Home > Page 74
Published on:

By

In the view of Jordan Furlong 30 months ago, for three reasons general counsel balk at making major changes against law firms (See my post of Feb. 19, 2009: seven reasons why law departments do not take dramatic action.)

  1. General counsel are under-incentivized. This catch-all explanation adds nothing – the other reasons offered below drill down on incentives.
  2. General counsel are overburdened by distracted bosses. If driven pillar to post with other demands, where’s the time to sharpen the pencil? If anything, you need law firms more than ever.
Continue reading
Published on:

By

If there were an accepted rate to convert the number of a law departments paralegals to lawyer equivalents, such as three paralegals will be deemed to equal one lawyer, and similarly to convert support staff to lawyer equivalents, what would that conversion tell us as a benchmark? First, though, although the math is easy, does the result make any sense? It may be useful to study law departments that have different mixes of lawyers, paralegals and support staff in a comparable, single expression.

I tried this on a group of 22 medical devices companies that have taken part this year in my General Counsel Metrics global benchmark survey. Three paralegals equal a lawyer, for the purposes of this exercise, and five support staff equal a lawyer. I based this rate loosely on compensation as well as contribution and mean no disrespect to non-lawyers, but if the idea of equivalency has legs, there needs to be some translation into a common denominator. I have bruited this idea before (See my post of July 31, 2006: secretaries counted in terms of lawyer-equivalents; June 28, 2006: a proposed standard; and Feb. 4, 2010: lawyer-equivalents.). Try as I might, I could not tease out any pattern or conclusion from the exercise. The various rankings and calculations I tested did not suggest a pattern.

Published on:

By

The law departments of large and acclaimed companies sit square in the targets of most benchmark surveys. Perhaps we should call them the Unfortunate 500, deluged as they are with requests for benchmark participation.

All survey sponsors want name brand respondents. Bigger is better; better known is better. Particularly when consultants sponsor the survey, such as the former Hildebrand Law Department Benchmark Survey, the consultants want to sell their services, and larger law departments are thought to be more likely purchasers of services or at least purchasers of more costly services. For these reasons, benchmark respondents may bulge at the large end.

Exacerbating that tilt, small departments may pass over benchmark surveys more than larger departments do because the one, two or three lawyer general counsel feel they have less maneuverability in response to benchmark metrics. On the other side, you can’t hide in a smallish company where cost and headcount pressures are front and center; there may be more urgency to find comparative metrics.

Continue reading
Published on:

By

Teams = praise. We extol teams constantly, but we may not have objective evidence to support that widespread belief. When a group of people work together on a project, many times they succeed better than if individuals members went ahead on their own. Other times, however, teams falter for various reasons. For example, citing research by Elliott Jaques, the author Robert Rowland Smith, Breakfast with Socrates (Free Press 2009) at 47, notes that “the spreading of effort across several people leads both to a diffusion of accountability and to a confusion of role.”

Perhaps because of my contrarian streak, I have accumulated a number of posts that attack teams (See my post of Jan. 6, 2006: demographic diversity has a negative effect; Aug. 28, 2006: attack on committee effectiveness; Jan. 20, 2007: task conflicts and relationship conflicts; Jan. 11, 2009: law department’s online tool to diagnose team problems; May 29, 2009: performance problems as team size increases; June 4, 2009: four challenges of teams; June 23, 2009: does background diversity help a team; May 26, 2010: heterogeneity may degrade a team’s performance; and June 16, 2010: diversity can obstruct team effectiveness.). To this array I would add group think, peer pressure, chilling effects, and brainstorming gone awry.

Published on:

By

Having scoured my posts for lists of six and seven, I conclude this obsession with my lists of eight. The first three years produced 10 of them (See my post of July 14, 2005: 8 methods to train clients; Jan. 17, 2006: Ethics Officer Association (EOA) and 8 global standards; Feb. 8, 2006: 8 measures of a country’s legal infrastructure; May 21, 2006: 8 methods to control legal costs; Dec. 11, 2006: 8 calculations you can do with the invoices of a firm; Feb. 25, 2007: 8 roles of inside counsel; March 20, 2007: 8 best-practice factors in procurement; Nov. 8, 2007: 8 suggestions for alignment; and Oct. 12, 2008: 8 modest recycling steps.).

Thereafter, 2009 was a banner year, with 12 pieces of eight (See my post of Jan. 30, 2009: 8 benefits of virtual deal rooms; Feb. 5, 2009: 8 cognitive traps; Feb. 5, 2009: 8 downsides of the recession; Feb. 13, 2009: 8 technology roles in law departments; March 23, 2009: when forced to reduce staff, 8 changes a law department needs from its clients; April 25, 2009: 8 ways law departments stick out compared to other staff functions; July 8, 2009: 8 benefits of having an in-house lawyer responsible for relations with a primary law firm; Aug. 10, 2009: 8 myths procurement professionals harbor about US legal departments; Sept. 5, 2009: 8 fundamental software packages for law departments; Sept. 21, 2009: 8 reasons why a relationship partner might not make constructive suggestions; Oct. 21, 2009: 8 ways to increase revenue per lawyer; and Nov. 10, 2009: tracking time, 8 pros and 6 cons.).

The pace has slowed since that year (See my post of June 21, 2010: 8 suggestions for cc’s on e-mails; Dec. 10, 2010: 8 myths of innovation; and Feb. 8, 2011: 8 suggestions for how to learn more about your client’s business.).

Published on:

By

The National Law Journal, in its June 11th issue, published my article on four developments that will enhance benchmark reports in the near future. This article won the BigLaw Pick of the Week in the July 26, 2011 issue. BigLaw is a free weekly email newsletter that provides helpful information for the world’s largest law firms and the corporate counsel who hire them.

Want to benchmark your law department’s staffing and spending at no cost? Click here to take General Counsel Metric’s seven-minute survey and receive your report of 55 pages in late September. There will be more than 450 participants.

Published on:

By

The law department looks to reduce its budget or headcount by shifting some tasks back to clients, such as minor contracts, administrative help (terminate a secretary in a remote office and have the lawyer there double up on a business unit secretary), review of some marketing material, IT support, etc.). At the same time, a business unit or staff function that has to cut back wants to terminate a contract administrator who had helped the law department, cut back on preventive law training, reduce anti-counterfeiting efforts, or have sales people request contract reviews prematurely.

Both sides want to slough off on the other some of their former obligations. Unlike me to have no opinion, but I do not have any overall sense how the back and forth transfer of costs or work nets out.

By
Posted in: Clients
Published on:
Updated:
Published on:

By

  1. Cargill (See my post of Aug. 9, 2011: Cargill with 7 references.).

  2. Drivers of legal investment, company attributes, influences on law department size (See my post of Aug. 15, 2011: what defines companies better than industry with 11 references and 2 metas.).

  3. Intel (See my post of July 30, 2011: Intel with 6 references.).

Continue reading
Published on:

By

Modernism is out of date in terms of today’s law department design

A fad in the mid-20th century for rational design by an omniscient planner, as evidenced by Le Corbusier’s view that “a house is a machine for living in” and the elaborately laid-out but sterile cities of Canberra and Brasilia, went under the term “modernism.” Modernists would view a law department mechanically: organized and understood as a purely technical and economic means to a productive end, the rationally planned manufacture of good legal counsel efficiently and inexpensively. This thumbnail of modernism comes from John Kay, Obliquity: why our goals are best achieved indirectly (Profile Books 2010) at 4, 25, but I translated it to my single-minded interest.

Re-engineering, the now defunct notion of starting from scratch and building a logical, airtight system, has modernist overtones. Let’s reconfigure processes (and ignore people and culture). A law department that places too much stock in benchmarks and quantifiable performance objectives might fall prey to the unbalanced fixations of modernism (See my post of Dec. 26, 2010: Robert McNamara and over-reliance on quantification.).

Continue reading
Published on:

By

The teleological fallacy improperly infers causes from outcomes. A good or bad outcome of an initiative by a general counsel does not derive, necessarily, from a good or bad cause, be it an idea, design or implementation. A loss at trial doesn’t mean the legal work done was shoddy. A patent granted doesn’t prove the application was well drafted and prosecuted. Outside counsel costs might rise even though a number of solid steps were taken to moderate those costs. The teleological error is to make inferences about the relationships between what happens and what was done before what happens.

“The illusion that we have more control over our lives than we possess, that we understand more about the world and the future than we do or can, is pervasive.” Along with the teleological mis-attribution, this depressing point is made by John Kay, Obliquity: why our goals are best achieved indirectly (Profile Books 2010) at 127. The delusion that we directly influence big effects on our lives teaches that we should experiment, we should take steps and study the results as best we can, we should be open to new ideas and to change course.