What Makes Legal Departments Go from Good to Great?

Checklists are used from performing surgeries to putting a man on the moon, so why not have a checklist for your attorneys. It is obvious that checklists work well in regular situations, but especially well in highly complex situations. “They catch mental flaws inherent in all of us – flaws of memory and attention and thoroughness,” said Dr. Atul Gawande (surgeon), the author of The Checklist Manifesto. There are “simple problems” like what to do when entering into an independent consulting agreement or baking a cake. There are “complicated problems” like what to do when a specific situation arises, like negotiating an intricate scope of work or an operating agreement. In the world of law, we are besieged by “simple problems” more often than “complicated problems,” like what essential clauses go into an affirmative defense to raise when a particular claim is filed, or complicated ones, like how to navigate Stark and Antikickback Statutes (AKS) or how to negotiate toward a particular outcome in a settlement, while minimizing risk. Our firm uses checklists for precisely these sorts of scenarios.

 

One way to save time and money is to use templates. The rule of thumb is if you have a particular type of contract or pleading that arises more than 3 times in any given year, the legal department should have a template to accommodate that situation. The templates are not the same as a checklist, although many practitioners use them as that. Simply make a list of what business relationships your company strikes regularly and frequently and create a relevant library of templates. Our firm helps clients build a library of templates that are customized to the clients’ needs. We regularly use our internal template library to get our clients what they need faster and at a lower cost.