Building blocks of institutional memory in the legal department

Bernadette Bulacan, Thomson Reuters

It’s a familiar story line about the changing face of the workforce: Boomers are “out” (or at least starting to retire in droves) and taking with them the war stories and best practices carved out of robust work experiences. And Millenials are “in,” along with the perception that this younger generation of workers has a greater tendency to “job-hop” and avoid planting roots with a single company for any extended period of time.

For any organization, institutional memory is a collective set of facts, concepts, experiences, and know-how held by a particular group of people; for the legal department, the keepers have been these seasoned, trusted corporate counsel. For corporate legal departments, this generational difference poses numerous challenges, including: How do you capture the institutional memory of those retiring, both explicit and implicit knowledge, so that the department can access such knowledge on an ongoing basis? And, if the stereotype is true and Millenials are transient employees, how best to share retained institutional knowledge with these transitory attorneys, to make them as efficient as possible as quickly as possible, regardless of their tenure? The recent Thomson Reuters Legal Department In-Sourcing and Efficiency Report (Efficiency Report) addressed this trend of staffing changes within a legal department and offers some guidance on the best ways to capture and share a department’s institutional memory.

According to the Efficiency Report, nearly one-third (30%) of the departments responded that they anticipate hiring in the coming year in order to grow their internal headcounts. This increase is in addition to the sixty percent of departments that claimed to have hired and grown in 2014. Some of this growth can be attributed to the mounting volume of work facing lean departments as well as an overall healthier economy. The growth also reflects a strategy by many departments to better manage overall legal spend by retaining work in-house rather than sending it to a more expensive, by-the-hour law firm.

Regardless of the reason driving the growth in legal departments, the same challenge remains: how best to capture best practices and share them with a dynamic and changing department and staff. The Efficiency Report described a few techniques employed by legal departments.

• Digital and technology platforms – Several departments are deploying various systems to capture and share best practices and templates, including document management technologies (49%), matter management systems (33%), collaboration (19%), and knowledge management platforms (14%). According to one respondent in the Efficiency Report, utilization of knowledge management technology “reduces time spent searching for buried organization knowledge, forms and templates.” These technologies provide an archive of the company’s legal work and templates for the generation of employees to come.
• Playbook and checklists – In addition to the use of these technology platforms, numerous departments use checklists (29%), annotated agreements (12%), and playbooks (8%) to more effectively onboard new employees and share collective knowledge and know-how. As shared in the Efficiency Report, one assistant general counsel from a healthcare company stated that his goal was to “develop a more robust internal playbook and clause bank” that reflected industry standards and specifically his company’s risk tolerances.
• Dedicated outside counsel team – Data in the Efficiency Report demonstrated that departments are decreasing the amount of work sent to outside counsel, and more than three-quarters (79%) of the departments surveyed said that they reduced their reliance and use of outside counsel because more work was coming in-house. Consequently, this has resulted in greater competition among law firms for limited work from corporate clients. Departments are using this dynamic to their advantage. For example, in retention agreements or set forth in request for proposals (RFPs) for new work, legal departments are requiring dedicated law firm teams who will commit to and develop a deep knowledge of the company, its product/business lines, and the industry. While individual corporate counsel may come and go within the department, these dedicated law firm teams become another channel and source of institutional memory for the department.

Regardless of whether your department is shrinking (because of retiring Boomers) or growing (because of newly-hired Millenials), the department can retain institutional knowledge through templates, playbooks, and other best practices discussed here. To learn about more efficiency techniques deployed at innovative legal departments, read the full TR Efficiency Report here.

About the author

Drawing from her experiences as a former assistant general counsel and law firm partner, Bernadette M. Bulacan, Esq. is a frequent speaker and author regarding the use of technology in corporate legal departments, collaboration between in-house and outside counsel, and best practices related to legal project management. Bernadette currently leads Thomson Reuters Market Development Group, which is charged with identifying trends and innovations affecting corporate legal departments. Bernadette was a founding employee and Assistant General Counsel of Serengeti. Prior to joining Serengeti/Thomson Reuters, Bernadette was a partner at Graham & Dunn, a Seattle law firm, where she led the firm's Entrepreneur and Emerging Companies practice group. She started her legal career advising start-up technology companies with Venture Law Group, a Silicon Valley law firm. Bernadette received her undergraduate degree from Yale University and her law degree and LL.M (Taxation) from the University of Washington.

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