The history of inhouse legal: Difference between revisions
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
Amwelladmin (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
||
Line 61: | Line 61: | ||
It is quantification, not evaluation, and along a single dimension: ''[[Cost - waste article|reducing cost]]''. The question is never ''what'' to do, or ''why'' to do it, but ''how cheaply'' to do it. The full beam of analytical, reductive rigour is trained on that single question: ''how can we do all this for less and less money''? Hence, management’s laser-focus on the [[delivery of legal services|''delivery'' of legal services]] over the nature of the services themselves. How they should be delivered, with what tools, out of which segments, at which cost? | It is quantification, not evaluation, and along a single dimension: ''[[Cost - waste article|reducing cost]]''. The question is never ''what'' to do, or ''why'' to do it, but ''how cheaply'' to do it. The full beam of analytical, reductive rigour is trained on that single question: ''how can we do all this for less and less money''? Hence, management’s laser-focus on the [[delivery of legal services|''delivery'' of legal services]] over the nature of the services themselves. How they should be delivered, with what tools, out of which segments, at which cost? | ||
Now the [[Thought leader|thought-leader]]<nowiki/>s of the world have understood for decades that the problem in a distributed manufacturing process isn’t [[Cost - waste article|cost]] by itself, but [[waste|''wasteful'' cost]]: raw materials ''do'' cost money. You ''do'' have to pay skilled machine operators ''something''. You can’t avoid the basic minimum costs of doing something properly. Rather, you rigorously test your process to check you ''are'' doing it properly — and not ''over''doing it by wasting materials, over-engineering, having your staff standing idle, moving unnecessarily or engaging them in gratuitous activity. In fact, you charge your staff with monitoring this: they become frontline optimisers. They, more than anyone else, are best placed to see waste, and figure out the best way of eradicating it. | Now the [[Thought leader|thought-leader]]<nowiki/>s of the world have understood for decades that the problem in a distributed manufacturing process isn’t [[Cost - waste article|cost]] by itself, but [[waste|''wasteful'' cost]]: raw materials ''do'' cost money. You ''do'' have to pay skilled machine operators ''something''. You can’t avoid the basic minimum costs of doing something properly. Rather, you rigorously test your process to check you ''are'' doing it properly — and not ''over''doing it by wasting materials, over-engineering, having your staff standing idle, moving unnecessarily or engaging them in gratuitous activity. In fact, you charge your staff with monitoring this: they become frontline optimisers. They, more than anyone else, are best placed to see waste, and figure out the best way of eradicating it. | ||
This was Toyota’s profound insight: through sheer analytical rigour in [[Toyota Production System|eliminating waste from its manufacturing process]] in the 1950s and 1960s, it beat the American auto-manufacturers to a pulp. | This was Toyota’s profound insight: through sheer analytical rigour in [[Toyota Production System|eliminating waste from its manufacturing process]] in the 1950s and 1960s, it beat the American auto-manufacturers to a pulp. | ||
====Cost and waste==== | ====Cost and waste==== | ||
Now the thing about | Now the thing about [[Cost reduction|cost]] and [[Seven wastes of negotiation|waste]] is that they are not some kind of astral yin and yang, orbiting each other in a stable zero-sum relationship. Some costs are wasteful; some are not. But costs are obvious; wastes are, from above, invisible. Wastes are “[[Legibility|illegible]]”. | ||
The easiest costs to see are ''salaries'' | The easiest costs to see are ''salaries'': they are big, lumpy and easily stopped: you simply dispense with those to whom you are paying them. | ||
Now if the salary in question in spent on an expert whose waking moments are spent heading off litigation, breaking deadlocks, identifying system inefficiencies, and providing inspired strategic advice on the bank’s endeavours — if she does nothing but that, all day and every day — then dispensing with her salary might not be such a good idea. | |||
But let us return from the Spheres for a moment and imagine, instead, that she spends her day answering stupid questions, educating people who should know better, wrestling with bureaucracy, hamstrung by rigid policies and fighting to navigate incomprehensible documents. | |||
Our lawyer is in this case misemployed, to be sure, and there is much that could be done to improve her contribution — but will any of it be achieved by relocating her role to a call centre in Bucharest help? | |||
Silly questions distracts not just those who ask them, but those to whom they are addressed: all who are hindered from doing more productive things. Hare-brained notions skitter around the skirting-boards of all organisations, out of sight, unchecked, by their nature creating ''more'' stupid questions, more bad ideas, triggering little chain reactions of stupidity and waste. If not answered quickly and clearly, these chains sometimes harden into policies, procedures, work-streams, teams and even [[Human resources|whole departments]]. | This ought to be a rhetorical question, but 20 years of management orthodoxy says it is not. “Juniorising” and “right-shoring” create ''more'' overhead, ''more'' confusion, ''more'' bureaucracy, ''more'' [[Horizontal and vertical escalations|horizontal escalation]], ''more'' people [[Internal audit|auditing]] and monitoring [[Service level agreement|service-level agreements]] and [[Key performance indicator|key performance indicators]] engaged in non-risk-facing roles. Instead of ''answering'' stupid questions, low-cost off-shore replacements ''ask'' them. Measurable cost may have declined — but, all told, probably not all that much, once the bureaucratic machine required to manage the right-shored process is considered — but ''unmeasurable'' waste will have ''exploded.'' | ||
Silly questions distracts not just those who ask them, but those to whom they are addressed: all who are hindered from doing more productive things. Hare-brained notions skitter around the skirting-boards of all organisations, out of sight, unchecked, by their nature creating ''more'' stupid questions, more bad ideas, triggering little chain reactions of stupidity and waste. If not answered quickly and clearly, these chains sometimes harden into policies, procedures, work-streams, teams and even [[Human resources|whole departments]]. | |||
Eventually, this institutionalised, low-level vacuity creates its own invisible tide of cretinaiety, sloshing around the organisation, delaying things, pulling useful people into its undertow, spawning its own little waves of dreck and powering armies of little administrators chasing these fripperies down and, as they go, building out yet more complicated operational infrastructure. For all the outsourcing, offshoring and down-sizing of the last 20 years, UK financial services employment has remained largely stable.<ref>Over 21 years, and including all the branch closures, in that time, it is [https://www.statista.com/statistics/298370/uk-financial-sector-total-financial-services-employment/ down just 7.5%] </ref> | Eventually, this institutionalised, low-level vacuity creates its own invisible tide of cretinaiety, sloshing around the organisation, delaying things, pulling useful people into its undertow, spawning its own little waves of dreck and powering armies of little administrators chasing these fripperies down and, as they go, building out yet more complicated operational infrastructure. For all the outsourcing, offshoring and down-sizing of the last 20 years, UK financial services employment has remained largely stable.<ref>Over 21 years, and including all the branch closures, in that time, it is [https://www.statista.com/statistics/298370/uk-financial-sector-total-financial-services-employment/ down just 7.5%] </ref> |