Effectiveness is the ultimate test of the legal department. Getting the plan right is the first step. There are activities ranging from operational to strategic which can be carried out. Our offerings include
- alignment with corporate and business unit plans
- 3-year and 5-year demand forecasts for legal services
- 12 roles for legal departments
- annual business plans for the legal department
- non-legal functions of the legal department
- retreats with the legal department
To Plan or To Improvise
The alignment of work type and complexity with the experience levels of members of the legal department should be managed rather than improvised. General Counsel should introduce formal programs for work intake and allocation. This should be a part of a legal department’s formal annual business plan – one that is aligned with corporate priorities and which makes a strategic contribution to the organization.
Why the Devil Is in the Details
Sourcing and pricing complex legal work is manageable with detailed matter planning and budgeting. Planning assumptions and tasks for each phase of the legal matter are essential as a pre-requisite to resource allocation. Senior in-house counsel can evaluate the number of hours and their distribution by lawyer experience band for each planning assumption. The article includes two spreadsheet examples.
Management Beyond the Basics
There are five features in law departments that are considered well managed. These are organizational alignment, the deployment of legal department resources, the management of initiatives and priorities, strategic communications, and a focus on leading practices. All are required to manage beyond the basics.
Why Strategy Seldom Works in Law Departments
Five factors which inhibit the execution of strategy are applied to law departments. They are executive leadership that is not mobilized, strategy that is not translated into operational terms, poor alignment with business units, strategy execution that is relegated to being someone else’s job, and poor direction and communication on strategic goals.
Risk Aversion in Retaining External Counsel
Flexible, independent, cost-ineffective operating practices of law departments for selecting law firms are less tenable than they were 10 years ago. Law departments must apply robust criteria when selecting law firms and begin by stabilizing and reducing the number of firms. An estimate of the 3-year demand for each specialty followed by multi-year partnering agreements with primary firms provides a good base. External counsel can be sole-sourced or selected after a competitive process. As always, service, results and pricing must be in balance.
Drawn and Quartered: The municipal law department
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.
A Manifesto for the Law Department
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”.
Getting Things Done in the Law Department
This article sets out a Critical Success Factor and three indicators for planning. Five causes of the failure to implement plans are listed. Bossidy and Charan’s seven insights into the execution of plans and work are practical. A case study details one way to organize and execute a multi-faceted business plan for a law department.
Too Little, Too Late?
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.
Strategic Impact
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.