Law Department Management

Capable general counsel combine leadership and management

“We can make the distinction between leadership and management conceptually, but in practice I don’t think we should.” An excellent point for general counsel, made by management guru Henry Mintzberg in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 51, Fall 2009 at 12. He points out that setting grand strategies is often bested by interesting strategies that emerge as managers deal with smaller decisions day to day. He believes the hundreds of decisions made every day by someone who directs a team are under-rated by academics and consultants. The two talents of managing and leading are as intertwined as thinking and acting (See my post of June 11, 2008: leadership with 32 references.).

General counsel certainly ought to think about things on a larger scale, motivate the troops, and make decisions about priorities on a larger scale, but what they do every day makes an equal huge difference in the effectiveness of the department. As Mintzberg says, “Management without leadership is disheartening or discouraging; leadership without management is disconnected.”

Global contracting staff outnumber legal staff by two to one (CSC) – a useful metric?

Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) has, according to an article in the Practical Law J., Vol. 1, Nov. 2009 at 71, “over 400 global contracting staff.” Its legal group has around 100 lawyers, which means around 200 total legal staff if normal benchmarks hold. Thus, the contracting arm of CSC outnumbers the legal arm by something like two to one. That is an intriguing metric, one for which I have seen no other examples. There must be some range of ratios between contract professionals and legal professionals, so perhaps a reader or two will send me data from their company?

As a side note, the contracts group of CSC has offshored its project for an integrated, global “obligations management” tool to a company with operations in India.

Evaluating recent posts on evaluations of law firms

Long, long ago I zeroed in on law firm assessments (See my post of Nov. 16, 2005: evaluations of law firms with 9 references.). Since way back in ’05, this blog has accumulated many more posts on the topic. Examples of specific law departments and their evaluation process or forms number seven posts (See my post of March 10, 2006: NCR and its evaluations of firms; May 19, 2006: BP’s 30-factor evaluation form; Feb. 25, 2007: Caterpillar’s evaluation process; May 17, 2006: Exelon’s three-survey process; Nov. 20, 2006: law-firm evaluations at FMC and inducements to inside lawyers; July 2, 2007: six attributes to evaluate; and April 15, 2009: FMC’s six-factor form.). A couple of elements to be evaluated include budgeting and diversity (See my post of Dec. 19, 2006: predictive accuracy of outside counsel on budgets; and Dec. 5, 2008: diversity performance.).

Other posts of recent vintage tackle uses of law firm evaluations and challenges to them (See my post of May 14, 2006: evaluations of law firms; Aug. 20, 2006: evaluations as part of an index of performance; Nov. 20, 2006: at FMC, lawyers can’t close a matter without an evaluation; May 18, 2007: relationship manager best positioned to do evaluations; May 24, 2006: 20% of large law departments do not evaluate firms; Oct. 22, 2006: law departments poorly analyze firm performance; May 23, 2008: client satisfaction surveys only obliquely judge outside counsel; and April 16, 2009: abandon formal evaluations.).

Finally, this would not be a metapost without some stragglers (See my post of April 25, 2009: an asymmetric commitment under ACC Value Challenge; May 16, 2009: prediction market as to highest evaluation of law firms; and Oct. 22, 2008: published law firm ratings with 11 references.).

Report-outs that out lawyers who flout e-billing rules for outside counsel

E-billing software applies rules to invoices, such as “no person can bill more than 10 hours in a day,” or “time of unapproved billers will be rejected.” But rules are made to be broken, and some in-house lawyers consistently break a lot of rules.

One measure to take against flagrant rule flouters is to have the software track which lawyers let slide which rules, how often, and for how much in fees or disbursements.

If a general counsel approves of monitoring the monitors, it gives the rules teeth; they are not gummy guidelines that one can disregard with impunity.

When in-house counsel assess the performance of a firm, push them to give specific examples

We are all defensive, so if a law department lawyer criticizes a law firm, the partner who hears the criticism (and tries dutifully to acknowledge it, appreciate it, take it to heart as constructive advice) inwardly may seethe and deny. The partner wishes deeply to hear a real instance of the problem.

The wish deserves granting. Make sure your lawyers sprinkle through their evaluations comments on specific situations that justify the criticism, not just conclusory, high-level remarks. “On the X brief, the Y memo and the Z letter you got the draft to me too late for a careful review” backs up a criticism much better than does “You’re often late.”

As well, useful assessments offer a comparative view: “Your firm was the weakest of our primary firms on delegation of work.” Sometimes feedback relies on measurable characteristics such as effective billing rates, cycle time, or percentage use of core staff. Benchmarks give even more crunchiness to firm-to-firm evaluations (See my post of Nov. 16, 2005: evaluations of law firms with 9 references.).

Evaluate firms on attributes, but also ask your attorneys to say how important those attributes are

If you ask your lawyers to evaluate the importance of various attributes of law firms – responsiveness, knowledge of the law, creativity and the like – you should also ask your lawyers to indicate the importance to them of the attributes.

This extra question addresses the same reason you should ask on client satisfaction surveys for ratings on the relative importance of your department’s performance attributes (See my post of Oct. 26, 2005: gap analysis of rating and its importance; and Nov. 28, 2008: relative importance of measurements on a balanced scorecard.). Scores on attributes make only as much difference as the attributes are important. A high score on penmanship doesn’t counteract a low score on the ability to achieve results (See my post of Nov. 16, 2005: evaluations of law firms with 9 references.).

Wal-Mart to require outside law firms to have flextime policies – over-reaching?

The National Law Journal reports a new requirement from Wal-Mart’s legal group on its outside counsel. “Law firms must have flextime policies if they want to do legal work for Wal-Mart.” Associate general counsel Joseph West told an audience at the annual meeting of the Association of Corporate Counsel in Boston that his his company will add the flextime requirement to its current list of criteria used to evaluate [and I presume to select] outside law firms.

"We've found that even those firms that have flextime policies haven't communicated to attorneys in the firm that it's OK to use them without fear or shame," West said.

Here, then, is yet another imposition by a well-meaning legal department on how its law firms should operate. I have written extensively here and in an article Download 08-02-21 Rees Morrison Interventions in Law Firms NYLJ about the uses and abuses of interventions (See my post of Aug. 4, 2008: interventions with three posts and 40 references.). This one strikes me at the abusive end. What about nursing rooms, or carpool policies or recycle?

In-house lawyers may deal constantly with corporate policies, but win no friends

"Twenty-nine percent of the corporate lawyers [attending a conference] believe policies and procedures are a necessary evil -- but believe they are evil. Forty-nine percent believe the policies and procedures are not completely worthless in influencing employee behavior, but almost." That hurts. Inside lawyers often have their hand in corporate policies, be it to set them in motion, draft them, vet them, or interpret them. How discouraging to labor on what everyone else regards as millstones around their neck!

James Nortz, the director of compliance for Bausch and Lomb, james.a.nortz@bausch.com provided these gloomy data points in ACC Docket, Vol. 28, Sept. 2009 at 104. Nortz added that according to his survey, “Sixty-three percent of the respondents indicated that if all their corporations policies and procedures were to ‘suddenly disappear,’ no one would notice. Twenty-eight percent indicated that there would be ‘jubilation and rejoicing in most corporate locations.’” The hurt increases.

Part XLII of a collection of embedded metaposts

Ten more embedded metaposts (See my post of Oct. 25, 2009: Part XLI), each bedraped with the number of its back references.

CEO and influence on law department (See my post of Oct. 28, 2009: CEOs with 27 references.).
Corporate policies (See my post of Nov. 2, 2009: corporate policies regarding the legal department with 12 references and 1 meta.).
Executive education for in-house lawyers (See my post of June 15, 2008: executive education with 8 references.).
Lawyer per support staff (See my post of Oct. 27, 2009: one-to-one ratio of lawyers to support staff with 9 references.).
MBA (See my post of Oct. 29, 2009: MBAs and legal departments with 9 references.).
New general counsel (See my post of Oct. 28, 2009: newly-appointed general counsel with 12 references.).
People management bad sides (See my post of Oct. 25, 2009: ugly sides of people management with 9 metaposts.).
Shared ratings of law firms (See my post of Nov. 5, 2009: collected assessments by law departments of their firms with 10 references.).
Strategic plan II (See my post of Oct. 30, 2009: long-range plans for operations in legal departments with 6 references.).
Technology training (See my post of Nov. 3, 2009: training lawyers on software with 14 references.).

Prospects for a reliable pool of comments about the performance of law firms

We are in the midst of another broad-scale effort to compile law department evaluations of law firms. This time the Association of Corporate Counsel leads the charge, and claims early in the battle to have lots of cavalry behind it. I have my doubts about the war’s success, but I support the effort.

A long trail of posts here discuss what may be a mirage of collective evaluations by law departments of their law firms (See my post of July 21, 2005: Zagat-style ratings for law firms; April 6, 2007: risks of crowd-hacking on evaluation systems; May 14, 2006: collective, confidential assessments; Nov. 19, 2007: shared ratings of firms; March 20, 2009: benefits to general counsel of pooled ratings of firms; Jan. 25, 2008: Martindale-Hubble and shared assessments; May 12, 2009: pooled evaluations; June 9, 2009: further thoughts on ratings of firms contributed by law departments; Aug. 5, 2009: favorable byproduct of convergence; and Aug. 13, 2009 #3: Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem.).