Legal Commentary

Adding value by deconstructing

By Patrick J. Lamb

I was talking about how Valorem works, saying that we do things where we add value and try to avoid things where we don't.  I was pressed for an example, and here is one that jumped to mind.  We needed to analyze a mitigation issue under California law.  The normal practice is to have your associate jump in, find the leading cases, analyze them, write a memo, have the partner read the memo and then look at some or all of the cases to see if the associate got it right. 

Do we add value by finding the lead cases?  Not really. We're good researchers, but so are others who are much cheaper.  We had them find the cases?  Do we need a memo? No, we need an answer.  Get the cases, analyze the cases in the context of the facts of the case.  Done.

When people talk about process management, they are talking about something different than project management.  Process management is deconstructing a case, a task, a problem into its constituent elements.  Critical.  Equally important is asking whether you or your firm add value to a given task. If not, find someone who can do it more cheaply.

Full post as published by In Search of Perfect Client Service on June 10, 2010 (boomark / email).