Good lawyers are good typists. Too bold a claim? If you lack keyboard proficiency, your productivity relative to your peers will lag.

Critics – Luddites actually – used to suggest that expensive lawyers spent too much time typing and formatting their documents. You don’t hear that complaint much any more. Bear in mind that it is expensive to hire and keep competent administrative assistants. Furthermore, the ratio of admins to lawyers is steadily declining in law departments.

Today, where so much information flies around by email and floats in the computing cloud, where we spend so much time before monitors, it has to be true that touch typing at a good and accurate rate is an asset. You are how you type.

An admonition in a column of Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, May 2008 at 72, caught my eye. "Tell your outside providers to get in the habit of analyzing and vetting bills before sending them to you." Well, yes, of course. Isn’t that bit of advice on a par with “Tell your law firms not to over-bill you?”

Setting aside that snide shot, how would you know that a partner has reviewed the pre-bill unless their bills indicate time written off because it was inefficiently spent? Billing partners always claimed that they scrub their bills, but how many of them state on their invoice the time written off by them?

Ask partners to show specifically what they have written off. You can learn how they assess their own bills and what they think is lower value effort. Or you might find that the firm bills you whatever timekeepers record.

A piece in Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, May 2008 at 71, states that law firms should propose set payments every month as an “alternative fee arrangement” for costly, multi-year cases. “This benefits the law firm during the valley times and the client during peak times, and overall is a win-win solution for both over the life of the litigation."

Not necessarily so, Candide. Both sides benefit only if they have hit upon an amount to be paid each month that is fair. A monthly fee that is too peakish favors the firm; a fee too valleyish favors the department. No one can know early on the likely magnitude or timing of costs in a case. More fundamentally, it is not my impression that even payments make all that much difference to a law department.

I have a residual worry that monthly retainer payments make it too easy for the law department’s responsible counsel to pay little heed to the bill. It is a good practice to reconcile the amounts paid against the actual costs accrued by the law firm and perhaps adjust the amount of the payment for the future based on those costs. Even better, set the monthly amount every six months based on a budget submitted by the firm and reviewed by the in-house lawyer that details why the payment should be what they propose (See my post of April 27, 2005: budget only as far as your headlights reach.).

“When correctly implemented, e-billing actually changes the way attorneys and support staff do business. Call it business process reengineering brought down to the legal department.” This optimistic claim comes from Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, May 2008 at 75.

Certainly, members of the legal staff do different things with respect to invoices once they have e-billing software. But not every modification of behavior deserves renown and praise as business process reengineering. The hyperbole that surrounds software that “transforms the practice of law” usually turns out to be marketing exaggeration. It is enough that software improves the productivity of those in law departments who use it.

InsideCounsel, May 2008 at 61, reports that of the1200 in-house counsel who responded to its career satisfaction survey, nearly two-thirds of them (63.6%) get more than 15 vacation days annually. I assume that means the plurality gets four weeks per year.

Since at some companies you have to work there for some number of years – five is a common mark – to qualify for four weeks of vacation, a group of the respondents simply had not qualified yet. A more precise question would have asked, “What is the maximum amount of vacation a lawyer at your level can earn in a year?”

Nevertheless, my assumption is that nearly all veteran in-house lawyers in the United States are entitled to take at least a month of vacation every year (See my posts of June 30, 2007: workaholics; May 18, 2007: vacation days taken in law departments; April 23, 2006 and April 1, 2005: sabbaticals for in-house counsel; and Dec. 12, 2006: “extreme jobs.”).

For its biennial survey of career satisfaction, covered by InsideCounsel, May 2008 at 61, InsideCounsel obtained responses from 1,200 in-house counsel. One question asked them to choose from a list of 11 the MOST rewarding part of working in-house. A second question asked them to choose from another list of 11 the LEAST rewarding aspect of their jobs. This post comments only on the methodology of the survey questions. Later posts will turn to the results.

It is an excellent sample size (See my posts of April 22, 2007: power tests and sample size; Dec. 9, 2005: margin of error and sample size; and Oct. 31, 2007: benchmark data and a formula.). For that reason, if data were collected it would be possible to compare responses to years out of law school or years in present position. A more sophisticated analysis might account for multiple responses from the same law department (See my post of Sept. 5, 2007: probability-weighted samples.).

Multiple choice questions often need an “other” category, which this survey did not offer, or possibly did not report on (See my posts of April 12, 2006 and July 14, 2005: importance of “Other” as a list choice.).

It would have been even better to have asked respondents to rank their top 3 or 4 morale boosters and busters, especially if as here one or two choices dominate the selections The top two accounted for 48 percent and 53 percent of the selections on their respective lists. Rankings allow much more analysis, yet don’t require much more effort on the part of respondents (See my posts of Oct. 17, 2005: ratings compared to rankings; June 10, 2007: a better way for surveys to rank; March 10, 2005: setting priorities; April 8, 2007: ranking compensation by practice area; and April 4, 2008: rankings and percentages.).

Finally, analysis of the results would be cleaner if the lists had used the same wording for similar aspects. For example, “perks” as a morale booster corresponds pretty closely to “benefits package” as a morale buster. Even so, I think of benefits as primarily monetary, whereas perks might include non-monetary benefits such as parking spots or size of office. Likewise, the booster choice “management opportunities” (8th on the list at 3.1%) compares roughly to the buster choice “managing people” (6th on the list at 5.2%).

Another co-general counsel department. Diane Genova and Travis Epes are co-general counsel of JPMorgan Chase, according to Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, May 2008 at 56 (See my post of June 16, 2007: Computer Associates’ co-general counsel, and cites to Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.).

Some depth on statistics. The correlation squared (R2) is the percentage of the variance in the observations that is accounted for by the regression equation. The adjusted R2 reduces the R2 to reflect the fact that as more and more independent variables are added the amount of variance accounted for by the equation will generally increase regardless of the explanatory value of those variables. The F-statistic is a measure of whether the equation as a whole has significant explanatory power; stated differently, it is a test of the joint significance of the independent variables (See my posts of April 5 and May 10, 2005: correlation; and Jan. 14, 2007: the amount of variance in an independent variable explained by correlation.).

Sports references on this blog. Baseball season is here, and the Mets I love to root for (sorry, Monica Bay!) are wallowing at .a 500 pace. To cheer myself up I searched for baseball references among my posts and found a few (See my posts of Sept. 4, 2005: lawyers should rely on metrics more; July 21, 2005: Zagat ratings for law firms; Sept. 4, 2005: define diverse lawyers; April 22, 2008: drugs that increase mental ability; and Nov. 14, 2005: metaphors of managers.). Other sports are not represented.

In the business press you often read that a good executive will bring value to whatever industry that executive joins. General managerial ability rises above knowledge of a particular industry. If so, then to the same degree a general counsel in one industry might be equally effective in the same position in an unrelated industry

Some examples are at hand. Richard Walker moved from the top lawyer position at the SEC to Deutsche Bank. Marschall Smith move from a potash producer eventually to a bowling equipment company (See my post of March 24, 2007: a GC in his fourth GC position; and Oct. 2, 2006 #2: more examples.). Stasia Kelly shifted from a retailer (Sears), to a telecommunications company (MCI), to an insurance/financial services company (AIG). Dan Cooperman recently moved from an industrial database company (Oracle) to a consumer technology company (Apple). Years ago, Andy Hendry moved from a high-tech company (Unisys) to a consumer products company (Colgate-Palmolive).

Despite a few examples, my impression is, however, that it is far more common for mobile general counsel to stay within the industry they know. The ability to manage a law department may be transplantable and transcend industry, but legal knowledge and practical business experience gained in an industry makes far more difference for a successful shift of jobs.

Ideally, the system in the law department that tracks outside spending ought to produce the same numbers as the company’s accounts payable system. For many reasons, however, that correspondence doesn’t happen.

Both systems would have to treat an invoice as paid as of the same date. They would have to include the invoice in the same period of time. A second source of discrepancy is that people make mistakes: they miscode a general ledger account, they don’t realize a vendor is already in the system; they allocate a fee among different budgets. Conversions of foreign currency may throw off the amounts in one system (See my posts of Sept. 5, 2005: currency conversion; and Nov. 5, 2007: current thinking on currency conversion.). Possibly there are either duplicate payments or incomplete adjustments (See my post of May 8, 2007: duplicate payment of invoices.).

Third, not all payments that should be charged to the legal general ledger code are done properly, and some payments that are not the responsibility of the law department end up on their accounts.

Sometimes data entry people may make different judgments about the accounting treatment of an expense, such as to capitalize it for one system but not for another. Or perhaps settlements are treated as part of the legal budget for the accounts payable system but not for the matter tracking system of the law department.

For reasons such as these, the data from a matter management system and the data from the corporate accounts payable system usually do not track.

When Johnson & Johnson’s law department got its e-billing system up and running, the department benefited from the “reduction of confusion in payment,” according to Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, May 2008 at 75. The law department finance manager estimated that the department “cut a good month out of the payment cycle.”

Now, inquiring minds want to know, why is it better for a law department to dispense its cash more speedily? Interest earned on the float isn’t the reason. A department gains nothing from invested funds that are later paid a law firm or vendor. A company may be able to conserve cash and earn some interest during the delayed period but not a law department.

To the contrary, shorter cycle times might help a law department if it has prompt-payment discounts from its firms (See my posts of Oct. 25, 2007: prompt-payment discounts are infrequent; May 4, 2005; Aug. 24, 2005; Aug. 27, 2005; Sept. 14, 2005; Oct. 14, 2005; and Oct. 15, 2005: prompt payment schemes; June 11, 2007: full review and end-of-year larger discount; and June 20, 2007 on prompt-payment discounts.).

But expeditious review and payment of bills also brings other benefits. There is less chance of misplacing bills if you get them off the lawyer’s desks and into accounts payable. Spending reports from you matter management system will be more current. With quicker review there are less likely to be duplicate payments or questions about whether a bill has been paid (See my post of May 8, 2007: duplicate payment of invoices.). Then too, when it comes to processing bills, law firms prefer quick clients to dilatory clients.