabilities are spreading.

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The reason there are so many awards handed out to law departments is that vendors and service providers pay handsomely for the publicity. If you are a software vendor, for example, you rejoice when one of the law departments that has installed your software bags an award (See my post of Feb. 9, 2012: litigation hold vendor’s client honored.). Not only do you rejoice, you take out an ad in the publication that gives the award. Or, if you are a law firm’s marketing department, you love having a client identify you as their partner in an award-winning activity, plus you plump down a bundle as the “sponsor” of the the black-tie ceremony. Even law departments swell up and feel good about themselves to be recognized as the Best Something – and they too pony up for a table at the gala bestowal ceremony.

The award givers make money from content, ads and tables and sponsorships. The awardees feel good about themselves and the marketing hype rises and rises all around.

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Something is amiss if the distinguished Legal Tech. News of ALM proclaims that the year’s most innovative law department, from the standpoint of technology, achieved that distinction because it selected a litigation hold system. The February 2012 write-up, at page 15, unquestionably describes something new and unheard of: the “extensive 430-point rating system to assess various vendor offerings” that Deere concocted. The vendors invited to participate, and there are a slew of them vying for playing time, must have gnashed their teeth at the bloated set of questions. A Request for Profusion shouldn’t win the blue ribbon.

The explanation for that unimaginably lengthy RFP, which spewed huge replies almost impossible to assess by Deere even if the vendors answered honestly and completely, was “because the system needed to work in the company’s current technology environment, integrate with existing technology, and be highly configurable.” That is what all law departments want of their software. Nothing innovative there nor in the function itself – litigation hold software. Ultimately, Deere selected Fusion Legal Hold from Exterro.

Unless there was a paucity of submissions, why does licensing a commercial package to handle litigation holds merit such recognition?

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The most recent ALM Intelligence metrics survey asked about 26 practice areas, including “Other.” They allowed me to examine data provided by about 70 US legal departments. Of them, eight practice areas accounted for two-thirds of all the lawyer positions. Litigation and Commercial each accounted for around 15%, while Intellectual Property and Regulatory were next most common (7%). International as well as Labor/employment both had around 6%. Securities, Healthcare, and Insurance, at 4% each brought the total of the most common practice areas up to two-thirds of all the lawyers.

From a different perspective, with the exception of Insurance, which was influenced by the participation of a large insurance company, the other seven specialties of law are generic, in that any company might have lawyers who practice in those areas. To learn more about the Law Department Metrics Benchmark Survey of ALM Legal Intelligence, click here for ALM’s website.

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Not many law departments calculate rolling averages, such as for what they spend per month on outside counsel, but it is a useful tool to show up-to-the-month patterns in time-interval data. Rolling averages can show your progress since they convey recent trends rather than overall averages. I write about rolling averages and how to calculate and display them in my Morrison on Metrics column, published Jan. 30, 2012, with InsideCounsel.com. The full column about rolling averages is available online.

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By my rough count, at least six vendors at LegalTechNY offered SharePoint applications. For example, Handshake Software explained to me that its software can draw on the structured, SQL data in any matter management system and put that data into SharePoint. It sounds like the ubiquitous software takes a step toward a portal, or a platform, or a data warehouse.

Handshake also explained that their PageGum application lets an in-house lawyer personalize SharePoint. Tools that personalize what is on the screen for a user have great appeal, if the users take advantage of those features.

I note three other SharePoint vendors from the show. CLM Matrix offers a SharePoint application related to contract administration and Business Integrity http://www.business-integrity.com/ promotes its integration with SharePoint for contract creation and management with Contract Express. The third is Dolphin software, which swims in the same pool as CLM Matrix and Business Integrity.