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One of the speakers at the SuperConference mentioned that his seven-lawyer department uses SharePoint as an internal blog. Inside lawyers and others can collaborate with that tool. Also at the SuperConference, a speaker from Hewlett-Packard’s law department mentioned that they have created a SharePoint application where, among many things, they share photos of the legal team members.

A law department I have assisted can have its law firms upload PDF files of their invoices whereupon SharePoint automatically forwards them to the correct lawyer for review as well as to the administrator. The matter number in the Subject line of the email invokes the forwarding rules. The department also uses SharePoint to list engagement letters and rates.

Hartford Financial also makes full use of SharePoint in its legal department. According to a recent article, “In conjunction with the teams’ custom-made intranet, SharePoint gives each law group a dashboard to manage calendaring and key information such as forms, boilerplate documents, and research materials. It was expanded in 2010 to include board materials and calendaring, and broker-dealer compliance functions.”

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The bread-and-butter of many in-house attorneys consists of commercial contracts, those contracts either to buy or to sell goods or services, and the legal work attendant on them (See my post of Dec. 22, 2009: primary role of many inside lawyers; Dec. 23, 2009: one-third of litigation involves contract disputes; June 7, 2010: most common kind of litigation is a contract dispute; Aug. 25, 2010: at Johnson Controls, commercial contracts, corporate work, and antitrust are core; Sept. 4, 2010: three priority levels for contracts handled by law departments; and Dec. 15, 2010: article cited that wonders about contracts being key work of law departments;).

Many people collaborate with the lawyers on contracts, or help get them done and tracked (See my post of Sept. 21, 2009: offshore staff to curate contracts; Nov. 6, 2009: global contracting staff outnumber legal staff by two to one at CSC; Aug. 10, 2010: contract specialists at Discover Financial Services; Nov. 18, 2010: sales force may be greater challenge than contract negotiation; Nov. 29, 2010: clients and negotiations; Dec. 19, 2010: outside counsel and fixed fee of Bell Canada for contracts; and May 31, 2011: eBay and procurement’s involvement.).

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Studies have shown that conservative bloggers cite other conservative blogs and include links to them in their blog rolls; liberal bloggers likewise segregate their references and citations. This point Cass Sunstein makes in Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford 2006) at 190.

A test of this proposition would be the set of blogs I have identified as written by current or former in-house counsel on law department operations (See my post of Jan. 28, 2009: law department management blawgs with 11 references; May 16, 2011: blawgs by in-house lawyers past or present with 16 references.).

If someone assembled all the blog rolls of the site and counted them, it would probably show a core of blogs that frequently cite and link to each other as well as a long tail of infrequent sites.

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The latest newsletter of executive recruiters Laurence Simons mentioned ProcureLaw.com, “an online tendering platform for legal services.” Misys General Counsel, Tom Kilroy, tells us that he saved around 50 per cent on legal fees after running a tender to select a law firm to carry out an employment law project. Forty nine law firms took part in the process over 14 jurisdictions. According to Tom, ProcureLaw enabled the global IT company to “run a genuine and fair price comparison between competing bids” and the legal department would be using it “more extensively in the future.

To cut legal fees in half astonishes me, but there you have the quote. To invite 49 law firms to propose on work also astonishes me. To put so much emphasis on “price competition” – well, you get my point.

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A handicap for many managers of in-house legal teams, when they want to make sense out of a mass of data, is that they do not understand statistical tools well enough. Aside from learning them on their own, they might look around their corporation to find someone who already knows statistics. My “Morrison on Metrics” column of June 13th, offers five suggestions for where you might find quantitative analysts internally.

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Managers in law departments might want to avail themselves of a decision-making method known as the Delphi technique. Cass Sunstein in Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford 2006) at 208, outlines the three key aspects of the technique, which is sometimes called the nominal group technique (See my post of Dec. 9, 2005: Delphi method (nominal group technique); Aug. 25, 2009 #2: criticism of Delphi technique; and Feb. 1, 2006 #1: introduced in 1964 by Rand researchers.). “First, it ensures the anonymity of all members [of a group that is trying to make a decision] through a private statement of views.” Anonymity reduces the effects of peer pressure, dominant personalities, or a prevailing majority opinion.

“Second, people are given an opportunity to offer feedback on one another’s views.” These conclusions also are given anonymously and fed back to the group through a facilitator. “Finally, and after the relevant communication, the judgments of the group members are elicited and subject to statistical aggregation.” Meaning, you collect and analyze the opinions.

Len Fisher, The Perfect Swarm: The science of complexity in everyday life (Basic Books 2009) at 83-84, describes the method a bit differently. “Circulate the problem to group members.” Next, “Collate the responses, suggestions, and supporting arguments.” Third, “send the collation back to the group members and ask them to rate the suggestions.” He does not mention anonymity but the process, which continues until the group tires or reaches consensus, is stated more clearly.

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An article in the Acad. Mgt. Learning & Ed., March 2011 at 41, distinguishes between “explanatory sciences and design sciences. The explanatory paradigm, as predominately followed in business schools, is concerned with understanding what is, while design science (as predominates in medicine and engineering) is concerned with what should be. Design science is concerned with developing knowledge that provides answers to problems.” I flatter myself that this blog both explains law department operations as well as provides some solutions to operational problems.

Little Bets: How breakthrough ideas emerge from small discoveries, by Peter Sims (Free Press 2011), at 12, 28, makes the case for “design thinking” as “a set of creative methodologies for solving problems and generating ideas that is based on building up solutions, rather than starting with the answer.” Design thinking works particularly well with complex, ill-structured problems. Design thinking sounds just right for some complicated legal tasks.

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In a study of 47 companies, mostly insurance, a recent survey found that about a third of them maintain a staff counsel operation. Of those, about half (57%) the time staff counsel for claims “reported structurally through the chief claims officer as opposed to through the legal department.” Among the larger companies, the trend for staff counsel to report to claims was dominant.

The Council on Litigation Management commissioned Revere Advisory to conduct the study. This finding is on page 4 of the report. If you would like to obtain a copy of the full report, write Taylor Smith.

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Software to help handle contracts – recent references [metapost contract software II 12]

The ubiquity of commercial contract work in legal departments matches the prolixity of software that can help. I have previously collected posts about technology and contracts, but more have accumulated since then (See my post of Nov. 22, 2008: contract management software with 11 references; and June 1, 2010: contract management and software to assist with 10 references.).

Databases and drafting systems predominate in the references but there are also portals, email transfers and analytic tools (See my post of Sept. 21, 2009: offshore database to coordinate contracts; Jan. 7, 2010: clients request contracts through portal (Catholic Healthcare West); Jan. 10, 2010: legal department has contract assembly database; Feb. 19, 2010: automated drafting system at Latham & Watkins; April 20, 2010: software to match contract terms against other parties’; June 29, 2010: Codean’s Visualizer software; Sept. 6, 2010: lessons learned about contract management software; Dec. 17, 2010: Ladbrokes law department licenses its contract management system; April 11, 2011: automatic linkage between contracts and email; April 19, 2011: Fenwick & West offers corporate contracts and documents online; April 25, 2011 #1: law firm provides document creation tools online; and April 29, 2011: Lecorpio offers contract management software.).

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Two previous posts have shared analyses of the matter management systems of participants in this year’s General Counsel Metrics survey (See my post of June 13, 2011: leading systems by number of departmental users; and June 14, 2011: comparison of leading systems to non-users on total legal spending.). The 142 law departments that did not answer about their matter management system or who responded “none” might have a different profile in terms of total legal spend as a percentage of revenue.

Not so. The average total legal spend of that group was 0.77 percent of revenue and the median was 0.41. As compared to users of matter management systems, the average was slightly lower and the median slightly higher. What confounds these very preliminary findings is that some of the non-respondents might have declined to identify their department’s matter management system. They might not have known the name, they might not have wanted to disclose the information, or they might simply not have cared enough to bother.