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A survey conducted in the past month by Legalbill obtained data from more than 600 law firm lawyers about their use of UTBMS codes. The survey asked them “To what extent did the clients’ requirement of your use of the UTBMS codes change your billing behavior?” My presupposition was that tasked-based billing should not change a firm’s billing patterns: timekeepers simply avoid block billing and choose the most appropriate code for the activity.

According to the survey findings, four out of ten of the lawyer respondents said that the code requirement changed their billing to a moderate or large degree; the remainder said that it made no difference or only a small difference. Perhaps for those firms that had not previously had to do even that much responded that, yes, they had “changed their billing behavior.” I think of that as an administrative change in behavior. As for more profound “billing behavior,” we can’t tell from the wording of the question whether code usage changed what was substantively done by the firm, who did the work, or how much the firms billed. Those would be practice changes, and much more telling.

If you would like the fuller set of the data results, write Legalbill’s Managing Partner, Stephen French.

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The Council on Litigation Management (CLM) has teamed with Columbia Law School to host the Litigation Management Institute. According to a press release, “The Institute is the first certification program specifically designed to provide attorneys a comprehensive understanding of the business of litigation management.”

The Institute, to be limited to 100 participants, will start October 28th. Nine courses will cover topics such as case evaluation and assessment, reserving, data management, resolution strategies, fee arrangements, and the fundamentals of insurance coverage and risk transfer. Upon completion of the program, attorneys will receive the Certified Litigation Management Professional (CLMP) designation and be awarded the Litigation Management Institute certificate. Additional details are available on the CLM website.

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Should you expect your law firms to scrub their invoices electronically to match your guidelines?

We learn from the Orange Rag, June 2011 at 3 that “Wilson Legal Solutions has partnered with Invoice Solutions to develop the Invoice Optimizer system. Compatible with LEDES (Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard), it prescreens law firm invoices and flags entries that don’t comply with client guidelines, so firms can streamline and improve ebilling processes. Invoice Optimizer integrates with Elite software.”

Part of me admires law firms that invest in software so that their invoices comply with the complicated and obnoxious dictates of their clients. Both sides benefit from invoices done correctly.

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A piece in Met. Corp. Counsel, June 2011 at 12, concerns Enterprise Risk Management (ERM). Aimed at a company level, I tried to bring it down to the legal department level and apply one of its teachings. The authors write that “Linking your risks to strategic objectives is the most powerful tool for prioritization [of risks].”

Let’s reflect on that seemingly innocent bit of advice. Your law department knows your corporation’s strategic objectives. If they are “organic growth,” “new product development,” and “targeted acquisitions,” let’s say, just how useful is it for the department to identify the major legal risks that lurk around each goal? “Organic growth” – hmmm, that could stretch to involve a class action suit over wages and hours? “New product development” – you could fail to patent a good idea or allow an unsubstantiated claim in an ad? “Targeted acquisitions” could lead to a shareholder derivative suit or breach of a lockup provision? None of these legal risks seem either probable or very threatening.

My point is that lawyers can tag any corporate goal with some conceivable legal risks, even potentially major ones, but that exercise hardly seems useful. What comes from a nice chart with colored bubbles that links legal pitfalls with high-level company objectives?

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Of the 97 lawyers in WellPoint’s legal department, 27 of them make up its litigation department. That nearly one out of three lawyers in that department litigate puts it at the very highest end of the range of litigation lawyers as a percentage of all lawyers (See my post of Aug. 27, 2005: litigation staff as a proportion of law department staff.).

Last year the department spent approximately $48 million on outside counsel, about 55 percent of its total legal spend. That ratio is completely typical of large U.S. companies. What proportion of it goes to litigation is not disclosed (See my post of Oct. 24, 2007: cascade of 60% for components of legal spending.).

All the above we learn from Corp. Counsel, June 2011 at 73, plus “Half of WellPoint’s litigation matters are handled internally.” That is very unusual (See my post of Feb. 27, 2008: litigation loads and handling cases in-house through trial; and June 30, 2010: number of cases handled and number of outside counsel managed per inside litigation lawyer.). The article quotes the head litigation lawyer, Deputy General Counsel Ray Umstead: “Last year the litigation department was able to achieve at least a partial dismissal in more than 100 cases.” Here we have an example of a key performance metric.

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The matter cost-control firm Legalbill surveyed some 16,000 lawyers who use its matter management software at one or more of his law department clients. More than 600 responded. One question described a typical invoice and asked the lawyers: “On average how many different UTBMS litigation codes will you use?” Roughly speaking, the distribution of responses fell evenly in the four buckets of 1-4 codes, 5-8 codes, 9-12, and more than 12.

This survey has developed very interesting empirical data about UTBMS codes. Legalbill’s Managing Partner, Stephen French, is still processing the results, but he was kind enough to let me see some of the early data. Reach out to Steve if you are interested.

On this one particular finding, I was surprised. I would have thought that fewer codes were necessary for a given case during a normal month, since how many different tasks of a law suit take place in that narrow window? Nor was the average size of the invoice very large, which might have accounted for the wide distribution of task codes used. The distribution and amount of codes used tells me that law firms pay attention to their time records and draw on the full range of UTBMS codes even for a typical, relatively modest invoice.

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A post in Portuguese on the FDJUR group of LinkedIn, which is for in-house lawyers in Brazil, asked members to respond with the software they are using. [ Qual o software que sua empresa ou escritório utiliza?] I have written about one of them, from Tedesco (See my post of Feb. 6, 2008: Brazilian matter management system that translates into many languages.). In line with findings from the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey, based on its question regarding matter management systems, there is much more legal department software out there than most of us realize.

Here is the listing of 19 packages from the LinkedIn item, in alphabetical order. I have given the URL that was in the post:

BC LEGAL, BENNER, COGNITIVA, CPJ – PREÂMBULO, CP-PRO, DIAFANIS, ESPAIDER, GENIALIS, INSO GR, LAWER, LEGAL MANAGER, LEXONLINE, PORTAL DA ADVOCACIA, PROJURID, PROJURIS, RR SISTEMAS JURÍDICOS, SISJURI, TEDESCO, and THEMIS.

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Given the cost and complexity of e-discovery – defined by me as the steps necessary to locate electronic files, preserve them, review them and produce them – some law departments work with their information technology counterparts to do the job internally. They pick which cases to do in-house and turn to consultants and vendors for the rest.

A piece in InsideCounsel, May 2011 at 64, describes different criteria for that decision. Size may serve, such as all cases where the electronic files amount to less than 50 gigabytes. Or the amount in controversy may draw the line, such as anything under $200,000. Some companies make the decision by type of case, such as all civil lawsuits. Obviously, mixtures of these three characteristics of volume, value, and variety could also make the decision, as might existing workload of the in-house discovery team.

While I wrote the above, I checked for my recent posts about e-discovery. Even though I know little about this area, it turns out that I write about it with some consistency (See my post of Oct. 13, 2010: drawbacks to reliance on law-firm discovery centers; Nov. 30, 2010: touted e-discovery costs by big US companies; Dec. 21, 2010: predictive coding as a tool to reduce the costs of e-discovery review; Dec. 30, 2010: analytical discovery tools; Jan. 12, 2011 #2: accounts for 80% of litigation costs; Jan. 23, 2011: online training for e-discovery; Jan. 26, 2011: data from 2008 on discovery costs; April 14, 2011: Academy of Court-Appointed Masters; April 15, 2011: formula to determine what documents were not found; May 16, 2011: in-house experts decamp for vendors; May 20, 2011: ACC chooses a preferred vendor; and May 25, 2011: Google comments on e-discovery approach.).

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For online, tech-savvy lawyers of law departments, one of the ways to keep abreast is Twitter. For example, the posts on this blog appear there under my Twitter handle @ReesMorrison. The headers and text compress automatically through some magical software that I don’t pretend to understand.

With somewhat fewer followers (435) than say, Justin Timberlake, I was startled to find that during the month preceding June 18th, 17 people had seen fit to retweet 38 of my posts. They say something short and usually complimentary and refer to one of my posts compacted into a tweet. They signal a retweet with via@ReesMorrison or RT@reesmorrison. A couple had even retweeted a retweet.

Among those who have retweeted one of my posts are Gaston Bilder, Brad Bjelke, Toby Brown, Jeffrey Brandt, Tim Corcoran, Ron Friedmann, Jordan Furlong, Jonathan Kash, Aric Press, Sally Schmidt, Allen Simpson, Gavin Ward, Christopher Wills, and Roddy Young, I thank them for their efforts and recognition.

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Benford’s law, named after statistician Frank Benford, holds that in most lists of numbers from real life, the digits in the first place should occur according to a known table of probabilities. For example, the digit 1 should occur 30.1 percent of the time as the right-most digit, the digit 2 should appear 17.7 percent of the time, 3 at 12.5 percent, and so on in declining frequency. This précis of the law comes from Len Fisher, The Perfect Swarm: The science of complexity in everyday life (Basic Books 2009) at 161.

Benford’s law underpins some forensic accounting, since fraudsters try to randomize numbers, but those faked patterns violate Benford’s law. What I would like to see is an analysis of time records from law firms. If the chargeable time was created long after the work was done and the person simply plugged in approximate numbers, the first digits will not conform to the normal and expected distribution (See my post of July 12, 2010: 60% of law firms reported reconstructive time tracking.).