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What blocks lawyers in legal departments if they want to streamline how their department’s work gets done? It’s not lack of funds, management intransigence, lack of creativity or ideas. Assuming they would like to increase productivity, it’s not the crush of work, the lack of rewards, risk aversion, or barriers to change. No, it’s an unwillingness to step away from the flow of their work and think about how it might be handled more effectively.

That’s it, the long and the short, the summum and the bonum. Simply put, it’s the failure to pause and reflect. If lawyers in legal departments would deliberately, open-mindedly, and creatively stop and think about their input, processing and output, they could bring to bear some of the most basic improvement techniques: A follow-up post explores those core productivity techniques.

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A review in the Economist, July 2, 2011 at 74, of a book by William Rhodes, a prominent banker, picked up on Rhodes’ methods to bring a roomful of disparate interests to a consensus: “keeping people awake until they will agree to just about anything, for example, or forcing everyone at the table to state their positions on each issue.” Sleep deprivation doesn’t appeal to me as an effective method.

Nor do I think the ranking lawyer, often the general counsel, should state a position early on in a discussion. That can create a dampening effect on discussion, let alone opposition (See my post of Feb. 1, 2006: how to lessen peer pressure and the general counsel chill; Dec. 8, 2006: as a general counsel, encourage different viewpoints; April 17, 2007: silence at Town Halls; Jan. 4, 2009: electronic voting software helps surface difficult issues that are otherwise suppressed; Jan. 9, 2009: ideas are suppressed around a general counsel; July 14, 2009: the false consensus effect of intimidated subordinates; July 22, 2009: chill effect of dominance; and May 25, 2010: futility, not fear, stops people from speaking truth to power.).

As for insisting that everyone weigh in on an important decision, I like the idea but it can wind up to huge pressure and lots of me-tooism.

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Paragon Legal, started by Mae Tai O’Malley around 2007, places former in-house lawyers – usually women – inside companies on a project basis. According to Fortune, July 4, 2011 at 77, Paragon “has more than 60 lawyers, 85% of whom are women with school-age kids.” They are billing at close to $200 an hour. Paragon is doing well since its total billings this year will hit $8 million.

Here is yet another choice for general counsel: hire someone, retain a law firm, or rent a project lawyer. With the project-lawyer choice, it may be that you can hire that person after you have battle tested them (See my post of Feb. 27, 2008: fees owed to temp agencies when you hire someone they placed.). The news item also reminds us yet again of the difficulties women lawyers with small children have when they try to balance family and work. Paragon gives many of them a welcome choice, and one that benefits general counsel.

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Canadian Lawyer gathered salary data from 87 Canadian in-house counsel. I looked at each year out of law school and their ranges, meaning the absolute difference between the lowest salary and the highest salary. They averaged $76,000 but they showed no pattern with increasing years of experience. I would have expected ranges to widen as medians (years of experience) rose. Over time, pay spreads, or so I thought, as people differentiate themselves.

I found likewise with the range divided by the median: no pattern except that years with wide ranges were higher than the average of .75. For this metric, it seems plausible that it would stay fairly stable, for the reason that as medians rise, so does the difference between lowest and highest (but see above).

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Posted in: Talent
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And the seasons they go round and round, so I combed through the 120 posts that I picked in the last twelve months as the best of a month. That covered the posts of June 2010 through June 2011. My goal was to code the posts and then see what patterns they disclose, to build on my analysis of the first annual batch (See my post of July 5, 2010: analysis of first year of best posts – outside counsel; July 5, 2010: thinking; July 5, 2010: metrics; and July 6, 2010: shortage of posts on clients and technology.).

This time, outside counsel posts again led the pack, with 25, followed again by posts on decision-making and thinking, with 20. The former topic appeals to many of my readers, both inside and outside of law departments. In third place were productivity methods or tools, with 17 posts. In the first year there were not nearly as many on those topics or I coded differently. Surprising me were the 13 posts on what I coded as theory: high level thoughts on management of legal departments.

Following theory in frequency were metrics (10), technology (9) – unlike last year, costs (9) and talent (6). Maybe it is my selection criteria, maybe my off-the-cuff coding, but the two years of “best posts” do show significant differences.

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Canadian Lawyer gathered salary data from 117 Canadian in-house counsel. One sentence about the budgets for those participants set me to calculating. “In terms of average legal spends budgeted for 2011, 36 per cent said their corporate legal department would come in under $500,000, 26 per cent said $500,000 to $1 million, 15 per cent said $1 million to $2 million, 14 per cent said $2 million to $5 million, five per cent said $5 million to $10 million, and five per cent said over $10 million.” I assume these are Canadian dollars.

If “average legal spends budgeted” means total legal spend, then one out of three departments could have had only one lawyer. After all, if total spending tends toward 40 percent inside and 60 percent external counsel, that would leave no more than $200,000 for the inside staff, which barely covers one lawyer. On similar reasoning, the 26 percent of respondents in the next larger budget bracket ($500,000 to $1 million) would be unlikely to have more than two lawyers. My reasoning is that if we take the midpoint of $750,000 and allocate 40 percent of that to the internal budget, the resulting $300,000 would be skinny for two lawyers.

Who knows if these one-hundred plus respondents are representative of Canadian law departments, but it appears from this data and the calculations that almost two out of three are small law departments (See my post of Dec. 27, 2008: small departments with 7 references cited.).

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Every now and then I run across unusual software packages that help law departments. Here are five of them that showed up during consulting projects or reading.

(1) Fidelity offers a package that handles equity compensation awards and tracking.

(2) ComputerShare has software that specializes in the arcane machinations of stock certificate transfers.

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A piece on PSLs – professional support or practice support lawyers – in the ABA J., July 2011 at 27, led me to ruminate why some law departments don’t agree to share a PSL. The large law firms cited in the article have non-practicing lawyers who “provide practice guides, up-to-date forms and other support that frees up the time” of practicing lawyers. They sound like knowledge management specialists and they sound like a useful resource for many law departments.

Few law departments on their own, however, can afford a PSL. So, why can’t two or three law departments join together to retain a PSL, not as an employee but as an independent contractor, to help with those sorts of beneficial support tasks that the departments have in common? With the world awash in good lawyers looking for part-time or full-time work, and with law firms eager to second associates for opportunities with law departments, many would be available at modest costs when those costs are divide among several departments.

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Posted in: Talent
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Thomson Reuters has acquired the assets of eBillingHub. According to the July 2011 issue of Am. Legal Tech. Insider at 1, eBillingHub was one of the major players in the ebilling and electronic invoicing sector. The newsletter explains that eBillingHub is “best understood as a SaaS data exchange that automatically configures client codes and billing rules with third-party ebilling systems.” It now joins Elite as part of the Business of Law unit at Thomson Reuters.

Having just recently written about this class of software, which checks law firm bills for their conformity with clients’ e-billing guidelines before the bills are submitted, I add this item (See my post of June 1, 2010: why don’t law firms test their invoices against their client’s e-billing rules before submitting them; and Dec. 2, 2007: reference to eBillingHub.). Law departments appreciate the grooming of bills before they arrive.