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A letter to the editor of the ABA Journal, Aug. 2011 at 7, lambastes the deplorable writing of in-house lawyers. The writer teaches technical writing to corporate employees. He claims that “universally, the people I teach say that they understand all the points I make and try to write this way. Then comes the inevitable, scathing “but.”

“[B]ut that their documents become full of meaningless jargon, poor construction and passive voice after they go through their legal departments.”

For sure ceteris paribus which is a painey way that is complained of for the scions of the immortal bar de jure heretofore a force majeure of non aproprose.

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A glimpse of the future: In-house lawyers and their internal clients can access a portal run by a law firm that gathers large amounts of relevant information about potential deals. To be more specific, consider the site that the U.S. law firm ParkerPoe has assembled regarding Caribbean resort sites. The firm identified each resort site in the Caribbean and Central America and then “researched local development and zoning laws, public contracts, leases, and landlord/tenant agreements for dozens of countries.” Also assembled on the site, according to Law Tech. News, Aug. 2011 at 15, are lists of contracts in government and utilities … and local business leaders.” The firm pulls news feeds onto each site for key resort chains and hoteliers. In short, law departments can benefit from assembled law and business information with value added in many ways.

Law departments can make use of such enriched databases cum website cum legal material. Increasingly, value-added online sites sponsored by law firms will help law departments and their clients move ahead effectively.

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To the degree managers don’t make distinctions between concepts, they lose some ability to understand and respond to what is happening. For that reason, value vocabulary – each new word sharpens just a bit one’s ability to discriminate between concepts. The truth is, I relish lumping and splitting: joining concepts that others might not have, such as network theory and client satisfaction, or separating concepts, such as ideas, beliefs, and knowledge. Let me take that trio and do some splitting.

An idea is an awareness that clarifies enough in your mind that you recognize its distinctiveness and can speak about it. “I just had an idea about how to push law firms to submit more realistic budgets.”

A belief is an idea that rests on and draws strength from your value system, even if the analytical evidence for it may be lacking. “I believe that law firms submit much too conservative budgets.”

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Breaking itself into three pieces, the ITT spinoff underway will result in the promotion of two of its lawyers to the new top spots. As laid out in Corp. Counsel, Aug. 2011 at 32, the former ITT corporate secretary, Burt Fealing, will head the lawyers of the new company that retains the old name. The former ITT general counsel, Frank Jimenez, will continue in that role for the water-technology spinoff. As for the third piece, the defense business, Ann Davidson, who was the original company’s chief compliance officer, will become its new general counsel.

As a career path, to move to a spun off company as the general counsel ranks at the very top. You then get to create a law department as you see fit, although your raw material has been working together for years. My other thought went to the ratio of spin-offs to mergers: the creation of new law departments to the end of law departments. What is that ratio in the United States?

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I am a broken record on my mistrust of the term “best practice” (See my post of March 20, 2009: seven charges against best practices.).

At the same time, no relativist I where anything goes, some practices I condemn as mistaken. Not to review bills from law firms that charge by the hour would be one, since everything from innocent errors to deliberate fraud could happen. Not to produce basic reports well from a matter management system would be a serious flaw. Not to praise and encourage lawyers and staff who do well holds back a law department. And so on I could pile up the slag heap of managerial missteps.

But you can’t turn a bad practice inside out and claim that not doing it is a best practice. Reviewing bills, reporting from database, and recognizing achievements are hardly best practices. They are solid, middle-of-the road, expected practices. If there are exemplary practices, and this too I firmly believe even if they are not “best,” they must dramatically improve on the staples. For an article by me on best practices, click here.

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On LinkedIn I came across references to three companies that provide contract management software, and law departments that are using (or about to use) them. Remedy was described as “a contract management and work allocation system. People who need legal’s help will send their request through Remedy and the managing counsel can use Remedy to allocate work to members of the legal team and contracts, work load of attorneys etc can be tracked.”

Meditract and ImageNow are the other two packages. Another in-house attorney wrote “We have been using Meditract for my 3-hospital integrated health system, which is a nice contract management system. We’ve hired a contract manager and will be moving to ImageNow, which allegedly has a better search feature than Meditract.” I add these three to my cottage industry listing.

I also heard in a comment about a website that provides information about contract management. The site doesn’t have that much content and you have to scroll down to see what is there.

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Feeling compulsive after my marathon with posts that list 6 of something, I plucked out all the posts that give 7 reasons or suggestions or examples of something. I have organized them by the 18 in 2005-2008; and then the 16 in the remaining three years of this blog.

For the first three years (See my post of April 27, 2005: 7 common causes of team breakdowns; July 17, 2005: 7 good practices regarding metrics; Oct. 30, 2005: 7 flubs that get firms fired; Oct. 1, 2006: 7 methods of data visualization with charts; Dec. 1, 2006: 7 reasons why law firms don’t transfer knowledge to law departments; Dec. 22, 2006: 7 methods to deliver training; June 14, 2007: 7 mistakes law departments can make regarding performance metrics; Oct. 26, 2007: 7 tips for more effective RFPs by a law department; Nov. 27, 2007: 7 ways work arrives for an in-house lawyer; Jan. 27, 2008: 7 ploys that may appease losing firms; Feb. 25, 2008: 7 tips for how to do email more productively; Feb. 25, 2008: practice area benchmarks for 7 practices; March 25, 2008: 7 steps toward convergence; May 7, 2008: 7 more visual methods to portray law department data; Aug. 15, 2008: 7 tips on how to do competitive bids; Sept. 21, 2008: 7 obstacles to good management of talent; Nov. 19, 2008: 7 team building activities for retreats; and Dec. 2, 2008: 7 guidelines for when the legal department ought to be involved in contracts.).

For the past three years (See my post of March 15, 2009: 7 more cognitive traps in-house lawyers may fall into; March 20, 2009: 7 reasons why I question the infatuation with “best practices”; Feb. 19, 2009: 7 reasons why law departments do not take dramatic action against costs; May 13, 2009: 7 “maps” for managers of corporate legal departments; July 4, 2009: 7 suggestions for sourcing and procurement to get legal on-board; Oct 5, 2009: 7 recommendations for how to have successful technology projects in your department; Sept. 1, 2009: 7 similarities between contract management and matter management software; Nov. 17, 2009: 7 variations on rate freezes from the traditional choice of one or two years; Jan. 8, 2010: 7 profundities on quantification; May 31, 2010: 7 steps a general counsel might take to reduce gaming on matter budgets; June 1, 2010: 7 steps in the Puma law department’s program against counterfeiting; July 19, 2010: 7 commonalities between the constructs of “risk” and “value”; July 29, 2010: 7 koans on “legal risk”; Oct. 22, 2010: 7 ways of learning and relative efficacy; Oct. 31, 2010: 7 reasons why clients might perceive law departments to be slow; and Jan. 6, 2011: 7 essential practices of personal productivity.).

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Some law departments set guidelines for how many timekeepers they will permit to charge time to their matters. They want a core staff to account for most of the billings. De jure, the firm has to get permission to add more. De facto this requirement breaks down under pressure.

This cost- and quality-control method works much better when the services needed aren’t time sensitive. For example, not during the lathered gallop just before trial – more like the gentle canter of patent prep and prosecution or domain name conflicts. There is a difference between drive-by billers and crisis calls for all hands on deck.

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An article gave some data on the number of U.S. mobile patents 11 major players in that market have applied for and have been granted. Bloomberg Businessweek, Aug. 8-14, 2011 at 37, shows a chart with data provided by MDB Capital. I eyeballed the numbers for the likes of Research in Motion, Nokia, and Microsoft and calculated one ratio.

First, however, I am staggered that the group as a whole has applied for something like 14,000 mobile-related U.S. patents. And that on top of another 4,000 already granted. No wonder companies seek standards and patent pools as well as maintain clumps of patent lawyers and staff (See my post of June 19, 2011: patents and industry standards.).

As to the ratios, overall about 75 percent of the patents are in the USPTO pipeline, not yet granted. That represents a huge amount of prosecution activity across these major technology companies.

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So-called maturity models imply best practices and a desirable progression along a ladder of improvement (See my post of May 15, 2009: model for ethics and compliance function.). You can get a taste of one for leadership development in the Harvard Bus. Rev., April 2011 at 133. Its bottom rung is “Inconsistent management training,” next is “Structured Leadership Training,” then “Focused Leadership Development,” and the zenith is reached at “Strategic Leadership Development.” The major shift in this particular maturity model is from training to development.

Mitratech has laid out a maturity model for technology that can be used by corporate counsel. They name the five rungs “Embryonic,” “Emerging,” “Adolescent,” “Established” and “Optimized.” The evolution has to do with how well the software works, its ability to scale up, ease of implementation, and flexibility of customization.

It would be easy to devise a maturity model for outside counsel management. Platitudes and gold-plated phrases could appear effortlessly if that were a scholastic effort divorced from messy reality. It would be the operational differences and choices, however, that would be the struggle and give it construct validity (See my post of Jan. 4, 2011: construct validity tests a concept in real life.). Put more bluntly, the maturity model for managing law firms would not be useful unless you believe there are best practices (not just the avoidance of bad practices).