A legal department that speaks with a single voice, thinks with a single mind, and acts like a partnership will outperform one that is fragmented with uneven or inconsistent practices and policies. General counsel of dispersed legal departments, those with lawyers based in several locations around the world, have a particular problem of striving to nurture a sense that members work in a single, unified department. It is true that the larger the department, the more techniques of solidarity help, but even a small department, if its members are not in the same location, can benefit. In this article I discuss 20 techniques, by increasing order of difficulty or cost to bring about, that increase coherence and effectiveness in a spread-out legal department.
1. Distribute a newsletter. In an age of electronic everything, you can send a newsletter by e-mail or post it on the intranet. Whatever the medium, the message is that the legal department has news of interest to most of its members. Newsletters can change and grow, and they do not have to be on a rigid schedule.
2. Recognize people as individuals with lives and values. Take time to celebrate personal landmarks like births, marriages, transfers, and promotions. At least one legal department highlights a couple of employees each month, which lets others see a more personal side of co-workers. Some put pictures on the web page and post Facebook-style entries such as "What super power would you like to have?"
3. Make it easy to have call-ins. Telephone conference calls, although they present time-zone challenges, let colleagues hear each other and talk together. Webinars and video conferencing help even more to increase comfortable familiarity and convey visual cues. Increasingly, companies have telepresence capabilities, which help knit far-flung members of the legal team together. Soon, legal departments will use individual webcams.
4. Spread common standards and technology. If everyone uses the same matter-management system or the same document system, they have a common bond. To the degree policies and guidelines apply worldwide, the various locations feel more part of one department. Ways of working that are shared in common, even as mundane as tracking time, link the different members of the department.
5. Use a law department intranet. If everyone in the department gets used to looking on the intranet site to see the same organization charts, FAQs, learning resources, and policy statements, it helps bring them together. Wikis and blogs complement this approach. Such Web 2.0 technologies create communities of interested and involved people. Essentially, the more the members of the law department feel in the loop and knowledgeable about what is going on, the more they feel part of one department.
6. Cross-train lawyers and paralegals across offices. If you take the time to teach backups in distant offices, it can help spread a common culture throughout a department. This can only happen in exceptional circumstances, to be sure, but it is a possibility. Teaching someone creates a bond; learning from someone else breaks down stereotypes and remoteness.
7. Nurture centers of excellence and communities of interest. Create pools of experience here and there, and lawyers will be linked through reaching out to their leaders. Centers of excellence, as they are sometimes called, help establish standards of practice and disseminate good methods of lawyering. They embody the idea that "we do it this way throughout this department."
8. Have the leadership teams visit locations. To rally the troops and keep them marching together, the general counsel and other honchos may need to fly frequently and spend time with them. This press-the-flesh technique can also mean visits every now and then by other lawyers to and from distant outposts. While at a site, the senior lawyers should spend some time with the local members.
9. Host retreats and conferences. Nothing beats shaking hands with a colleague and getting to know him or her in person. Periodically, the entire legal team should come together for a global legal conference. When you do, mix people at events and do activities that involve assigned seating or multiple configurations of attendees so that, whether they are in meeting rooms, at meals, participating in activities, or in plenary sessions, members of the department are rotating and getting to know people from different offices. One neat trick is to have name tags that offer a couple of conversation starters.
10. Promote annual objectives for individuals that include efforts to unite the department. Encourage members of the legal team to buy into the idea of collective benefit from a shared sense of purpose and practice and to come up with ideas to help make possible that advantage. Managers need to pay attention to whether those who commit to unification steps actually carry through. One way to do so is to require public commitments and feedback regarding unification efforts.
11. Learn from morale and values surveys. You may be able to spot cross-office differences in values and attitudes from the survey findings and address those differences. You also realize that different parts of the world, and the lawyers who practice in them, operate according to different norms and mores. A one-department department does not mean a homogeneous department, but it should mean consistent professional practices.
12. Share initiatives such as pro bono, knowledge management, and social events. Those who pull together are pulled together. Not that everyone has to be a clone, but nothing beats working side by side on a common, engaging commitment to build a sense of being in it together.
13. Put on project teams a mix of members from different offices. Whatever lets people get to know each other helps to keep the melting pot melting. So if you establish a team to rethink knowledge management efforts, stock it with members from various offices. They will meld.
14. Move meetings of the senior legal team around among the various offices. One general counsel I have worked with takes care to visit different offices for the periodic meetings of his senior leadership group. Part of that circuit riding involves spending time in open sessions at which the local lawyers and staff can ask questions of the senior lawyers.
15. Provide continuing legal or professional training across the department. When people teach others, they get to know them. When people learn from others, they absorb consistent practices; when people attend training sessions together, they get to know each other in addition to the normal context of work. Primary law firms used by the department also play a role in disseminating common practices and ways of thinking throughout the legal department.
16. Break down silos of practice groups. If clusters of lawyers who support a particular business line or function stick only to their own kind, and share and disclose little to other fiefdoms, the department will feel fragmented -- a confederacy at best. Dissolve those barriers. For example, prepare one guideline for outside counsel to cover the entire department; create a shared list of preferred counsel; choose a single relationship partner at each major law firm; do collective requests for proposals. Isolation and "going our own way" separates people; doing things in similar ways brings people together.
17. Establish regional general counsel. Senior lawyers who oversee the legal services in a part of the world, such as Asia/Pacific, encourage a unifying effect. They pull together the lawyers in their part of the world and ferry values and messages to and from the rest of the department.
18. Arrange expat assignments. Send people out of country for a tour of duty, and over the longer term that will help with integration of the department. It is expensive and may be hard on personal lives, but some people like travel and a foreign posting.
19. Rotate lawyers through positions. Not only do some professionals like something new to learn, but shifting people around cross-pollinates views and culture. Boundaries and prejudices break down when people get to know former strangers.
20. Centralize reporting of all practicing lawyers. Having one boss helps gel a legal team. If that is not the structure in your company, however, the fight is uphill and lengthy to change traditional beliefs.
If your legal team has offices strung out from Albania to Zimbabwe, you probably wish there were more cohesion, collegiality, and collective culture. When you are the general counsel, it is easy to feel that the world revolves around you and everyone is on board with what you believe. In the hinterlands, however, out in the archipelago of your department, your lawyers and staff need to nurture a feeling of being part of one legal department. The techniques described above should give you plenty of ideas to put into practice toward that end. These 20 techniques should help you strengthen and unify your department.
Rees W. Morrison has for two decades consulted to general counsel on the management challenges of their law departments. He has also worked with law firms. He blogs at Law Department Management.
