Workflows and Workloads

The CEB reports that, for two reasons, the relationship-based business model for corporate law departments is fundamentally unsustainable. First, the number of individuals calling on inside counsel for routine matters has proliferated beyond the company executive team. Second, most internal clients want resolution not a relationship. Some General Counsel are conducting detailed studies of demand patterns affecting their resources. Others are introducing protocols and programs to make many regular clients self-sufficient.

Timekeeping by in-house counsel is unusual, with fewer than 25% of law departments requiring the practice. Most are public sector law departments. Communicating the value of the in-house counsel contribution depends on framing a new value proposition that includes service, results and costs.

This e-book reprints a portion of our articles from our on-going series of articles in the on-line magazine Legal Business World. This first, short 64-page volume contains 6 articles on law department business plans and strategy and a further 5 articles on workflows and workloads.

The article suggests six ways that legal project management (LPM) and budgeting add value in complex matters. The roles of external counsel and law departments in LPM are detailed. Law departments should ensure that matter budgets for complex work include planning assumptions for phases and tasks, together with a percentage probability of correctness.

Legal project budgeting should be correlated with a suitable pricing model if it is to provide the right incentives for all involved.

Law departments do not allocate work like law firms. There are rarely any junior lawyers and too many paralegal tasks are done by lawyers. Accurate data on the number of matters, complexity levels, and hours by client is hard to come by without timekeeping, though techniques for accurate estimates are readily available. General Counsel are challenged to change resource allocation patterns, defaulting instead to simply responding to daily demands for service. Inside counsel are able to estimate the proportion of their year spent on matters that require 0-5 hours, 6-25 hours and more than 25 hours. Some law departments and senior counsel spend as much as 40% of their time on operational support usually on matters requiring less than 5 hours to complete. It is difficult to be strategic when one is engaged in this way.

People who are paid more to work tend to work more hours. Altman Weil’s 2020 Chief Legal Officer Flash Survey reported that, in spite of the pandemic, this averaged out to 10% more. A 45-hour week becomes a 50-hour week.
Productivity gains of at least 10% are readily available when law departments work to have their non-core clients be more self-sufficient. It is noted that 40% of workloads for core clients is still routine work. General Counsel should have an accurate picture of the current and future demand for their department’s services. They should introduce work intake protocols to reduce routine work by 50%. Finally, they should attend to the practice management habits of each member of the law department.

Conversations with 15 General Counsel over 3 days focused on four challenges: business plans and metrics; workflows and workloads; the organization and resources of the law department; and relationships with external counsel. Workloads are, by far, the greatest challenge. But few departments have programs in place to reduce routine work. Three principles should be applied to intake criteria: demonstrate productivity improvements in legal, increase coverage for specialization and special or strategic projects, and calculate the savings from additional resources.

Non-strategic work usually gets backed up in law departments – or so it seems. In fact, backlogs typically average 3 days before input is needed from a stakeholder. Work distribution spreadsheets provide clarity about how in-house counsel spend their time. Rigorous work intake criteria, applied judiciously, encourage business units to be better prepared when consulting Legal. Coupled with quarterly planning, the law department can better influence its workflows and workloads.

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.

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.