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Fees, one can measure. Fees, one can ''bank''. | Fees, one can measure. Fees, one can ''bank''. | ||
[[ | Legal practice management consultants may help [[Law firm|law firms]] by running [[algorithm]]s comparing inputs to outputs; devising metrics to predict the ''optimal amount'' of literary lollygagging to maximise fee returns, but [[inhouse lawyer]]s collect no fees. Their putative quest is ''not'' “to produce legal work product”, nor even “timely, excellent, and great value-for money legal work product”, but to ''avoid'' generating legal work product wherever possible. | ||
In-house legal departments exist to ''throttle'' legal expense. | |||
The problem is, you can’t measure this with [[metric]]s or [[key performance indicators]]. Unavoidable legal process — things like customer [[contract negotiation]] — can certainly be streamlined and productionised, but once that is done, the [[process]] becomes an operational function, not a legal one, and [[legal]]’s contribution to its ongoing success, again, can only be measured in ''silhouette'': how ''infrequently'' legal is obliged thereafter to get involved. | |||
Hence, the best way of measuring inhouse legal value is also by its silhouette: just as a business cannot count the ways that its [[inhouse lawyer]]s sprinkle their magic on its forward health and viability, it certainly ''can'' count the ways they | Hence, the best way of measuring inhouse legal value is also by its silhouette: just as a business cannot count the ways that its [[inhouse lawyer]]s sprinkle their magic on its forward health and viability, it certainly ''can'' count the ways they are prevented from doing that by the quotidian distraction of the life bureaucratic: the box-ticking, form-filling, meeting-attending and re-advising the business on things it is, fundamentally, the business’s job to know already. | ||
These “[[key non-performance indicator|key ''non''-performance indicators]]” could | These “[[key non-performance indicator|key ''non''-performance indicators]]” ''could'' be counted and presented to the [[Opco]] during its weekly stakeholder check in conference call, on an attractive [[slide]], replete with [[RAG status]]es, downward-sloping graphs and Gantt diagrams charting the department’s ascent to a condition with maximum scope for offering untrammelled, ineffable excellence. | ||
But ''are'' they, in any organisation on the planet? | But ''are'' they, in any organisation on the planet? |