Enhancing Legal Decision-Making in Organizational Crisis Management

Abstract

Dependency diagrams and decision trees represent two measures that enable in-house counsel to better integrate of risk analysis principles into legal decision-making. Dependency diagrams and decision trees, however, are subject to a major limitation: their reliability is contingent on the data, perspectives, assumptions, and assessments on which they are built. The Policy Delphi provides in-house legal departments with a means for reducing or removing this limitation. The Policy Delphi acts as a mechanism to identify every major alternative, bring out points of agreement and disagreement into the open, clarify positions and simplify arguments, assess the strength of evidence connected with each alternative, and assess the suitability of each alternative. The results of the Policy Delphi provide decision-maker(s) with the strongest thinkable opposing views (and supporting evidence) on any solution(s) to the problem. The purpose of this article is to outline how use of Policy Delphi will support the legal department’s development of dependency diagrams and decision trees through promoting deliberative decision-making while minimizing some of the challenges associated with group decision-making.

Keywords: legal strategy