Municipal mergers and population growth have generated more legal work for law firms. They have also created 5 challenges for municipal law departments: broad-based poorly defined roles and responsibilities, unclear accountability to political and administrative masters, a growing demand for commercial skill sets, failure to leverage long-term partnering arrangements with fewer law firms, and failure to use key performance indicators which matter.

Shifting the perception and the focus of a law department can be accelerated with a formal positioning statement or “manifesto” that is endorsed by corporate leadership. The components include a brief mission statement for the law department, a strategic focus aligned with the corporate plan, clear operating principles, and a set of medium-term priorities for the law department. The article includes a sample “manifesto”.

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.

You get what you measure. A key performance indicator (KPI) for “Strategic Impact” challenges the law department to choose its priorities, show more leadership, offer more resources to corporate business priorities, and re-think its critical competencies for senior counsel.

The article reviews 6 critical success factors, (CSF) for a successful law department – especially if they must add value to the company. The composite score for most departments is only 5 on 10. Priorities for improvement are proposed.

Richard interviewed 5 UK Experts : Mark Ford at E+Y Law, Ian Gray at Eversheds Sutherland LLP, Nick Williams at Proxima, Stuart Dodds at Positive Pricing et Deborah Watson at Coate O’Grady. The article features fresh thinking and energy in the market supporting corporate and government law departments.

Six processes support process improvement. The first three focus on the customer for value engagement. They include value creation, figuring out how the work gets done and removing waste. The fourth requires evidence-based decision-making, fifth is people empowerment, and the last is sustainable process improvement.
Process improvement will be successful when client behaviours change to require less legal service and more self-sufficiency from clients.

Six Chief Legal Officers share their views about the current state of their law departments and the outlook for the next six months. The article covers workflows and workloads, the relationship of the law department with business units, law department resources, performance and the relative use of external counsel.

An effective law department requires six ingredients to be successfully managed. These are a comprehensive business plan, a multi-year forecast of the demand for internal and external legal services, work intake and allocation protocols that business units will accept, technology that is sufficiently advanced to relieve at least 30% of senior counsel time otherwise tied down with routine work, cost-effective non-hourly arrangements with external counsel, and metrics that drive behavior, priorities and resource allocation.