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It’s probably not good for me, a consultant to law departments, to take law departments down a peg or two, but here I go. All the staff function, be they HR, finance, information technology, internal audit, facilities, PR, law, provide specialized input and support for business managers. Why lawyers should flatter themselves that their counsel outranks any other staff professional’s advice is beyond me.

Well, yes, lawyers have graduated law school and passed a bar exam. But so have medical doctors who work for a company (See my post of Nov. 9, 2010: professional standards for in-house physicians.) and CPAs. Lawyers have ethical obligations, but they are not alone in that regard (See my post of June 29, 2011: heightened expectations regarding integrity of the general counsel.). What blesses or curses employed lawyers with the halo of probity?

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No self-respecting in-house attorney wants to be besmirched as a relay station to outside counsel. Client calls; inside counsel speed dials; partner does the work.

It is fine and proper to be the switch when you judiciously choose the external firm, frame carefully what they are to do, and translate their legalese into practical business-speak. But mechanical pass-the-potato adds zero value (See my post of Sept. 17, 2005: outsource work rather than just pass it on; Nov. 8, 2005: specialist lawyers turn most often to outside counsel; Dec. 9, 2005: add value, don’t just passively intermediate or gatekeep; Dec. 17, 2006: ADVO’s sole lawyer was to filter and direct questions; Feb. 4, 2007: first lawyer in company might be primarily a conduit; and July 13, 2011: sometimes clients should go straight to outside firm.). Clients may rarely voice the question that troubles them, but it’s there just the same: “If you are my lawyer, why do we need to pay wads to law firms?”

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The lead story in Met. Corp. Counsel, July 2011, prints an address delivered to the Atlantic Legal Foundation. It slams litigation funders for (1) high interest rates and (2) the “perverse financial incentives funding creates when settlement discussions happen.” The story cites Counsel Financial, which it says is backed by Citigroup, as well as the “Litigation Risk Strategies” division of Credit Suisse Group and Allianz ProzessFinanz GmbH.

The writer, Kirby Griffis, a partner with Hollingsworth LLP in Washington, DC, takes particular aim at the American Legal Finance Association (ALFA), the lobbying arm for those who fund litigation. ALFA was founded in 2004 and operates from 228 Park Avenue South in New York City. Griffis minces no words: “The litigation funding industry is a powerful force that will distort and, most importantly, increase U.S. litigation.”

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The NJ Law Journal published its “2011 Directory of In-House Counsel.” It lists 1,944 individual names. It lists them on 55 pages by company, but does not state the number of companies (i.e., law departments). To calculate that, I counted the number of companies on every other page for the first fourteen, found 12.6 companies on average per page, and therefore estimate about 700 departments (12.6 times 55 pages).

Coincidentally, an ad in the Directory for the New Jersey Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel (at 21) states that its membership directory has “more than 1,200 in-house counsel at more than 450 companies.” Since it costs to belong to the ACC, but not to be listed in the Directory and lawyers in the government are not allowed to be ACC members, it makes sense that the ACC chapter has about two-thirds as many lawyers and law departments. I have not cross checked membership against each other, but let’s assume overlap to a large degree, but not completely.

So, grant 2,000 in-house lawyers in New Jersey at 750 companies. The average therefore would be 2.7 lawyers per department. Meanwhile, New Jersey in 2010 had 8.8 million residents out of 308 million in the United States. So, at 84.3 law departments per million residents in the Garden State, the United States would extrapolate to 26,000 law departments.

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Regardless of your view of Rupert Murdoch, you have to be impressed by the physical boldness and quickness of his interim group general counsel.

Janet Nova was the first person at Murdoch’s recent hearing in London to react to a protester’s approach. As the NY Times, July 21, 2011, put it, “She leapt to her feet and, clutching her iPad, tried to block the man’s reach toward her boss.” Moments later the better known of the one-two punch was landed by Wendi Deng Murdoch, who lunged out of her seat and landed a haymaker on the pie-wielding protester.

Nova was perhaps not quite at the level of Cleitus, who saved Alexander the Great’s life at the Battle of the Granicus in 334 BC, but it is symbolic (indeed, actual) of the general counsel’s role to protect the CEO (See my post of July 11, 2008: general counsel of InBev in photo striding along with CEO.). Nova, a 14-year veteran of News Corporation now serving as the interim GC, deserves praise at least for this act.

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Good survey methodology urges the use of seven-point scales, known as Likert scales, such as Very improbable (rated as 1), Improbable, Somewhat improbable, Neither probable nor improbable (4), Somewhat probable, Probable, and Very Probable (7). Most respondents don’t do well with more elaborate scales, there needs to be a neutral middle point (4) , and two calculations favor the seven-point choice.

If a second question asks about the importance of an event, again on a seven-point Likert scale, you can multiply the probability score by the importance score. Many two-by-two quadrants follow this methodology: respondents rate something on two scales, multiply the scores, then distribute them to the appropriate quadrant.

Another neat calculation becomes easy, as explained in Ron Hale-Evans, Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & tools for overclocking your brain (O’Reilly 2006) at 171. If you double the ratings, the scores that come from multiplying one scale score by the other for something, you get a result ranging from 2 to 98, which closely approximates a percentile scale (0-100).

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Posted in: Tools
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For the 30 days preceding July 24, 2011, SiteMeter shows the web pages ranked by visitors they directed to my blog. Towering over all other sites is Law.com (245 referrals), in part reflecting the fact that this blog stands as one of the Law.com blog family and my posts circulate on its heavily-trafficed site. Next comes the fine blog of Geoff Gussis, In-House Blog (89 referrals) and, to my surprise, Twitter (62). Twitter has steadily increased as a source of visitors over the past year.

Joe Bookman’s PinHawk (44) comes in fourth and then this blog itself (41). My laboriously created back references take no credit; TypePad’s suggestions of related posts account for most of them.

The next five referral sites include LinkedIn (34), my website (27), ReesMorrison.com, in part because it runs my five most recent posts, ITDatabase (12), the bankruptcy news aggregator BK Information (6), and StumbleUpon (6). I am not sure what StumbleUpon is or does, but I welcome the leads.

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In an interview, Helen Gillcrist, the veteran administrator of the Liberty Mutual law department, was asked “If you were recruiting to replace yourself, what sort of background would look for in the candidates?” The surprising answer comes online on June 27, 2011, from Legal Strategy Rev (CPA Global).

Gillcrist said she would seek “An MBA graduate with a background in Six-Sigma process improvement. We’ve been doing a fair amount of work in that field and that would be useful. And you need strong communication skills.” There is a substantial salary cost to hiring MBAs and Six Sigma applies mostly to very large law departments with enough process work to benefit from that toolbox of techniques. Her views, I believe, reflect the highly unusual circumstances of her company, not the typical needs of most law departments. Even so, no one can quarrel with “strong communication skills.”

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Posted in: Talent
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As I came up with this list, it seemed useful to put them in declining order of legitimacy. In other words, the first few make sense, toward the end they make poor excuses.

  1. The lawyers like the services they get from the firms and feel the value delivered for the cost paid is acceptable.
  2. No one is pressuring them sufficiently from within the corporation to chop costs.
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Galileo was forced to recant, but famously muttered the truth. Though often pushed to use other people’s words or to talk about best practices, my protests still echo. Even with my skepticism as expressed on this blog, from time to I refer to some practices as best (See my post of May 28, 2010: conference calls for bidders during an RFP process; Sept. 6, 2010: contract management; Oct. 4, 2010: reserve setting; Oct. 26, 2010: contract signing; Nov. 27, 2010: pool business unit bonus funds; Dec. 7, 2010: oscillating on patent preparation in-house; and May 29, 2011: choice of ECA due date.).

I add these nominees to those of the posts on best practices I have compiled before (See my post of June 6, 2006: best practices with 4 references; and Feb.14, 2009: best practices with 24 references and one metapost.).