Page 6 - CCCA 239285 Magazine_Fall 2015

{ PerForMance in tHe Law DePartMent }

the 29-point CheCk-up

By Richard Stock

The Corporate executive Board (CeB) is a member-based advisory operational effectiveness
company that combines best practices, decision support and CEB should provide more detail about
what is intended in its statement on
talent management to help clients drive business performance. choosing alternative service organizations
One of its 11 practice areas is Legal, Risk and Compliance. (ASOs) for certain legal tasks. Some ASOs
have more cost-effective staffng and tech-
nology than law frms. Many ASO pricing
reviewed The Anatomy of a World-Class clients clearly recognize we must allocate models are more predictable and less ex-
Legal Department, a CEB resource de- a greater share of our legal resources to pensive than law frms.
i signed to assess the effectiveness of law corporate priorities.” Too few law depart- The second statement is similar but
department activity. This diagnostic tool ments have a comprehensive business addresses non-legal services needed by
sets out 20 statements in four broad cat- plan in place. the law department. Examples include the
egories: opportunities to create value in One can then consider CEB’s frst management of documents, subsidiaries
the company, optimization of talent for statement: “We build our legal services and intellectual property.
higher-value work, operational effcien- around a few core aspects that law frms The third calls for “streamlining pro-
cies and effectiveness of external counsel. can’t provide as effectively as we do.” The cesses.” This should be worded to refer
GCs are asked to rank each statement on statement should be revised to say “cost specifcally to Lean Six Sigma, and Legal
a scale of 1 to 5 for importance in relation effectively.” The core aspects of the law Project Management and Budgeting.
to their department’s strategic priorities department can then be defned in the The fourth calls for the transfer of
and for their current effectiveness. context of its business plan, rather than in knowledge across the continuum of law
Through CEB’s self-assessment pro- relation to law frms. frms, the law department and internal
cess, law departments can decide whether The second statement evaluates the clients. This statement should refer to
they need to take action on a number of law department’s ability to add value targets that are refected in the annual de-
fronts. The resulting improvement priori- at the individual client level. The third mand forecast and business plan.
ties can fnd their way into a law depart- considers how early in the process the The ffth, calling for work fow trans-
ment’s business plan. law department becomes involved when parency, would be more effective if it spe-
There are a number of ways to improve a new strategy is developed in the com- cifcally referred to the use of legal project
the CEB assessment tool, primarily by re- pany. The fourth and fifth assess the management methodologies for complex
vising some of the assessment statements nature of collaboration with clients and legal work by the law department, and not
contained in it. In this article, I propose the extent to which clients are encour- only by its law frms. Robust legal project
the revised 20 statements plus nine more aged to become more self-sufficient. management should include planning as-
to help GCs assess their departments. The final one focuses on how the law sumptions, interdependencies and deliv-
department communicates with inter- erables for each task and phase of a matter
Create Value nal clients. in excess of 25 hours.
The six CEB statements in this category Many of these statements deal more The fnal statement calls for a hand-
make sense provided a prerequisite state- with how the law department works and ful of metrics to demonstrate the value
ment is added to the mix: “We have a less with what it does. This is important, of the law department. However, CEB’s
written business plan for the law depart- provided there are programs and metrics reference to accurate budgeting misses
ment that is aligned with corporate pri- in place to promote client self-suffciency the mark by not focusing enough on the
orities. Executive management and our and effective communications. achievement of the department’s business

6 CCCa MaGazIne | FaLL 2015 auTOMne