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In his column for the ACC Docket, Dec. 2011 at 4, Jonathan Oviatt cites “one of the most important findings in the CLO Survey is that 92 percent of CLOs remain satisfied with their careers.” The glow emanating from that cheerful factoid may be completely deserved. Or, it might deserve inspection.

Any statistician would point out that CLOs who were sufficiently dissatisfied to leave their position weren’t counted. A survivor bias of sorts is at work. On further inspection, someone would like to know whether there was a choice of “very satisfied” or “completely satisfied.” If so, the luke-warm “satisfied” provides thin gruel. If the question was “yes or no, are you satisfied,” 92 percent seems low!

As a third comment, to put much credence on the reported finding you would want to know how many general counsel responded, the demographics of the population, and the survey’s methodology. Then too, if the identical question were asked of a group of other professionals, such as partners in architectural firms or managing partners in accounting firms, would the finding be that in the 90th percentile are satisfied? In other words, maybe most people with good jobs are content with their career. One wonders, too, whether career contentment equals current-position contentment. Lastly, if nearly one out of ten of the top lawyers were not satisfied, doesn’t that suggest a higher level of dissatisfaction might be likely lower down?

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Back in the mists of time, I wrote about the 18 tools that general counsel most commonly use (See my post of April 14, 2005: based loosely on Bain’s annual studies of tools.).

Seven years later, I would no longer include balanced scorecards, employee satisfaction surveys, psychometric tests and retainer letters. Recreating what my thought process was back then when I included them gets me nowhere. Today I recant: those four tools rarely show up in law departments.

As to three other tools, I am dubious, to put it mildly, about including client satisfaction surveys, mission statements, and strategic plans. Although they have their adherents, those tools hardly rise to the level of “common.”

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Many invitations to complete surveys appear in the e-mail boxes of general counsel. Probably scores of them every year for U.S. departments and they seek all kinds of information. It is an incessant badgering, but how else can interested parties learn about what is going on out there more precisely and reliably than from anecdotes, the press, and subjective impressions?

Since I am one of those people who surveys and since this blog battens on survey data about law department operations, I thought to summarize the styles of questions that present themselves to general counsel.

Some gather opinions: “Has ADR made a difference in how you resolve disputes?”

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How you manage your only absolutely finite resource – your fixed allotment of time – determines your effectiveness. That much may be accepted intellectually, but under the onslaught of pressure, emotions, and foibles, our best laid plans aft gae awry. We don’t schedule ourselves very effectively and, worse, for many in-house lawyers, someone else sets the pace.

Despite its paramount importance, how in-house attorneys dole out their minutes and hours has gotten relatively little explicit attention on this blog (See my post of Sept. 3, 2008: general counsel are in control, except their own calendar; Oct. 4, 2009: give direct reports a time budget; Nov. 13, 2009: much of GC’s time is fixed by others’ schedules; Dec. 10, 2009: give yourself time between meetings; Sept. 16, 2011: limit meetings with clients to 30 minutes; and Oct. 31, 2011: build in time margins.).

My only suggestion is a common-sense one: take a few minutes to review and think about your own calendar and patterns and whether you could dole out your finite minutes more effectively.

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An article in Atlantic, Dec. 2011 at 67, proposed this distinction: “[I]deological differences stem more from differences in people’s beliefs about how the world works than from differences in their basic values”

It is hard for me to distinguish the two views in the context of a legal department.

Basic values would seem to be highly determinative in a person’s model of how things work. Consider one situation. If you believe everyone is created equal (a basic value), wouldn’t it affect how you see promotions, success in life, fairness? If you think that powerful wealthy people generally get their way (that’s the way of the world), isn’t it likely that your basic values lean toward discipline, striving and self-improvement? Not necessarily, because you could believe the essentially life is unfair or mean.

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This term, new to me, appeared in a catalogue of books from MIT Press. Here is a definition from George Ainsley’s website.

“Picoeconomics (micro-micro-economics) explores the implications … that people (often) … discount the prospect of future rewards in a curve that is more deeply bowed than a “rational,” exponential curve. Over a range of delays from seconds to decades, there are pairs of alternative rewards such that subjects prefer the smaller, earlier reward over the larger, later alternative when delay to the smaller reward will be short, but prefer the larger, later reward when the smaller alternative will be more delayed, even though the time from the earlier to the later reward stays the same. The curves that fit the observed data best are hyperbolic, that is, show value as inversely proportional to delay.”

Ainslie originally discovered hyperbolic discounting as an aspect of a broader empirical principle, Herrnstein’s matching law. It’s not simply the size of a reward times the inverse of time until the reward – that would be an exponential function.

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A benchmark that shows up from surveys of law departments is the external spending per in-house lawyer. According to this year’s General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey, for more than 400 departments in the United States, that figure runs around $500,000 per attorney. Stated differently, for the median department, if each lawyer were equally responsible for managing outside counsel, they would be approving about $10,000 of invoices each week. (Just stating that colossal amount belies claims of effective bill review.).

Several factors influence spending per lawyer for any specific legal department. The most significant is the number of in-house counsel. If the department is “lawyer heavy” it will have a lower figure, since it has relatively more lawyers than peers. Ironically, more lawyers on staff may lead to them generating more need for outside counsel.

The figure also depends on the industry of the department, since industries differ considerably in the intensity of litigation faced by their members. Litigation accounts for the largest share of external spend, but not all of it.

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Penny Simpson, energetic, funny, generous of her time and talents, caring of those around her, a completely warm and loving person, and incidentally the very capable founder of an innovative legal technology consulting firm, lost it all two years ago from a massive heart attack. Amazingly, you could say, she survived, or at least her body did, but the loss of oxygen to her brain robbed her of her abilities, personality, husband, and joyous élan.

Penny died New Year’s Day, and it is a sadder 2012.

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Mitratech, a leading matter management system provider, acquired by private equity firm (Nov. 1, 2011)

Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm with some $6 billion in investments, acquired Mitratech.

A reporting line to the board to assure the general counsel of more independence (Nov. 3, 2011)

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Wordnik.com shows how English words are actually used in books and other publications. I searched for “law department” and found most of the references were to the law programs at universities, but with one charming exception. “After he took her picture, just as a lark, and displayed it in his shop, it was seen by an errand boy who worked in the law department of Loews, Inc.” The quote comes from J. Randy Taraborrelli’s, Sinatra, The Man Behind the Myth.

For “legal department,” there were quite a few more references in works of fiction. The one that made me smile was from a science fiction work called Moonwar by Ben Bova. “As I understand it,’ the head of the legal department tried to explain, ‘Edie Elgin beamed her report here from Moonbase.” Beats faxing.

Finally, in Dan Fogelman and Tom Clancy’s thriller, The Sum of All Fears, Wordnik salvaged this commonplace: “Nancy, could you tell the general counsel that I need to see him?”