The history of inhouse legal: Difference between revisions

Note the narrative sweep here: industrialisation. ''Scale''. ''Control''. ''Margins''. The approach to the problem of legal comes from a particular viewpoint. ''The accountant’s''.  

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 management orthodoxy has understood for decades that it isn’t [[Cost - waste article|cost]] by itself, but [[waste|''wasteful'' cost]], that is the problem in a distributed manufacturing process: raw materials ''do'' cost money. You ''do'' have to pay machine operators ''something''. You can’t avoid the basic minimum costs of doing something properly. Rather, you rigorously test your processes to check you ''are'' doing it properly — and not ''over''doing it by wasting materials, over-engineering, having your staff standing idle or engaging them in unnecessary activity. 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.

Now the thing about costs and waste is that they are not some kind of astral yin and yang, orbiting each other in a sort of stable zero-sum relationship. Some costs are worth it; some are not. Some costs are obvious; some are hard to see.