High Performance Legal Organization Consortium

Why do certain Legal Organizations overachieve? In this era that emphasizes the search for cost-effectiveness, we’re surrounded by “best practices,” and checklists to manage the bottom line. But what’s missing is a framework for informed decision-making and exemplary leadership by the chief legal officer. Certainly management techniques have a role, but to achieve and sustain high performance, leaders of legal organizations need a strategic framework for a tactical world.

The High Performance Legal Organization Consortium is a unique effort to bring together leaders in the corporate legal world – including academics and researchers - to explore a challenging set of questions around why some legal organizations attain exceptional performance and others are merely adequate. Participation in the Consortium will provide general counsel and those serving them with a body of knowledge for communicating with the CEO and other C-level peers (particularly the CFO). The results will enable the leaders of legal organizations to identify those actions that would maintain or improve outcomes – and move their own organizations from “acceptable” to “high” performance.

The High Performance Legal Organization Study

In business, management researchers are still searching for the response to the question, “What does it mean to be a high-performance company?” The Harvard Business Review has taken on this challenge in “Toward a Theory of High Performance,” a centerpiece article by Julia Kirby in its July-August 2005 issue. She notes that in the 23 years since the concept was launched in Tom Peters’s In Search of Excellence, numerous credible frameworks have been developed that move us closer to an answer for corporations. And, of course, even more important than the fact-based descriptive work that strives to identify the best companies, the need to discover why remains.