What to Measure

The Association of Corporate Counsel (“ACC”) provides on their website a sample Legal Department Client Satisfaction Survey. While every company would want to customize their own survey, the ACC survey does an excellent job of setting forth those categories of legal department performance that are of critical importance to the client.

1. Aptitude and Drafting Skills. This is the bread and butter of lawyering. Clients look to their lawyers to have the ability to provide, in essence, the correct legal answer to a wide variety of problems that arise in the business. Lawyers must be capable of advanced legal reasoning, they must know the law, and, because so many in-house positions are transactional in nature, clients look to lawyers to effectively memorialize business agreements. By “effectively” the clients mean that the lawyers will draft agreements that accurately reflect the business under­standing while, at the same time, shielding the company from undue risk, ambiguity, and misunderstanding. The ability of lawyers to deliver the core competencies of lawyering is a primary criterion that clients will assess, and one the lawyers themselves often believe that clients are not necessarily qualified to measure.

2. Risk Assessment and Business Literacy. One recurring concern that clients often express is that their in-house lawyers are not “business savvy” enough and do not place their legal analysis within a larger business context, which would help the client to appropriately assess various risk factors. The ACC Client Survey poses this question in multiple ways, including asking the client to rate the lawyers on the following proposition: “Demonstrating commitment to helping me find a way to achieve my business objectives instead of just saying -no-.” Of course, it is not possible for lawyers to score well in this category unless they have a deep understanding of the business itself.

3. Communication Skills. Every in-house client survey I have ever reviewed contains multiple questions concerning a lawyer's ability to effectively commu­nicate within the company. This means being able to explain complex legal concepts in terms that non-lawyers can understand. It also means being honest, straight-forward and candid with clients. Lawyers will be judged on their ability to effectively communicate in three basic settings: the group meeting, one-on- one meetings, and brief written summaries. High competency in aptitude and risk assessment/legal writing skills will be wasted if the lawyer is unable to communicate to the client in ways the client can understand.

4. Responsiveness/Time Management. Time and again, clients will emphasize the importance of a lawyer's responsiveness, which is another way of saying that they value lawyers who can effectively manage their time and prioritize their work in a way so that the client receives the advice and counsel they need in a timely manner. The threshold requirement is one of accessibility. Lawyers cannot be responsive to clients if they are not accessible. But it also means that lawyers must effectively manage clients' expectations. Over-promising and under-delivering in terms of responsiveness will result in a low rating.

5. Cost Containment and Managing Outside Counsel. Legal services are expen­sive, and lawyers are increasingly held accountable for containing the cost of these services. Of all the categories which are subject to numeric rating, this is perhaps the easiest to measure. There is a budget, and the lawyers will be held accountable for meeting it. The single biggest variable in doing so is the cost of outside counsel. In order to succeed in the in-house setting, lawyers must be able to take advantage of the expertise outside counsel provides while staying within budget. How they do this is not typically visible to the in-house client. But whether or not they do it is painfully obvious. Bottom lines simply don't lie.

6. Collaboration and Teamwork. This category is perhaps the most subjective of all, and it is the one that typically produces asymmetrical results on client surveys. But it remains one of the most critical. Some constituencies within a company might think a lawyer is collaborative and an effective teammate.

Others quite simply may find it hard to get along with a particular lawyer (and vice versa!). Nevertheless, this criterion looms large in the minds of the clients and is a prominent feature of any assessment.

So then, the question arises, how does one measure potential candidates’ ability to achieve a high score on client surveys once they become an integrated member of an in-house legal team?

3