Thoughts on the use of productive tracking software to track and quantify the work of in house counsel?
There has been a lot of coverage of these lately and they seem somewhat incapable with legal work, just wondering how others feel about the prospect of their employers implementing something like this.

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As an in-house lawyer, the second I am treated like a law firm attorney and asked to quantify and validate my time is the second I quit. No one goes in-house for that nonsense.

likeuplifting

🙌🏽🙌🏽🙌🏽💯💯💯

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I'm salaried and I work the amount of time that is required to get the job done. Sometime I'm working a 60 hour week, and sometime I'm working a 15 hour week. I'd give immediate notice if I was asked to allow them to track my minute by minute work.

likesmart

I think it’s offensive. I’m a professional. Maybe I would feel differently if I thought I/we (my department) had a productivity problem—but that’s not the case for us. So I’d likely leave if my employer did this. Since we don’t have a productivity issue to begin with, it feels like just a corporate money grab to try and suck more work from me even though I’m doing my fair share.

I often print documents and hand write notes. I spend time thinking about emails before I send them. You can’t accurately capture that. Plus, some days I work longer hours but I am definitely less productive than other days when I’m simply on a role and effectively knocking out a bunch of tasks. How would you quantify that? Is it better that I worked twice the hours, or that I knocked out twice as many tasks?

I definitely don’t think surveillance style methods are the way for our industry. *If* you genuinely think there is an issue with your in-house counsel, I would think that managers should try communicating regularly and maintaining relationships with the team instead, or you need to higher better employees.

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If your client’s level of mistrust for legal is that high, they need to work on their management style and practices, not micromanage and spy on their in-house counsel.

I agree it’s not compatible with legal work, and over the long run would probably lead to having a staff of automatons only capable of meeting a lowest common denominator and doing exactly what they’re told without thinking for themselves. Not what you want in your legal department.

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As others have said, any company that thinks this is the way to go has some serious issues, and I wouldn’t be working there longer than it would take for me to find another job.

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Occasionally I’ll see these suggestions made by attorneys with limited/no law firm experience and who ended up straight into an in-house role. It seems like the thought process is that if it’s good enough for law firms to track productivity, then it should be good enough in-house.

Invariably, whether the suggestion is made by an attorney or someone from the business side, the failure is to recognize that tracking time in a law firm isn’t about tracking productivity, it’s about tracking revenue. The infrastructure in place at a law firm to track time is designed to increase revenue capture and make that essential function more efficient. In-house departments are cost centers - the goal is to decrease necessary outside legal expenditures while not unnecessarily adding to the costs of the department.

No sane corporation would want to sink money in the 100% wasteful manner of either building infrastructure to track time or losing productivity associated with inputting time. Also, I 100% agree with other commenters that not tracking time is a significant part of the value proposition of going in house.

likesmart

Well said and I agree. For the record I agree with everyone who has commented. I was mostly curious how other attorneys would react to news that their employer was implementing a universal productivity tracking tool, like logging keystrokes, not necessarily something focused just on the legal department. I’ve just seen a number of reports lately about how this tracking is the trade off for remote work, and if companies are implementing it universally then it will inevitably affect lawyers, too.

But I agree with many others. If I’m going to be tracked in what is basically six minutes increments, I’m going back to being able to charge for each of those (and therefore being paid much more).

No to keyboard monitoring or billing.

But if you have a portal for business partners to submit legal tasks, and that portal happens to track metrics of how many items get completed monthly, or average time to complete, then something like that is fair game.

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Buh-bye.

likehelpful

I think your work getting done is sufficient indicator of effectiveness. Doesn’t matter when you do it as long as you’re responding to your company colleagues/ clients. What in the world is this nonsense?! Just crazy.

What in-house department is implementing productivity trackers just for the sake of being sadists? I’m willing to bet it’s a mandate from the business to justify current headcount and for future arguments that additional headcount is needed. Unlike in law firms, the in-house legal department is viewed as a cost center…

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