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A strategic plan to make better technology available in your law department makes much more sense to me than overall departmental plans. The software, hardware, and training covered by such a plan falls much more to the control of the department, although with corporate IT embracing it and standardizing it, than does an overall plan tied to the performance of the company and its business initiatives.

A department can much more chart its own course. It need not be reactive. Achievements can be shown within a few months; members of the department can see and appreciate improvements directly; and investments of time and money can be modest of manageable.

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Well, thankfully, now you can. My latest InsideCounsel column plunged into the insights you can gain when you understand, calculate, and properly apply the statistical tool called the coefficient of variation.

The calculation, easy to do with Excel, lets you compare the relative dispersion of two sets of numbers that don’t have the same base, such as to compare a set of numbers in dollars to a set in months. Click above to increase the statistical odds of some insightful variation in your life.

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LinkedIn membership costs nothing, but the vast professional online site can provide significant value. Groups abound and you can look up people and often find more about them and how to reach them.

Almost two months ago I started a LinkedIn group (Law Department Administrators) for administrators in legal departments and those who report to administrators. With 46 members as I write, this group gives heads of law department operations a forum to ask questions, share experiences, and offer lessons learned.

My long-running group on LinkedIn started in April 2008 for those more broadly interested in law department management has grown to 895 members. More and more frequently it has discussion posts and resources from a number of those members. The group warmly welcomes newcomers (See my post of Jan. 4, 2010: 250 members; Dec. 21, 2010: 445 members; Feb. 16, 2011: 510 have joined; and April 22, 2011: more than 650 in the group.).

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The HBR Consulting benchmark survey suggests a guideline for what expenses should be included in a general counsel’s budget. It is something like “Do not include expenses that a company would have to pay even if there were no law department at all.” That sounds constructive, and would eliminate annual meeting expenses and the costs to prepare and distribute annual reports, and directors’ fees, for example, since all of those costs would continue even if you shut down the law department.

My problem, however, is that patent registration and maintenance fees would presumably also continue even were a company to have never started, or later ended, its legal department. Yet I believe those expenses properly fall into the law department budget.

If law department managers are to be able to compare their metrics to others’, we need a consistent framework and definition for what’s in and what’s out.

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If you need an expert witness in a case, you can ask the law firm you have retained to locate one, or you can use one of the many services that specialize in finding experts (See my post of Feb. 2, 2008: expert witnesses with 9 references.).

When outside counsel locate the expert and conduct vetting phone calls., law departments typically pay for their help at an hourly rate. Boutique services are out there, however, that do not charge by the hour, let alone the hundreds of dollars an hour and lots of hours a law firm might charge. A principal of IMS ExpertServices makes this point in the In-House Defense Qtrly., Summer 2011 at 6 (See my post of Feb. 13, 2008: Round Table Group and its 95,000 experts; and Nov. 1, 2010: allow non-lawyers to assist with expert witness preparation.).

I can hear the objections already: the law firm will duplicate much of the work anyway. And, if anything goes other than as hoped with the expert’s role in the case, fingers will point.

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I came across this description of a service available from Macleod Dixon, a UK firm soon to join Norton Rose.

“Technology Consulting and Support: In-house legal departments’ technology needs are often quite different from the technology needs and solutions in their business units. Macleod Dixon provides technology consulting to clients in the following areas:

• Legal technology application development and evaluation

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A practice that is expressly authorized by most states’ ethics rules, and often referred to as unbundled legal services, means representing a client on a limited basis. According to For the Defense, April 2011 at 41, such circumscribed legal roles include to defend a deposition, appear at a hearing or mediation, or draft a pleading. The model rules of practice permit unbundling “as long as (1) the limitation is reasonable under the circumstances, and (2) the client gives informed consent to the limited representation.” Law department lawyers could and do unbundle many legal services.

All you readers may know about this definition of unbundling, but I did not and it struck me as another way for law departments to cherry-pick the services they want at the price they are willing to pay. The fly in the ointment is that to unbundle takes thought, time, and management – all in short supply inside.

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A tool to help communicate about and plan for a complicated project is what some analysts call a design structure matrix (DSM). As described in the Harvard Bus. Rev., Oct. 2011 at 106, in a DSM, “a project’s tasks are listed along the rows and columns of a matrix, and the team marks whether each item is related to the others, designating each relationship as either a direct dependency or a feedback loop.”

Matrix algebra can than calculate a recommended order for the tasks or a simpler spreadsheet function can show the interactions. DSM sounds like industrial-grade GANTT charting, but for hefty projects run by legal departments, a watered-down version might be helpful.

I have written about matrices, which are sometimes simply tables or grids (See my post of March 10, 2005: Johns Manville’s RAPP matrix; May 28, 2005: a spending matrix; May 3, 2006: PetSmart’s complex matrix; Feb. 1, 2007: nine-box tool; March 25, 2009: grid analysis methods; Aug. 4, 2009: Laffey matrix; Aug. 9, 2010: law firms put in portfolio matrix; Sept. 27, 2010: patent lawyers team with colleagues to prepare an opportunity matrix; and Nov. 8, 2010: contract approval matrix.).

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“Human beings tend to seek simple and neat explanations for a complex world.” Jochal Benkler explains in the Harvard Bus. Rev., July-Aug. 2011 at 84, that “cognitive fluency” is “the tendency to hold on to things that are simple to understand and remember.”

Cognitive fluency may be at work in law departments when general counsel latch onto discounts from hourly rates: everyone understands the idea immediately and it sounds like such a straightforward mechanism to influence the muddled, complicated, ever-changing complexity of outside counsel extravagance. “Partnering” is also cognitively facile: as in let’s hold hands together united into the dark. Another candidate could be “the big firm” since size matters and conveys longevity, quality and lots of defensible plausibility. It’s hard to think, evaluate, and choose the right firm amidst distractions, pressures, and conflicts – far simpler to avoid complexity and go big.

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No sooner than I published about two impossible-to-reconcile figures on corporate legal spending, and the disappointing lack of support for either figure, I read another (See my post of Oct. 25, 3011 #2: $60 billion global and $200 billion U.S. litigation figures.). In Corp. Counsel, Oct. 2011 at 55, Mark Harris, the CEO of Axiom, starts his article with a reference to the “half-a-trillion dollar global legal services industry.”

Later Harris states the future of the legal industry rests in the wallets of the “largest 5 percent of corporations, who among them control more than half of the $100 billion U.S. corporate legal services market.” He later infers that the “market” includes in-house legal costs. That means he sees the United States as accounting for about 20 percent of the worldwide legal services expenses. I would be surprised if it is that low.

One final number from Harris: “80 percent of the [U.S. corporate legal services] market is controlled by a mere 200 GCs.” If we crudely assume the Fortune 200 to be the biggest spenders, then the smallest company had a bit over $12 billion in revenue while the median was $25 billion – all 500 recorded $10.8 trillion. Guessing that the top 40 percent of the list (200 companies) accounted for 80 percent of the total revenue, and positing that something like one half percent of their revenues went for legal services, that would approximately $45 billion (.8 times $10.8 trillion times .5%). Fairly close to Harris’ estimate of half the U.S. corporate legal services market.