Ingram Micro GC: It’s My Job to Explain Business to Outside Lawyers

In various interviews with Big Law Business over the last couple of months, a common complaint among Fortune 500 general counsel has been that firm lawyers don’t know enough about their clients’ businesses.

Take UPS GC Teri Plummer McClure, for example, who has gotten so tired of outside lawyers who don’t understand UPS she’s stopped sitting through some law firm pitches ; or Ricardo Anzaldua at MetLife, who argued that firms are atomized collections of experts who are actually incentivized to guard information about their clients from other partners.

The latest GC to weigh in, Ingram Micro’s Larry Boyd , offered a slightly different perspective. “If the partner doesn’t understand the issue they’re working on in the broader context of the company’s challenges, then I haven’t done my job,” Boyd said. “My job is to make sure an outside expert fully understands that context.”

Ingram Micro is an information technology distributor based in Santa Ana, California. In addition to discussing a GC’s responsibility to coach up lawyers, Boyd recently spoke with Big Law Business about law firm marketing, recounted a brief history of the changing relationship between inside and outside counsel, and sounded off on his favorite books. Read Part I of the interview here .

Part II Excerpts:

That’s one way that we’ve gotten to where we are today, where you’ve got a lot of really good firms charging a heck of a lot of money in terms of an hourly rate, but they have all these cores of lawyers working for them that don’t know a thing about the account that they’re working on.

[Alan Denenberg is] one of those perfect partners in the non-legal sense of the word. He takes time to try and understand our company. He and I talk about the company, and I try and keep him up-to-date on things that are happening. I don’t get charged for that time.

I think that sort of marketing — firms freely putting the legal knowledge and the research that they’ve done in this recent development out there on the Internet — I think that’s helpful.

Below is an edited transcript of the final installment of our two-part series with Boyd.

[caption id="" align="alignleft” width="300"][Image “Larry C. Boyd” (src=http://corp.ingrammicro.com/CorporateSite/media/Corporate-Website/Bio%20Photos/exec_larry_boyd_1.jpg?width=300&height=450&ext=.jpg)]Courtesy of Ingram Micro[/caption]

Big Law Business: Another complaint we hear a lot is that lawyers don’t often understand the broader business context in which they’re giving legal advice. Do you agree? What are some practical solutions?

Boyd: That’s not usually a problem of mine. If the partner doesn’t understand the issue they’re working on in the broader context of the company’s challenges, then I haven’t done my job. My job is to make sure an outside expert fully understands that context. If they don’t know all of the pressure points on the company, then they’re not in the position where they can give their best advice.

What can firms do to better understand the business context of clients? It’s ironic, because when I started with Gibson Dunn back in the mid-70s, it was sort of the high point of the era of large corporate clients being with law firms from long periods of time.

I was seeing a generational change in Gibson Dunn. I was seeing a hand-off. We joked about it at the time — we said it was the Harvard class of ‘48. It was all the guys that had gone off to war and then came back in ‘44 and ‘45 and used the G.I. Bill to go to law school.

Unfortunately, with the exception of people like Sandra Day O’Connor, those classes were pretty much all male. At the time, they were the senior management partners of the big firms on Wall Street — out here it was Gibson, O’Melveny, and Latham; up north, it was Brobeck, Pillsbury, and the old line firms in San Francisco.

That class was in the process of handing off clients like Chevron Oil, Bank of America, Security Pacific Bank, and Edison Energy to junior partners, people who were in their early 40s at that point. But the partners that were getting the hand-off had been junior associates that had been working on that client’s matters for 15, 20 years. The knowledge was built into the whole relationship.

When you hit the mid-80s, with Skaddenomics, with the huge increases in the first year salaries — I think ‘84 was the year that sort of broke the bank with Cravath’s big move — those relationships started changing. The companies themselves started jettisoning their long-term relationships with law firms to go with the new up-and-coming firms, or the rainmaker who could promise them the world, et cetera.

So you didn’t have those long-term relationships to train your young lawyers and tell them what that business world was all about. That’s one way that we’ve gotten to where we are today, where you’ve got a lot of really good firms charging a heck of a lot of money in terms of an hourly rate, but they have all these cores of lawyers working for them that don’t know a thing about the account that they’re working on.

Big Law Business: Are secondments an answer to this problem? Is that something you do at all?

Boyd: It’s something that we’ve done only as a stop gap where we’ve got a growing business that can’t quite justify a full-time in-house lawyer, but that business has a legal need — particularly with a global company, they may have some near time zone needs. Servicing Brazil, for example, from Santa Ana may not work all that well.

In a situation like that we’ll work a secondment with a local firm and probably live with that for a year or two, and then may bring that person in-house or just go out into the legal community and hire somebody full-time.

It may have been in one of your earlier interviews that I read, but I’ve seen some ideas of something like an exchange program, where our people go to the big firm, or the big firm sends somebody over here for a while. I’m not sure sending some of our people over there make all that much economic sense, at least for us. But it’s not a bad idea.

Big Law Business: What are the three to five firms you do the most work with or have longest standing relationships with?

Boyd: In our corporate securities work, our disclosure work, we’ve been with Davis Polk ever since they took us public back 1996. I’ve gone through two relationship partners. I’m with Alan Denenberg out of their Menlo Park office right now, and Alan does a great job for us.

He’s one of those perfect partners in the non-legal sense of the word. He takes time to try and understand our company. He and I talk about the company, and I try and keep him up-to-date on things that are happening. I don’t get charged for that time.

When I’ve got a problem, and it’s something that he can handle on his own, I get 30 minutes of his time or 15 minutes of his time, and that’s what I get billed for. So he might be well over $1,000 an hour, but I see him as being very efficient and value add.

In Europe and in parts of Asia, in parts of Latin America, we use Baker & McKenzie a fair amount. We’ve got a very good relationship with them in Europe. By the nature of the beast, it’s good to have a relationship with someone that can give a service in a number of jurisdictions.

Beyond that, here in North America, we use who was originally with a smallish San Francisco old-line partnership and jumped around from company to company or firm to firm over a number of years, and now he’s gone out and started his own firm. We use him for a lot of litigation. The firm’s name is Slater Hersey .

Big Law Business: Comment briefly on law firm marketing. How could a firm strike up a relationship with you?

Boyd: I really value the topical email blasts. There will be a new significant decision or an action out of one of the regulatory agencies. There’ll be a significant Supreme Court decision, Congress will do something that’s actually been signed and passed into law. Within the next week, I’ll have any number of notices from various good firms that want to talk about that particular development.

So I’ll give them a quick scan. I’ll decide which look meaty, and look like something I’m going to use, and I’ll sit down and read through them. It goes into the memory bank. I have, on occasion, based upon something that I just read in the general email, put a call into somebody and retained them.

I think that sort of marketing — firms freely putting the legal knowledge and the research that they’ve done out there on the Internet — I think that’s helpful. I think it’s effective.

There are certain firms in certain areas that you start recognizing. You start realizing they’ve got an expertise, because every time something happens, I look at their stuff and it makes sense and it’s helpful.

Of course I distinguish this sort of advertising from the pieces that essentially try to scare us into thinking the sky is falling on each development, so we better get the money, guns, and lawyers.

Big Law Business: You also mentioned diversity briefly. Is that something you prioritize at Ingram Micro? Is that a condition you put on your relationships with firms? In what ways do you put pressure?

Boyd: I’m afraid to say we really haven’t done that much with our outside firms. We don’t use that many different outside firms. But I’m very happy when we’ve got new associates working that are not young, white males.

As far as Ingram itself is concerned, we’re a global company. We haven’t done a lot of hiring in North America in our legal department in the last 10 years, believe it or not. Most of the people up and down the hall and in other parts of the country have been with us anywhere from 10 to 20 years.

But out in the regions, we are primarily female and from just about every ethnic background you can possibly think of in our various offices in Asia, in Latin America, in the Middle East, and in Europe.

So the legal department reflects the makeup, the composition of the company itself. I have to say, when I’m looking for law firms, I’m looking for legal expertise.

Big Law Business: You said you haven’t hired many new lawyers, which is sort of against the overall trend.

Boyd: Some of it’s been M&A. I have acquired some young lawyers in acquiring some companies.

Big Law Business: But would you say you’ve beefed up, in terms of manpower, in terms of what you can do at Ingram Micro without relying on firms?

Boyd: When I joined the company in January 2000, I think we had maybe somewhere between 15 and 20 lawyers worldwide. Now we’ve got about 65.

But all of that growth with the exception of one recent hire in Canada and an acquisition here in North America, all of that growth has been outside of the United States or outside of North America.

Big Law Business: How about technology? E-billing, for instance, is nothing fancy or new, but can you point to anything in, say, the last five years that you’ve done to harness technology in the legal department?

Boyd: Oh absolutely. We had a homegrown matter management system that was pretty kludgy, but within the last 3 years, we took on a full suite from CSC . We use their entity management, we use their matter management file system, and we use their e-billing.

It has definitely increased efficiency. I’ve got a lot more visibility into the things that people are doing now. It kind of spoils you. I’d like more data if I could get it and get it more easily. We might need a different tool for that.

It’s funny. I still sort of pine for the day when we have, not just what I’ve mentioned, but a document creation system that controls content, and that makes content available for different applications, different templates, and things of that nature. I know those tools are out there. I just simply haven’t had the capital expenditure okays to go out and get them.

Big Law Business: What do you do for fun when you’re not working? What’s the best book you’ve read or movie you’ve seen recently?

Boyd: I like to play golf, but I don’t get to play very much. That’s one of the reasons that people retire, I think. But best book? I recently finished a great, great biography of George Washington by Ron Chernow . I had also started The Looming Tower about the birth and the evolution of Al Qaeda. I’ve set it aside for now because I’m also reading Charles Murray’s new book , talking about the idea of civil disobedience against the regulatory state.

Big Law Business: You sound like a bona fide reader. That’s good.

Boyd: Murray wrote the book Coming Apart about three years ago about the working class in America. He’s a very, very good sociologist.

Big Law Business: You’d be surprised, or maybe you wouldn’t, how often we ask people about books, and they can’t think of any.

Boyd: Well, I guess if I played more golf I wouldn’t have time to read.