"The idea that those who actually took part in great events or lived through particular times have superior understanding to those who come later is a deeply held yet wrongheaded one." This quote from a book by Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (Modern Library 2008) at 43 precedes her statements that we do not always remember accurately. Memory is not only selective, it is malleable.

So much of what we know about law departments comes from statements of those who were in a particular law department and part of its particular management initiative. We must always bear in mind that those participants may not have a superior understanding of what happened or be able to tell their tale objectively. Everyone employs rhetoric, pursues an agenda, and sees the world through distorting lenses.

General counsel invest their department’s money and time each year in professional development courses (See my post of May 25, 2008: CLE with 30 references.). Some of that expense must be borne because of state law requirements imposed on lawyers admitted to the bar of that state to keep up to date. Other development efforts, such as attending conferences, online learning, and presentations from law firms, are discretionary, but for both mandated and optional education, there should be some expectation of a return on investment.

Benchmarks are non-existent about what US legal departments put out for continuing legal education. It is possible that $4,000 per year per lawyer is a plausible estimate. That figure comes from $2,000 for one conference plus associated travel and lodging costs and eight hours of a lawyer’s time at $250 an hour fully loaded. Not that internal costs of a lawyer fall into the same category as checks written to a conference organizer, but for a company it comes down to virtually the same dollars.

One way to calculate the ROI of CLE would be to gather from a group of legal departments their spend per lawyer on CLE and a few other metrics, such as lawyers per billion of revenue, outside counsel spend as a percentage of revenue, and total legal spend as a percentage of revenue. If amounts invested for professional improvement per lawyer correlated to any of those outcome metrics, you could argue with more specificity that CLE activities translate into greater productivity, capability, or reduced costs. For example, you might find that the more you spend per lawyer on training, the fewer lawyers are needed per billion of revenue.

In its eulogy to Bob Banks, the controversial general counsel of Xerox during the 1980’s, Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, Oct. 2009 at 21, explain that “In 1981 he and eight other in-house lawyers met to discuss the possibility of forming an in-house bar group that would operate outside the American Bar Association. A larger group met again in March 1982 and, after an impassioned speech by Banks, voted 49 to 3 to form what was initially called the American Corporate Counsel Association.” ACCA later renamed itself ACC.

Who were the other eight lawyers at the historic first meeting?

“Selective networking should be a part of the day job, not just a ‘nice to do’ task.” I commend this idea from Mark Prebble, Managing In-House Legal Services: Providing High Value Support for Your Organisation (Thorogood 2009) at 19. Whether you meet people in the know at conferences, through social networks, from an article, with a blog, or in the course of a consulting project, you should periodically keep in touch. They can ask you questions about management; you can turn to them for advice when you need to. It costs little and it is the best kind of advice – knowledgeable, mostly objective, and free.

Each encounter with a person knowledgeable about legal department operations creates an opportunity for a continuing link (See my post of Nov. 16, 2008: conferences aimed at inside lawyers with 11 references; Sept. 22, 2008: social networks such as LinkedIn, with 7 references; and Jan. 1, 2008: consulting with 15 references.).

If your department maintains a legal intranet, you might wish to track some of the same traffic metrics that bloggers do. You could monitor the number of visitors, visit length, pages viewed, and business unit represented. You could find out which people visit with what frequency. You could also compile metrics on the amount of content on the intranet. A further analysis could study which items are used (viewed, downloaded or annotated) the most.

These would not be metrics collected for metrics sake, but to help you decide what parts of the intranet offer the most value. Fertilize those areas and prune or replant the others (See my post of Nov. 30, 2008: legal department intranet sites with 12 references.).

Actually a four-volume treatise, Robert Haig, Ed., Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (Thomson Reuters/West 2009 Supp.), the huge supplement this year alone has generated two dozen posts (See my post of April 20, 2009: minority general counsel in the Fortune 500; April 22, 2009: zero-based staffing decisions; April 24, 2009: lawyers and their relative aversion to change; May 3, 2009: whether in-house counsel compete with outside counsel; Aug. 7, 2009: don’t send courtesy RFPs; Aug. 10, 2009 #1: citation to this blog; Aug. 18, 2009: dubious metric on inside costs being one-third of outside; Aug. 18, 2009: collaborate with external counsel on your intranet; Aug. 20, 2009: CISCO’s online patent tool; Aug. 20, 2009: court limitations on inside counsel and confidential material obtained during discovery; Aug. 20, 2009: statements general counsel can sign in support of ADR; and Aug. 25, 2009 #2: four-month secondment by UPS to Legal Aid.).

Each chapter is a treatise, chock full of references to articles and books. The writing is stolid, complete, and dense with material. Much of the set appears to be substantive legal updates, but the management chapters are plentiful.

I do not believe that the half-life of legal knowledge possessed by in-house counsel is all that short, indeed if the notion of steady brain drain has any reality. Nothing erodes the value of what a lawyer knows along the lines of “you lose half the value of what you know every five years …”

The vast bulk of the law remains quite stable, whereas change takes place primarily at the borders, or occasionally with tectonic shifts from either the passage of a major law or a Supreme Court decision (See my post of Jan. 24, 2006: is the notion of knowledge half-life valid?). Grey matter doesn’t steadily and mathematically black out.

“The CBS Legal Department has created a new intranet, which is populated with substantive content designed to benefit CBS law Department’s in-house lawyers. This information, which is provided by both CBS’ in-house lawyers, as well as CBS’ retained outside law firms, includes breaking and new developments in the law and best practices in the industry.”

This quote comes from Robert Haig, Ed., Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (Thomson Reuters/West 2009 Supp.), Vol. 1, Chapter 6 at §6:29. The reference is not only to a good practice for law departments but a good opportunity for law firms (See my post of Nov. 30, 2008: legal department intranet sites with 12 references.).

Books are conversations. I write in them, underline copiously, dog-ear pages, and note ideas for possible blog postings. Books feed this blog (See my post of Feb. 1, 2009: thirteen books cited on this blog.). The latest sources include these ten books. Among them I have assembled a handful of “blook reviews.”

Gregory Berns, iconoclast: a neuroscientist reveals how to think differently (Harvard Bus. Press 2008) (See my post of Feb. 25, 2009 #1: polar diagrams.).

E. Leigh Dance, Bright Ideas: Insights from Legal Luminaries Worldwide (Mill City Press 2009) (See my post of July 30, 2009: blook review.).

Laura Empson, ed., Managing The Modern Law Firm: New Challenges New Perspectives (Oxford Univ. Press 2007) (See my post of Aug. 5, 2009: blook review.).

Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Penguin Press 2008) (See my post of March 6, 2009: insurance for litigation risks.).

Bob Haig, Ed. Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (Robert Haig, Ed.) (Thomson Reuters/West 2009 Supplement) (See my post of Aug. 7, 2009.).

Peter Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton Univ. 2009) (See my post of Aug. 12, 2009: blook review.).

Deirdre McCloskey, How to Be Human Though an Economist (U. of Mich. 2000) (See my post of Aug. 4, 2009: normative and positive descriptions.).

Ann Page and Richard Trapp, Managing External Legal Resources (ICSA 2007) (See my post of Aug. 12, 2009: blog review).

David Silverstein, Philip Samuel, and Neil DeCarlo, The Innovator’s Toolkit: 50+ Techniques for Predictable and Sustainable Organic Growth (Wiley 2009) (See my post of April 2, 2009: Kirton Adaption-Innovation instrument.).

William J. Stevenson, Operations Management (McGraw-Hill, 2005, 8th Ed.) (See my post of June 14, 2009: queuing theory.).

An example of how a SharePoint application helps a legal department appears in E. Leigh Dance, Bright Ideas: Insights from Legal Luminaries Worldwide (Mill City Press 2009) at 19.

Tim Glassett, the former general counsel of Hilton Hotels and its 40 in-house lawyers, used SharePoint "lists" for each of the legal department’s subunits (whether a practice or region). They had a "View" (their own customized page) that they populate at least weekly by each lawyer with brief descriptions of key information: top three developments, top three unfavorable developments, all new matters).

Users could view only the Highlights if they choose. That way, all lawyers worldwide had a consistent, quick and easy way and frequently received high-level global information. If they wanted more detailed information, they could go to any of the subunit views. SharePoint also includes some limited "push" communication tools” (See my post of June 9, 2009: SharePoint with 6 references.). Hilton’s SharePoint application offered capabilities much like a wiki (See my post of Sept. 1, 2008: wikis with 8 references.).