Six Sigma as a Legal Project Management Tool, Part 3

This is the third and final post in a three-part series looking at ABA materials discussing Six Sigma. Hat tip to Rees Morrison and his excellent Law Department Management blog for bringing these articles to my attention. In Parts One and Two, I discussed two papers on Six Sigma and electronic discovery presented at the 2009 ABA Litigation Section Annual Conference (Atlanta, GA). Here I'll discuss additional material discussing Six Sigma available on the ABA Web site. 

A search of "six sigma" on the domain ABANET.COM ("six sigma" site:abanet.org) returned 30 hits. A search for "six sigma" in the ABA Web site's search field, while logged in, returns about 100 (mostly duplicative) items. Of these, I found five items of interest. 

From the September 2008 issue of Law Practice Magazine:
 

Novus Law, a global legal services firm, was -selected [by The College of Law Practice Management for an InnovAction Award for its Lean Six Sigma analysis of the litigation discovery process as a means to capture, measure and improve quality, as well as reduce costs.

Spotlighting Innovative Firms, Law Practice Magazine, Sept. 2008, at 39, available at URL. 

See Novus Law's Web site for more information on "Novus Q," Novus Law's Six Sigma-based quality program.

Dennis Kennedy predicted in the April 2007 issue of Law Technology Today that firms and legal departments would start to look to Six Sigma to help make sound business decisions about technology. Dennis Kennedy, Seven Legal Technology Trends for 2007: Widening the Digital Divide in Law Practice, Law Technology Today, Apr. 2007, available at URL.

"What Is the Most Important Task of In-House Counsel?" by Steven A. Lauer. This paper is posted the the Spring 2006 calendar of the ABA Section of International Law. Mr. Lauer's answer to the paper's title is "select potential outside counsel."  In his discussion of how in-house counsel can go about conducting this most important task, Lauer describes how:

In early 2001, NCR Corporation's law department developed and implemented a pilot process to measure the performance, and guide the selection, of outside litigation counsel using Six Sigma tools. At the conclusion of that pilot project in June 2002, NCR determined that, by instilling more rigor into the process by which NCR's in house attorneys measure and select outside counsel, the company had lowered its outside legal fees for litigation by approximately 60 percent for all cases and 28 percent for routine cases (all but major intellectual property litigation), and reduced the number of open cases on its docket by about 3 percent. The NCR law department accomplished this while increasing its Six Sigma rating for the process from 1.8 in the baseline measure to 3.2, reflecting a marked reduction in the number of "defects" that NCR clients experienced in connection with litigation. NCR's Six Sigma project demonstrates that effective measurement and selection of outside counsel is critical to achieving the cost saving and case management goals of a corporate law department.

Id. at 6. Citing a paper by Susan Chema, Senior Attorney, Corporate Litigation and Employment Law, NCR Corporation: "Applying Six Sigma to Outside Counsel Management: In-stilling Rigor into Outside Counsel Selection," presented to Six Sigma Cohort Meeting, Malvern, PA (May 7, 2002).