Legal operations: Difference between revisions

{{a|work|}}A tremendous new wheeze for rent-seeking from [[legal eagle]]s. Legal operations is a [[second-order derivative]] [[Rent-seeker|military-parasitical complex]] that feeds off the direct first-order rent-seeking of those already in the in-house legal profession. The history of [[Inhouse counsel|inhouse legal]] is interesting, by the way.

Once upon a time there were deals, and banks who did them would engage law-firms to do the legals. Each one of these deals — [[Merger|mergers, acquisitions]], equity offerings, [[bond]] issues, syndicated [[Loan|loans]] — involved parties who didn’t know each other awfully well transferring each other lots and lots of ''[[money]]:'' not merely millions, but ''tens'' or even ''hundreds'' of millions of dollars. Every now and then, even ''billions'' of dollars.   

So began the great retrenchment of inhouse legal. But it didn’t happen, as you might expect, by asking the difficult questions the credit crisis plainly posed. Instead, management consultants got in on the act.

Now acres of ink have been spilled, books written, monographs published, thought-pieces floated, on the problem ''how to fix inhouse legal''. All are in awe of technology’s current gallop; all burn with the thought-leader’s desire to clothe one’s mundane vocabulary in voguish finery; to ride the vanguard leading edge. But the problem is not technological, it isn’t new, and it doesn’t require much vision. It is rather dreary and age-old. It is this:

{{Quote|''Legal is too expensive and too slow.''}}

But these problems require imagination, an understanding of [[Behavioural economics|human psychology]] and a [[Subject matter expert|deep grasp of the legal and market conventions]] — qualities with which your average [[Master of Business Administration|MBA]] is not liberally endowed.

Now MBAs are not known for their imagination, but they have a long suit in reductionist analytical rigour and they do like an over-arching metaphorical schema. They see the “inhouse legal problem” may be impervious to front-on attack, but they can ''analyse'' it into submission. This they do by breaking down that intractable whole into [[Legibility|legible]], familiar parts that already exist in the MBA toolkit. Each of these components becomes its own little sub-component, with its own workstream, and workstream lead, going out and gathering evidence and, bascially, getting in the way of the lawyers who are busily trying to execute on their time-worn business model.{{Sa}}