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ALA Currents is a free newsletter about management trends and innovations provided exclusively upon request to members of the Association of Legal Administrators.

News & Views

WHAT’S ON THE MINDS OF GENERAL
COUNSEL IN 2007?

Developed especially for this issue of ALA Currents and copyrighted by Altman Weil Inc. For more information, visit Altman Weil’s Web site.

By James Wilber
jswilber@altmanweil.com

For the eighth year in a row, Altman Weil, Inc. has surveyed Chief Legal Officers (CLOs) of major companies regarding the issues most on their minds. The past two years the survey has been conducted in partnership with LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell. Some 246 CLOs provided responses for the May 2007 survey, which were tabulated and analyzed by Altman Weil. Following is a summary of the results.

1. Within the next 12 months, do you plan to extend your in-house legal capabilities by hiring additional lawyers?

2. Have you fired or are you considering firing, one of your law firms this year?

3. Rank these reasons for firing a law firm (10= Most Important; 1 = Least Important):

4. What steps have outside counsel taken to improve the working relationship with your Law Department?

Representative comments:

Communication

• Communicating fully and requiring at least weekly discussions regarding ongoing matters;
• Getting together to plan work and to discuss strategy and outcomes;
• More face-to-face meetings, teleconferences, less e-mail, fewer memos; and
• Increased communications and clarity of objectives.

Fees / Billing

• Committed to budgets and alternative fee arrangements;
• More transparent billing practices and discounts;
• Improving the quality and timeliness of their budgets, forecasts, accruals;
• Providing early warning of potential budget overruns and taking steps to curtail spending until causes of overruns have been addressed; and
• By reducing hourly rates based on volume, our working relationship improved.

Training / CLE

• Conducting CLE programs at our office for in-house attorneys;
• Hosting luncheon meetings about a variety of legal topics of interest to the company; and
• Conducted training for new in-house attorneys.

Responsiveness

• 24/7 on call; and
• Timely response to critical issues.

Technology

• Joined our e-billing initiative;
• Access to knowledge management database; and
• Implementation of automated litigation management system.

5. What completely new positions have you added to your Law Department in the past two to three years?

TOP FIVE LEGAL SPECIALTY OPPORTUNITIES FOR ATTORNEYS

Lumen Legal, a provider of contract legal professional staffing, direct hire recruiting, and legal services, has identified the following areas of specialization as the top business law opportunities, according to Karen Maheu, Lumen Legal’s Vice President of Global Resourcing.

Intellectual Property (IP) – As companies invest money in new technologies, new processes and new brands, they will spend money on trade-marking, licensing, and protecting new inventions in the patent area.

Technical Expertise – Lawyers who have technological expertise have become invaluable for e-discovery challenges, especially those related to class actions.

Corporate Compliance – Sarbanes-Oxley, various complicated employee laws, large class actions, and new discovery rules have combined to keep this area hot – at the federal, state, local, and internal levels.

Corporate Transactions – Mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, licensing agreements … labor-intensive legal support is needed on both sides of the transactions.

Private Equity – More and bigger deals are in the works, so corporate attorneys with private equity experience are in high demand. And, with so many deals going on, it’s likely that some will go south – and that means more work in commercial litigation.

Other strong areas include immigration, due to confusion about the numbers of people allowed to enter the United States pursuant to various modes of approval, and how long they can stay. Maheu points out that immigration work is often done by smaller boutique firms. Real estate, including related bankruptcies, remains an active arena also.

Management Innovations

GO BEYOND I.T., CIOs URGED

Even chief information officers know that business innovation trumps everything these days. But corporate CIOs are focusing on the wrong things to deliver on the innovation goal. When we asked how they spend their time, for example, only 17 percent put “interacting with business partners or customers” in their top five. Asked to name the top three personal skills most pivotal for success as a CIO, only 15 percent said business knowledge and understanding industry trends. What all this says to Abbie Lundberg, head of CIO magazine’s editorial team, is that CIOs need to get out more. Get out of IT, Lundberg urges. Do a rotation in another part of the business. Get out of the office; go work with your customers, and have your team do the same. Get out of the United States; go work at one of your company’s international sites to broaden your perspective. “In the future, there will be two types of IT heads,” Lundberg says. “IT managers with a purely operational set of responsibilities, and true CIOs who will be at the forefront of developing technology-enabled strategies for the business. Taking a parochial view of your role will pretty much guarantee you an operational future.”

CIO

PULLING THE PLUG ON LANDLINE PHONE SERVICE

People who change residences are more likely to switch their phone service from a traditional landline to VoIP or wireless-only service. In a survey of more than 7,000 U.S. households, communications research company Telephia found that nearly half of all households who moved within the past year had switched to a “nontraditional” phone option for the home. Of those who moved within the last year, only 51 percent stayed with an old-school landline carrier, compared with 73 percent of non-movers. A surprising 25 percent of recent movers use a mobile as their sole phone service, compared to only 9 percent of those who hadn’t moved recently. Recent movers tend to be younger, more early-adopting crowd. They may have a lower overall household income than those who have not moved recently, Telephia found, but they also tend to spend more on communication and entertainment services. Another big factor: It’s not surprising to consider new telephony options when moving, because all household services enter a state of flux before settling on something new. VoIP and mobile-only solutions tend to be cheaper than landline options. But while price alone doesn’t seem to be enough to make most customers switch services, those in the throes of a move are often more motivated to go with cheaper services.

Ars Technica

Building Buy-In

INFLUENCING PEERS BY BUILDING TRUST, CONFLICT RESOLUTION
By Paul Trout

Tom Elsenbrook is the CEO of Alvarez and Marsal Business Consulting, a consulting firm with seven different legal entities. As the company started three years ago, Elsenbrook is responsible for building business. Find out his thoughts on influencing people, gaining trust, and preserving relationships.

Q: Undoubtedly, you’ve had a number of different opportunities where working and influencing your peers has been part of your job.
A: In all the organizations I’ve worked with, working with peers has been more about collaboration than command and control. Even when people report to you, influencing is the best way to direct their behavior. When you’re working across business units where you don’t have direct line of control, it’s all about influence.

Q: How important is learning how to influence your peers?
A: Very important. The higher up in the organization you go and the longer you’re there, the more influence takes precedence vs. the other capabilities. Emotional intelligence becomes more important to your success than IQ over time.

Q: Why is EQ particularly important working with peers?
A: I’ll put it in the context of Aristotle’s challenge. He said, “Anybody can become angry, that’s easy. But to become angry with the right person, to the right degree at the right time for the right purpose in the right way, that’s not very easy at all.” The point is you’ve got to have visibility and appreciation for where people are from an emotional standpoint. You must understand what motivates them, what they fear, how you deal with them in the most effective way, both from their perspective as well as your own.

Q: If you did adopt a command and control attitude with a peer, what would you expect to happen?
A: I would expect them to do what you command and control if it’s in their best interest and not do it if it’s not.

Q: What situations would typically come up when you’re trying to influence peers?
A: For example, if I provide one service and a peer provides another and you’d like an introduction to his/her client, you must influence them to gain that introduction. If you don’t have a high level of trust you can forget about influencing anybody to do anything outside of his or her own interest.

Q: What if you have to regain someone’s trust? What do you do in that situation?
A: Start with little things. For instance, you can work on reliability. You could say to someone who has lost a little trust in you could say, “Let’s meet and talk at lunch on Wednesday.” Are you reliable and do you show up on time? Start with the simple things at a lower level and work your way up.

Be sure to bring those people value and figure out how to convince them that you’re reliable, skillful, or that you can communicate and are oriented towards their success vs. yours. Trust is the most important ingredient to the success of an organization internally. Start on little stuff and move on to bigger.

Q: What other factors or other actions would you consider when you need to influence your peers?
A: Knowing how to have an effective conversation and being an expert at conflict resolution. If you were to ask others what the characteristics of an effective CEO are, what you’ll hear is they’ve got to have vision, they’ve got to be able to make decisions, they’ve got to be a leader … but when do you hear that they have to be a master at conflict resolution?

Q: Rarely.
A: Right! What does a CEO do that’s internally related? Allocating resources and resolving internal conflicts so that everyone feels like they got treated fairly and those conflicts are turned into opportunities.

Q: How do you preserve relationships when there is conflict?
A: Be very thoughtful – inquire first before you act. Try to consider everybody’s position before you come to a conclusion. Listen more. Speak less. Understand the emotional quotient and have emotional intelligence. Know what’s important to your adversary.

Q: What one piece of advice would you give to readers that would increase their ability to be more influential with their peers?
A: Building trust is without a doubt the most important variable. You can solve problems in five minutes if you have a trusting relationship. Trust is the oil that keeps the friction from occurring. If you want to be innovative and have a culture that’s entrepreneurial, dynamic, flexible, and opportunistic, you’ve got to have a high level of trust. If not, you’ll have to be on a conference call about everything and decisions will become very hard to make.

Paul Trout is a Managing Partner with Akina and helps Executives, Lawyers, and Consultants rethink how they sell. This article is an excerpt from one chapter of a book he is currently writing on the topic of Building Buy-In. He encourages readers to submit case studies, learnings, or questions about Building Buy-In, which may become part of the book and appear in a future column. Contact him at ptrout@akina.biz or (312) 224-8028.

Peer Points

ALA Management Solutions^SM is a free service provided as an ALA membership benefit. The professionals who staff this help desk explore resources and share information about hot law-office management topics like the one addressed here. If you have a question, call ALA Management Solutions^SM at (847) 267-1252 or e-mail infocentral@alanet.org.

CONDUCTING CLIENT SURVEYS
My firm has been tossing around the idea of conducting a client survey. Is this something we should be doing, and if so, can you provide sample surveys?

There is a great deal of information on client satisfaction surveys. We suggest that you skim the surveys and articles listed here, and consider the issues that the articles point out about why a firm wants and needs to conduct client surveys. Then you can create a client survey, from the articles and sample surveys that best fit the firm’s practice, culture, and needs.

The ALA Management Encyclopedia^SM includes an article, “The Administrator’s Role in Client Relationship Management,” in the Marketing Section that includes a sample client survey as Appendix B. Articles are available by subscription or by individual article purchase.

The following law firms have posted their client surveys on their Web sites:

• Gasparro in Philadelphia;
• Rahmin Silberstein in MA;
• Garvey Schubert Barer (NY, Portland, Seattle, DC);
• Fennemore Craig Client Service Survey; and
• Kahn & Associates Client Survey.

The following articles provide some excellent information on why law firms should conduct surveys, how surveys should be created and conducted, and what follow-up firms should do as surveys are received:

• “Client Marketing Survey: A Guide to Improvement,” by Joel Rose;
• “Utilizing the Results of a Client Marketing Survey: A Case Study,” by Joel Rose;
• “Client Surveys: Be an Informed Consumer;”
• “What Client Surveys Are and Why Law Firms Should Do Them,” by Mark T. Greene, Ph.D.;
• “Opinion Surveys Can Help Firms Keep Clients Happy,” by William J. Flannery, Jr.;
• “Cost-Effective Marketing Tools: Ask Your Clients What They Think;”
• “Know Thyself: Client Satisfaction Questionnaires Keep the Relationship Going,” ABA Journal, January 2002;
• “Putting Clients at the Heart of Your Firm,” The Verdict, published by the Minnesota Legal Administrators Association; and

ALA’s Legal Management Resource Center (LMRC) has a number of articles from associations, consulting firms and government agencies, as well as ALA sources, on creating client surveys. Log in with your ALA username and password for access to all ALA Members-only materials. Review the materials in the following Documents Directories:

• Law Firm Marketing \ Tools & Resources - “Clients’ Silent Dissatisfaction Is Bad for a Firm’s Business: Conducting Client Surveys;”
• Law Firm Marketing \ Tools & Resources - “Does Your Firm Measure Up? Create client surveys that give you more than useless information;”
• Law Firm Marketing \ Relationship Management - “Overcoming Misconceptions About Client Feedback Programs;”
• General Management \ Client Relations & Development - “Client Surveys-Using Them Most Effectively;”
• General Management \ Client Relations & Development - “Clients’ Silent Dissatisfaction Is Bad for a Firm’s Business: Conducting Client Surveys;” and
• General Management \ Firm Governance & Structure \ Firm Reporting Structures & Operations – “Where do you want to go? Analyze Your Own Competitive Direction to Understand Why Some Law Firms Make It and Others Don’t.”

Also visit The Law Marketing Portal, which collects and posts law firm marketing resources, including client surveys. At The Law Marketing Portal Web site, enter “client survey” in the search window for samples and background information.

Special Note: ALA members have free access to the ALA Reference Desk. Send any question on legal management here. Staff will conduct personal research on each question.

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CREDITS

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