So reports The American Lawyer / Law.com (subscription).
In recent years corporate Legal departments have loudly announced that operational excellence is their new goal. Promising speed of service delivery, lower cost, and enhanced accuracy in work product as results.
Headlines like the one above raise doubts about the seriousness, or at least the staying power, of corporate Legal’s commitment to operational excellence. Continue reading
1. If you don’t know the quality of what you’ve bought, no amount or kind of cost data can tell you if it’s money well spent.
2. The Thomson Reuters’ 2022 Legal Department Operations Index reported that 70% of corporate legal departments track total spending by law firm, and that other cost-control categories comprised 13 of the top 16 data sets on which they focused management attention.
3. But a mere 8% reported quality of legal outcomes among their top 3 focus areas, prompting one legal tech provider to observe: “Only 8% of Legal Teams Care About Quality. Really?”
4. Karen Skinner, of Gimbal Canada, one of the top half dozen law practice management experts in North America, had a different view:
“In-house teams not interested in quality of legal outcomes? It’s more likely they have no easy way to measure quality.”
A surgeon friend of mine once explained to me how her profession’s CPT Codes describe specific medical procedures in a way that’s commonly accepted across the medical industry. For each such procedure a fixed fee is charged — regardless of the time consumed or complications encountered in performance of the task.
Though there is a noble effort underway toward a legal industry counterpart to medicine’s CPT Codes, don’t expect its widespread adoption any time soon.
Why not? Because the fixed fees those codes make possible in medicine undercut attorneys’ billable hours business model. Continue reading
Managing Legal