Conclusion
To conclude, a professional legal department should configure some form of legal dashboard as a tool to optimize legal management. A dashboard is a symptom, rather than the cause of good legal management.
It is important to remember that a dashboard is never more than a tool. Zen Buddhists say that it is the fool who mistakes the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. Similarly, a legal dashboard only points towards the state of the legal function and is not the state of the legal function itself. However, if used systematically and over longer periods of time, a dashboard will provide insight into the development of the legal function that will enable a legal department to effectively communicate its added value and improvements in the state of the legal function. A dashboard will promote consistent communication with other departments and thus reduce the information asymmetry that is inherent to providing legal services. Professional legal management makes most of limited resources, by prioritizing proactively and systematically, rather than simply responding to the organization’s requests. Ultimately, this will lead to greater customer satisfaction, with the ultimate customer being the organization itself.Liquid Legal Context
By Dr. Dierk Schindler, Dr. Roger Strathausen, Kai Jacob
Introducing his article, Timmer puts his finger on a hot spot in the world of legal management: the conflict between legal craftsmanship, i.e. the ability to appreciate differences between individual cases, and “management”, which is loaded with associations of Fordism and Taylorism, standardization and efficiency. The two seem to be pointing to a very different mindset and approach, which according to Timmer may explain the, often tacit, resistance that legal professionals feel when it comes to legal management.
However, hiding behind the legal craftsmanship will inevitably lead to upholding the “black box” that exists around legal services for the rest of the organization.
Is this tendency based on pure unwillingness or even fear on the part of the legal organization? Timmer leads us to a different answer: it is the lack of building out the competencies. Lawyers are not trained to be legal managers, it is simply neither part of the university curriculum nor at the center of legal research.(continued)
Well, if Legal is mainly a cost center, a cost of doing business that large and complex organizations (have to) accept, while the vast majority of SME's tend to go without (or with a minimally staffed) legal department, why then the effort to go beyond cost management? Timmer, like many other authors, rightfully points to the fact that taking a holistic view to a modern legal function reveals that legal is not just about managing risk (and the cost for doing that), but also about exploiting opportunity.
So, is then not the simple answer to pull out the management books and adopt some standard practices that have long been researched and described? Timmer takes side with Phil Rosenzweig who fundamentally questions a lot of business research as “pseudoscience”, as it uses material of a subjective nature as a basis and is therefore exposed to the “halo-effect”. This means that an observer tends to assess most aspects of an organization as good, just because the organization's overall results are good, while in reality, organizations will often have good overall results in spite of flawed strategies or policies on certain aspects of it.
Timmer recommends a well-founded model that combines monitoring “common sense conditions” (i.e. what needs to be in place for any organization) with what is needed to communicate the basics on legal risk and opportunity. In terms of structuring the dashboard, the author recommends to visualize the function by showing where and how it correlates with other departments. Configuring a legal dashboard that does not only focus on cost, but also on performance metrics geared to improve legal quality and thus to enhance the legal function, is a first step.
The dashboard can become more balanced and refined as management of the legal function professionalizes further.References
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Ivar Timmer is an associate professor at the Amsterdam Research Center for Societal Innovation (ARISI), part of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS). He has been the project leader for the development of the master (LLM) and research program in Legal Management that the ARISI hosts (since 2012). He has previously worked as an in-house counsel and has experience as lecturer in contract law and administrative law. His research focuses on legal risk management and legal process management. He is the co-author of two books (in Dutch) on legal management and legal project management, as well as two books on the law of contracts and torts. He is currently conducting a PhD research on legal risk management.