Conferences / Symposia, In-House Counsel

How In-House Lawyers Can Expand The Role Of Non-Lawyers Allied Professionals To Improve Delivery Of Legal Services

The gains from working more closely with these colleagues should not be ignored out of inertia or fear.

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Biglaw woman partner male paralegal teamwork collaborationWe’ve talked at length in these pages about how the artificial divide between lawyers and non-lawyers undermines teamwork and collaboration, creates a harmful “caste system” in Biglaw, and even exacerbates the justice gap.

What can be done to break down this wall? That got discussed at “A Leader’s Guide to Delegating Legal Work: Stratifying Legal Services and Expanding the Role of Non-Lawyers in Your Department,” a packed panel at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) featuring the following speakers:

  • Lucy Bassli, Assistant General Counsel, Microsoft Corporation
  • Terin B. Cremer, Chief Human Resources Officer and Associate General Counsel, Bankers Financial Corporation
  • Steve Crossland, Limited License Legal Technician Board Chair, Washington State Bar Association
  • Mark Ross, Global Head, Legal Process Outsourcing, Integreon

A good first step, according to Lucy Bassli: avoid the use of the term “non-lawyer” (even though it was used in the title of the panel for convenience). Here’s a good explanation from Matt Homann:

Remember the last time you were getting a check-up, and your physician referred to everyone else who helped you during your visit (including the nurse, physician’s assistant, office manager and billing clerk) as a “Non-Doctor?” I didn’t think so.

Yet that’s the experience many have in the legal industry, which for some reason insists upon labeling those who didn’t go to law school with the completely unhelpful – and often pejorative – term “non-lawyer.”

Instead, according to Homann, “let’s call them what they really are: professionals.”

Because of the cost-containment pressures faced by corporate legal departments, lawyers are increasingly relying upon these allied professionals to get more work done with less. As noted in the just released latest in-sourcing and efficiency report from Thomson Reuters:

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[We] uncovered a developing trend: a rise in employing legal department operations (LDO) professionals, alongside a backlash against time-consuming administrative work. Most departments are besieged by the operational activities that come with being part of a corporation. General counsel seek to achieve greater efficiency and productivity within their departments and to work more strategically; bringing in LDO professionals to concentrate on business operations allows corporate counsel to focus on legal work and become more proactive and strategic in how they advise the business.

The work of LDO and other allied professionals must be adequately supervised or reviewed by lawyers when necessary, of course. But the gains from working more closely with these colleagues should not be ignored out of inertia or fear.

Terin Cremer of Bankers Financial discussed how she has used employment law support employees to dramatically reduce the burden on the legal department with respect to human-resources issues. She and her colleagues have a “toolbox” for these employees to use, consisting of standard templates, practices and procedures relating to such matters as ADA accommodation letters and EEOC position statements. This toolbox lets the support employees do a lot of preliminary work, which facilitates the subsequent work of the attorneys and also allows them to focus on more complex tasks.

Human resources work isn’t the only area where allied professionals can be leveraged to reduce costs and improve results. Other fields including contract management review and compliance work. Some upfront work is required to create the templates and toolbox to enable these allied professionals to function effectively, but the long-term gains in efficiency make it worth the trouble.

Another idea: intelligent use of law student interns. It can be tough to hire good interns when there’s not necessarily a path to permanent employment for them. What Cremer does: she recruits 1Ls with strong academic records (i.e., top 10 percent) to work for her over the summer. During their 2L summers, these high-powered students typically end up at law firms — some of them firms that serve as Cremer’s outside counsel. She will then tell these firms, when her former interns are summer or full-time associates, “I’d like [former intern X] to work on my matters; she knows me and my company.” This allows Cremer to get high-quality work from someone whose work she knows will be solid and who knows her company well — and therefore doesn’t need to spend much time getting up to speed on her business.

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Who else might be able to help you? In addition to the LDO professionals mentioned earlier, possibilities include project managers, who can set concrete goals and track the progress of projects; operations managers, who oversee deliverables and their quality; data analysts, who can use Big Data to detect and fix problems; and financial analysts, who can monitor budget impacts and cost fluctuations.

And don’t forget the possibility of working with allied professionals outside of your organization, such as employees who work at a legal process outsourcing or alternative legal services provider. Microsoft, for example, processes tens of thousands of contracts a year with the help of Integreon (represented on the panel by Mark Ross, who has a killer British accent). According to Lucy Bassli, handling that volume of contracts wouldn’t be possible without Integreon’s help.

Bassli framed the inquiry this way: “What do you do in your day job that doesn’t need to be done by you?” Consider sending such tasks to allied professionals, freeing you to focus on being the best lawyer you can be.

2016 Legal Department In-Sourcing and Efficiency Report [Thomson Reuters]
2016 ACC Annual Meeting [Association of Corporate Counsel]

Earlier: alt.legal: The Biglaw ‘Caste System’ — An Impediment To Innovation?
The Wall Between Lawyers And Non-
Lawyers Fail The Middle Class — Would Non-Lawyer Ownership Of Firms Help?

David Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at [email protected].

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