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The Five Pillars of Performance for the Law Department
- June 6, 2019
- Category: Performance Management
- Publication: Legal Business World, Issue 5 (2019) and Canadian Lawyer In-House, web site
The article suggests 5 basic elements that can serve as pillars of performance for law departments. These include the extent of “strategic impact” of the department, specifically the extent of contribution to the strategic priorities of the organization. The second pillar is “intellectual capital” with initiatives to leverage the capabilities of lawyers at all levels of experience. The third pillar of “innovation” is a pre-requisite to ensuring that the law department stays ahead of the demand curve for its services. Managing the “Costs” of internal and external counsel is the inevitable fourth pillar. “Leadership” by every lawyer in the department is the last pillar and a pre-requisite to performance in the other four pillars.
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Thoughts on Pricing Legal Services
- May 13, 2019
- Category: Positioning and Strategy, Workflows and Workloads, Organization and Resources, Performance Management, Managing Total Legal Spend, Benchmarking and Surveys
- Publication: Legal Business World, Issue 5 (2019) Canadian Lawyer In-House, 13 May 2019
The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) released a comprehensive report benchmarking 15 legal operations. The law department maturity model uses three stages to survey the External Resources Management function. Only 11 % of the 316 participants reported they were in an advanced stage for this function. Few law departments made significant use of alternative fee arrangements or of metrics applied to pricing. The article discusses the need for pricing expertise, four questions to include in RFPs for legal services and how to approach alternative fee arrangements.
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Getting Traction for Innovation in the Legal Department
- May 1, 2019
- Category: Positioning and Strategy
- Publication: Legal Business World, Issue 4 (2019)
Most inside counsel lack key elements of technology literacy to acquire or customize and use applications that will make them more efficient or their clients more self-sufficient. The article poses six questions designed to help legal departments better understand their workloads, workflows and the relative complexity of the matters being worked on.
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Innovation a Hot Topic at CCCA Conference
- April 17, 2019
- Category: Positioning and Strategy
- Publication: Canadian Lawyer In-House website
Most inside counsel lack key elements of technology literacy to acquire or customize and use applications that will make them more efficient or their clients more self-sufficient. The article poses six questions designed to help legal departments better understand their workloads, workflows and the relative complexity of the matters being worked on.
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Beyond the Basics
- March 12, 2019
- Category: Managing Total Legal Spend
- Publication: Canadian Lawyer In-House, posted on the website on March 10th, 2019 and Legal Business World, Issue 3 (2019) on page 34
The article is a commentary on Quovant’s white paper “Legal Spend and Matter Management”. Four basic ideas are put forward: timekeeper authorizations, billing guidelines, alternative fee arrangements, and objective and subjective reviews of invoices. Catalyst Consulting suggests additional and more robust measures that step away from hourly rates for individual timekeepers; rely on the introduction of formal Records of Instructions; detailed legal project plans and budgets for individual matters; and fee arrangements that provide incentives to law firms for productivity, performance and innovation.
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7 Critical Steps for a New Deal
- March 2, 2019
- Category: Managing Total Legal Spend
- Publication: Legal Business World Issue 2 (2019), at page 34
Successfully reducing legal spend in 2019 cannot take the form of a race to the bottom of the barrel for lower hourly rates. Seven critical steps are described: Secure 2 years’ worth of detailed data from law firms; prepare a multi-year forecast of requirements for external counsel; innovate in configuring primary and other firms by region with longer-term commitments; ensure Legal and Procurement professionals are proficient in non-hourly arrangements; apply optimal staffing patterns to individual matters; evaluate firms every 6 months against 4 KPIs; and have the CLO sign-off on a written project plan to implement the 6 previous steps.
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The Global Legal Department in the Future
- February 6, 2019
- Category: Organization and Resources
- Publication: Legal Business World, Issue 1 (2019) and Lexpert, Vol. 15, No. 10, September 2014
The 5 stages of relationships between law departments and law firms, described in Heineman’s “Inside Counsel Revolution”, are summarized in the article. Very few companies have moved beyond panels of preferred law firms to a strategic integration with one or two primary firms. The article concludes that making longer term commitments to a handful of firms is a pre-requisite to non-hourly fees for portfolios of work and to significant innovation in legal service delivery that will change the behaviours of inside counsel and their primary firms.
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Doing Metrics Right
- December 1, 2018
- Category: Performance Management
- Publication: Legal Business World, Issue 10 (2018) and Lexpert, Vol. 18, No. 5, April-May 2017
The article evaluates Counsel Links’ seven characteristics for good metrics. A four-part package to underpin proper metrics must include the department business plan, its budget, and the objectives and development plans for lawyers. However, only about 10% of legal departments have sufficient data that can be analyzed in a useful way.
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The Hummingbird Lawyer
- November 30, 2018
- Category: Workflows and Workloads
- Publication: Legal Business World, Issue 9 (2018) and Lexpert, Vol. 20, No. 2, November-December 2018
A review of Gazzaley and Rosen’s The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World applies some of the findings to in-house counsel. After dealing with an email, it takes the average worker 68 seconds to return to their work and remember what they were doing. The authors discuss FOMO, or “Fear of Missing Out”. Managing interruptions wth more discipline can generate about one hour of availability each day.
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Poor Leverage Means Poor Service
- September 30, 2018
- Category: Organization and Resources
- Publication: Lexpert, Vol. 20, No. 1, September-October 2018
Planning and teamwork are essential to appropriate task delegation in legal work. Both law firms and law departments under-delegate and fail to rigorously oversee the use of experienced legal counsel.
Law departments face particular challenges moving away from solo practice models when have no entry-level lawyers available on the team. Team-based lawyering and tougher intake protocols are essential.
Articles on Demand – Archive