In Support of Best Practices

In Support of Best Practices.

My prior post
discussed a recent article suggesting that the search for best
practices may be fruitless. I believe that the problem is less in
defining best practices and more in the mindset of lawyers. 

[Since my prior post, the article, The Quest for the Best Law Department Management Practices, is now available online without registration at Corporate Counsel magazine.]

The
quest for best practices is not so much to define an eternal best
practice as it is to examine systematically how law is practiced and,
for time-consuming or costly tasks, to decide consciously how they are
conducted and managed. The goal is to identify what works and what does
not and what is efficient and what is not.

Achieving this goal
requires collecting and quantitatively analyzing data, a task with
which most lawyers have little experience or skill. It also requires
the discipline to enforce standards. Many lawyers have no problem
enforcing their own standard but cannot abide following a standard set
by someone else.

I am not sure that I can definitively prove this hypothesis, but several observations support it:

  • Relatively few lawyers are skilled in using spreadsheets, an essential tool to analyze data.
  • It
    does not appear that many law departments analyze e-billing data to
    determine cost trends over time or across firms. To date, e-billing
    seems relegated to the auditing bills for minutiae rather than focusing
    on how much work should really cost and how it should be conducted.
  • When
    inhouse counsel say they are managing matters, it seems to me they talk
    much more about the substantive aspects of cases and strategy than how
    the case is run.
  • The discipline to enforce standards in law
    departments seems lacking. I have heard several stories of failed
    matter management systems. The problem was not technology; rather, it
    was that no one entered data or lawyers were unwilling to change the
    way they worked. Separately, I recently heard in a Webinar about a law
    department that retained a bevy of consultants to set up a
    collaborative system to share work product among outside counsel.
    Unsaid was that this law department did something very similar about a
    decade ago. Both stories suggest a lack of will to enforce standards.

I
would welcome being proven wrong about this hypothesis. But I believe
that weak empirical skills and lack of will to enforce changes in how
lawyers work better explain the failure to identify and establish best
practices than any other hypothesis.  [Strategic Legal Technology]

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