Omnibus

As I approach the year anniversary of this blog, I had a few miscellaneous thoughts I wanted to collect.

Fundamentally, a good practice of law is all about project management. If you ask clients about what they like about their attorneys, it will more likely be responsiveness, communication skills, delivering on time and on budget with few surprises, anticipating events and managing expectations. All project management skills. It’s the rare client who cares or even knows about the nuances of, say, drafting an indemnification clause.

I’d love to see a day when contracts are more like constitutions or charters, rather than exhaustive reviews of every conceivable risk that could occur.

Law is a very versatile career choice, but I believe that law schools often do their degree a disservice by encouraging law firms as a primary career path. Frankly, a law degree is valuable even without ever practicing because it teaches analytical skills, how to review and draft agreements, how to advocate, how laws are made and interpreted, public policy, etc.

I’d like to see cognitive neuroscience and law joined in some way. I’d bet that would tell us a lot about how to negotiate settlements and write contracts.

In the in-house setting, law departments may have to “beg, borrow, and steal” human resources, but that is not a bad thing. The way I see it, everyone in the company is a member of the law department (in that they have a role to play in compliance and risk management), but they just don’t know it yet.

Managing outside counsel fees take up a lot of space in trade magazines for corporate counsel, but isn’t the issue really as simple as effectively communicating your budget expectations and managing to them?

Don’t be afraid to entrust your paralegals and administrative staff with tasks that may be outside of their traditional duties. My experience is that people will invariably rise to the occasion, if given proper direction.

Working with partners and resellers requires a different sort of relationship than with a direct sales force. Sort of akin to the difference between friends and family. But if your company has good “friendship” skills (e.g. good communication, respect for boundaries, tolerance for differences), then partnership arrangements can be a tremendous force multiplier.

It’s natural for start-ups to want to protect their intellectual property assets, but in most cases the brand/market related IP will be of superior value to the patent related IP. Patents can drain a start-up’s initial resources, so proceed with caution.

I’ve heard it said that the law is what is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained. Or is that politics?

In mergers, I’ve found that the most critical “cultural” issues are the ones that revolve around how decisions are made, who is included in decision making, what level of information is required to make a decision, and how decisions are communicated. Much of the rest of the “cultural” issues are aesthetics or temperament.

Email is a great tool, but too often gives the illusion of productivity instead of the reality.

Multi-tasking is a dangerous trap. Some jobs can readily be multi-tasked, but many tasks require a degree of attention and focus that leads to diminishing or even negative returns when you include them in a multi-tasking environment. It’s the old maxim, if you don’t have the time to do it right the first time, how will you find the time to make it right. As such, be intentional about what you choose to multi-task.

I liked my time in law firms after law school. I view it as a sort of necessary apprenticeship. But I get true joy working in an in-house environment. To me, law and business management are the two wings of an airplane. Both are needed to lift the enterprise off the ground.