Law Department Management Blog

Well-run legal departments should have goals that have cascaded from corporate headquarters. A mission statement announces some of the durable goals, others might vary from year to year. A practice in a law department is a means to achieve one or more of those goals. To illustrate, a goal is to manage outside counsel responsibly, practices in pursuit of it are legion. Or a transcendent goal might be to steward corporate funds well.

David Hume, the great empiricist philosopher believed that our wants and desires determine our ultimate goals, and the role of reason is limited to telling us how best to achieve those goals. Reason applies to means (practices), not ends (goals). Emotional and psychological needs fuel goals, whereas the thinking parts of our brains, ideally, choose the tactics and techniques to get their.

If corporate goals are set for law departments, if the trickle down from on high sets the objectives, then managers of law departments apply reason to select among the contending methods to achieve them.

Non-stop activity at work – meetings and conference calls end to end with no respite – wears people down. One reason proposed by sleep researchers is that “we oscillate every 90 minutes from higher to lower alertness.” An article in the New York Times, July 24, 2011 at BU8, likened the daylight rhythm to the 90-minute sleep cycles people pass through at night.

It’s as if our bodies ask us for a break approximately every 90 minutes. If we don’t, we rely on emergency sources of energy such as adrenalin, noradrenalin, and cortisol. “In this aroused fight-or-flight state, our prefrontal cortex, which helps us think reflectively and creatively, begins to shut down. We become more reactive, reflexive and impulsive.” Nothing that distinguishes a careful lawyer!

In-house lawyers, under stress and under water, need to recognize that a change of pace, a bit of relaxation, a nap even will help them be much more productive during the remainder of their cycles.

Logical positivism, a philosophical movement in the 1920’s and ‘30’s, held that a “proposition not reducible to a simple enunciation of fact can have no intelligible meaning.” The quote comes from Bruce Mazlish, The Riddle of History: the great speculators from Vico to Freud (Harper & Row 1966) at 204. The linguistic move in philosophy, which sometimes goes under the name of logical analysts or analytic philosophers, held that if words could not be clearly stated, defined, and subjected to measurement, then they degenerated into uselessness.

“Value,” “risk,” “quality” and “judgment” would have no intelligible meaning to a logical positivist. They convey something to all of us in an ordinary sense, but they fundamentally lack rigor and precision. If we only know it when we see it, to a logical positivist we do not know it and we can’t say anything credible about it (See my post of July 8, 2010: positivism’s perspectives on law department management.). We struggle to pin down these terms, and we always will.