Date: April 12, 2013 Topic: The Shrinking ... - Georgetown Law
Date: April 12, 2013 Topic: The Shrinking ... - Georgetown Law
Date: April 12, 2013 Topic: The Shrinking ... - Georgetown Law
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General Counsel with Power? 2011 <br />
the in-‐house lawyer delegated the whole matter to the law firm, and expected many of the tasks – be <br />
they negotiation or legal research – to be carried out iteratively and collaboratively. Negotiation, for <br />
example, was a matter of collaboration between in-‐house and external lawyers, with a tactical aspect of <br />
matching the other side. <br />
Second, in an automation approach, the general counsel regarded automating one chunk in the task list <br />
– namely litigation support and e-‐discovery (or e-‐disclosure) – as the primary focus of efficiency <br />
improvement. Starting with computerizing the collection and hosting of data, the general counsel <br />
focused his attention on replacing humans with machines to undertake rule-‐based data processing (e.g. <br />
de-‐duplicating, coding, etc.), moving eventually onto pattern recognition in first-‐level document review. <br />
Third, in a process flow approach, the general counsel had established processes and procedures, in <br />
some cases using process mapping, to ensure the smooth flow of legal tasks from the start to the end of <br />
a case. This approach forces in-‐house lawyers to clearly scope out each task, and to define who is going <br />
to do what at the planning stage. An automation approach may be combined with a process flow <br />
approach, but some corporations adopted an automation approach without a process flow approach. <br />
One of the intriguing issues in this study is how these approaches relate to the general counsel’s <br />
internalization vs externalization tendencies (see Chapter 2). Internalizers amongst the interviewed <br />
tended to be most systematic about adopting the process flow approach, eliminating waste in the whole <br />
matter by taking a lead in disaggregating and in-‐sourcing litigation support and/or document review (see <br />
Figure 3). Externalizers Type 2 exercised their voice to induce law firms to take a lead; one general <br />
counsel told law firms “you’d better unbundle, or else we’ll unbundle for you.” <br />
Figure 3: Schematic association between general counsel type and production approach <br />
17 <br />
Said Business School | University of Oxford
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