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An article on requests for proposal in the ACC Docket, June 2011 at 74, states that hourly rate arrangements are more and more giving way to metrics “to assess efficiency and effectiveness.” The metric proffered is “percentage of work handled by partners and associates, respectively.”

I am at a loss to understand this claimed metric. How could a law department say for similar kinds of matters handled by different law firms that, for example, 20 percent partner time and 75 percent associate time (the rest going to paralegals) outperforms 40 percent partner and 55 percent associate. The total number of hours billed makes a big difference as do hourly rates. If held constant, then, sure, one firm works more cost effectively than the other, but that also assumes comparable outcomes.

Delegation is no panacea; lots of associates milling and billing will improve the ratio but destroy the value (See my post of Feb. 4, 2007: the ratio of partner time to other timekeepers’ time.).

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Do invoices from law firms flow in steadily during the year, or are there dry spells and floods? I wrote my latest column for Morrison on Metrics to try to sort out what might raise and lower the level, but in the end came to nothing conclusive. Nor do I think it even matters very much for legal departments.

A comment from John Conlon offered a perspective I agree with: “It’s often said that ‘a lawyer’s pen gets heavier as the year draws to a close.’ You need to account for the fact that many lawyers – especially in larger law firms – will look to pump up their billings as the year ends in order to meet their firm’s minimum billing requirements or get extra hours in for bonus purposes. Any realistic look at things that affect ‘seasonal’ legal billings has to consider this very real issue.”

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A mainstay of my consulting principles holds that one of the best contributions a consultant can make to a general counsel is to open the toolbox. The tool box of management practices includes lots of choices and approaches, the mixing and matching of which to the particular circumstances of the law department make the most sense (See my post of July 6, 2011: 500 hammers and best practices.). The more alternatives you know about as a manager, the more likely you are to select the right tool for the job.

Tool-box management covers a set of inter-locking beliefs. One size definitely does not fit all; syncretism prevails in the contest between ideological poles; context shapes the desirability of a management choice; always keep adding to and improving; priorities change from time to time and so should management initiatives, resources and their implied limits guide what is possible. All these ideas relate to a management style that favors the toolbox.

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A chronic complaint of business unit lawyers is that the mandarins off at headquarters pursue their own agendas on their own time and pace. They are out of touch with the rough-and-tumble of making a dollar. HQ doesn’t feel the same urgency and pressures as the lawyers at the coal face, in the hinterlands where real work gets done to make money. It’s all well and good to issue policies and gather data, imposing requirements without letting us add staff or get funds, your ivory tower, your “lawyers’-lawyers” attitude can be really galling.

From the other end of the looking glass, lawyers in the central headquarters group feel they are surrounded by mavericks, myopics, and “me-onlys” (going native). Most of the time they are red-lining indemnifications, dealing with crises of miniscule importance, flogging product and services, and cuddling up to clients. More business mongrel than legal beagle, the lawyers “out in the field” are farm hands, hardly capable of finely reasoned legal magic. Face it, they barely have to deal with smart partners at big, expensive firms! They don’t bump into the hot-shots of executive management and have to finesse razor-sharp consultants and strategic planners! Life is balmy out in the provinces, unlike the hot-house pressure of MBAs and PhDs at headquarters.

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Henry Petroski tells us in his book on design that “By the latter part of the nineteenth century, some five hundred different types of hammers were being produced in Birmingham, England, alone.” If the market supported such an array of one particular tool, if no one hammer was manifestly the best, if different ones suited different needs, how can law departments today not support as large – actually much larger – an array of management practices? How can the term “best practice” have any credibility?

Success through Failure: the paradox of design (Princeton 2006) by Petroski makes two salient points about the design of anything: (1) it can be improved and (2) failure yields more insights than success precedents. To his first point, you can sharpen any practice in any law department. A “best practice” is like infinity: describe a practice and anyone can go higher with it. Regarding failure, if we were to assume some practice were optimal, acting on that assumption will assuredly breed disappointment eventually because we would not learn thereafter. Only change, with the inevitable and occasional disappointments or failures, leads to continual upgrading.

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A few days ago I had the privilege of speaking during an Exari webinar on contracts and risk management. I discussed a dozen practices that some law departments follow regarding contract management and risk mitigation. If you click on this you can register to hear the recording of the session and obtain the slides.

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When legal departments have six or fewer lawyers, not counting the general counsel, it is my impression that the predominant structure is flat. More often than not at that number, all the lawyers report directly to the general counsel. By “report,” I mean the general counsel sometimes assigns them work, evaluates their performance, and expects to be consulted with fair regularity and certainly on important decisions.

Above a half dozen lawyers in a department, one of the direct reports may have his or her own reports. I consider that the third level of lawyers: general counsel, direct reports to the GC, and third level reports to one or more of those direct reports. There may be empirical findings on this tipping point for reports, but I am not aware of it.

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I just completed posts on four findings from a recent survey about the effects of UTBMS codes on law firm billing practices (See my post of June 23, 2011: often, many codes used even in a modest bill; June 27, 2011: codes made little difference in billing behavior of firms; June 28, 2011: little feedback on selection of codes; and July 5, 2011: law departments give no guidance based on codes). The Legalbill survey is rich in speculative insights and you are welcome to ask for a copy from Steve French. steve.french@legalbill.com

Inspired, I took a look back at my writings on the topic but found meager postings (See my post of April 9, 2009: no good set of task-based codes exist for discovery; June 3, 2010: GE litigators favor task codes; Feb. 11, 2010: drawbacks of Uniform Task Based Billing Codes; and April 7, 2011: task-based codes compared to automated bill review software.). These posts supplement my first metapost on the topic (See my post of Dec. 21, 2008: UTBMS with 8 references.).

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Many people have criticized PowerPoint for its rigidity, its format restrictions, riot of animation, endless slides. The overuse and abuse of the ubiquitous program has become a staple of cartoons. A chapter in Henry Petroski, Success through Failure: the paradox of design (Princeton 2006) at 34-33 rehearses the usual criticisms. Its power exacts a high cost. Often its induced prolixity robs it of ideas expressed clearly. Neither power not pointedness comes from PowerPoint.

Even so, someone in a law department who needs to get approval for funding or for an initiative will be expected to walk the fire coals of PowerPoint. Courses, books and mavens can give good pointers to unleash the power, to a point.

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The longer a lawyer stays in the same law department the more embedded the lawyer becomes. Known to everyone in the company, familiar with the execs and the cleaners, politically attuned, a compendium of historical business knowledge leavened with legal savvy, the lawyer’s value grows proportionally (or faster) with tenure.

Yet, the more years you stay, the harder it is to leave, since your knowledge base, your grasp of the business, its goals, operations and executives, cannot be transported. Were you to join another law department, that tacit and explicit wealth of knowledge evaporates.

So the longer in-house lawyers stay with a company, the greater their worth, but the stronger their chains (See my post of April 25, 2011: tenure of in-house lawyers with 8 references.).