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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. -
Fixed Fees and Performance
- September 1, 2018
- Category: Managing Total Legal Spend
- Publication: Legal Business World, post December 2018; Legal Business World, Issue 9 (2018); and Lexpert, Vol. 18, No. 4, March 2017
Corporate clients should systematically request detailed matter budgets with the planning assumptions and hours by phase and task for each fee earner when the file is likely to exceed 50 hours. This is good, basic practice management.
The article suggests that putting more eggs in fewer legal baskets and making long term commitments of work to law firms makes it possible to introduce fixed fees for portfolios of work. It also removes barriers to introducing key performance indicators and to truly innovating in legal service delivery.
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Innovation as a Performance Indicator
- August 1, 2018
- Category: Performance Management
- Publication: Legal Business World, Issue 8 (2018) and Lexpert, Vol. 16, No. 6, April 2015
Innovation as a stand-alone KPI accelerates discussion and action that can make a strategic difference to the company. Examples include greater self-sufficiency of business units, moving away from hourly to performance-based fees for external counsel, and raising the proficiency of the law department’s lawyers regarding leadership, business negotiations, and project management. The best innovations are dedicated to corporate projects and business unit priorities.
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Four Questions for Legal Sourcing
- July 31, 2018
- Category: Managing Total Legal Spend
- Publication: Legal Business World, Issues 5 (2018) and Lexpert, Vol. 19, No. 7, July-August 2018
A survey of 153 legal sourcing professionals by the Buying Legal Council leads to four questions. How do the savings get measured? To what extent is the entire portfolio of legal work scoped and then sourced on a non-hourly basis? Is the company able to evaluate law firm practice patterns as a way to select the best AFA? To what extent is complex, strategic work subject to the legal sourcing process?
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Failure to Delegate
- June 1, 2018
- Category: Managing Total Legal Spend
- Publication: Legal Business World, Issue 6 (2018)
Leverage is central to law firm profitability. Most levels of lawyers can delegate 20% of their work to less senior lawyers or to paralegals. Delegation should be optimal, not optional. Turnaround time, knowledge transfer, and stable legal teams are influenced by proper delegation. Failure to delegate tasks is a much more widespread challenge in legal departments since counsel usually does more than 90% of the work on a file. General counsel must monitor file count, file complexity, and cycle times against objectives.
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Making Legal a Strategic Contributor
- June 1, 2018
- Category: Positioning and Strategy
- Publication: Lexpert, Vol. 19, No. 6, June 2018
ELM Solutions’ white paper “The Call for Innovation in the Law Department” is focused on improving efficiencies and controlling costs as a pre-requisite to innovation. It is difficult to agree that this enough to create strategic value for the company. While helpful, the paper is silent about a critical element of a law department’s value — results.
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Too Little, Too Late?
- May 1, 2018
- Category: Managing Total Legal Spend
- Publication: Lexpert, Vol 19, No. 5
Most law departments do not possess the information or analyze the data that they have to leverage law firm capabilities. The result is a default to retail hourly pricing and the usual discounts for volume.
Too few firms have robust templates for matter plans and budgets. Planning assumptions and a percentage certainty by phase and task are the exception.
When asked, law firms always meet the challenge to produce data about practice patterns, to generate robust matter plans and budgets, and to accelerate the introduction of alternative fee arrangements.
Articles on Demand – Archive