Law Department Management: In-House Counsel

Home -> Law Blog Directory -> In-House Counsel Blogs

OR PHONE (866) 635-1838 for Bankruptcy Help, (866) 635-6190 for Divorce,
(866) 635-2689 for Personal Injury or (866) 635-9402 for Criminal Defense

Find a Local Lawyer

Bankruptcy (866) 635-1838
Divorce (866) 635-6190
Personal Injury (866) 635-2689
Criminal Defense (866) 635-9402

In-House Counsel

Law Department Management

Comments on every aspect of how best to manage a law department, including how to manage outside counsel. Topics of interest to general counsel and other in-house lawyers who manage legal functions.
By Rees Morrison

Post Frequency: 39.5/day

Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 11:12:47

Two technologies for nabbing IP bandits

Posted on December 08, 2009
A global mapping system for trademarks, available to clients of Reed Smith, appears to be an innovative way to assist decision analysis. The software uses global mapping to portray the international complexities of an IT strategy. As reported in Corp...

Workarounds on knowledge management for law departments ? pull it don?t push it

Posted on December 08, 2009
By now, with all the frustrated initiatives and years of lassitude, let?s just accept that in-house counsel couldn?t care less about contributing to departmental knowledge bases (See my post of March 5, 2005: no altruistic information sharing.). Not if they...

The rising tide of billing rate rollbacks demanded by legal departments

Posted on December 08, 2009
Last month, Susan Blount, the general counsel of Prudential Financial, wrote to the 60 law firms the insurance giant uses regularly. She informed them that in 2010 the company expects to pay for legal services at 2008 hourly rates. It...

Rising expectations of law departments regarding speed of response by themselves and law firms

Posted on December 08, 2009
"At one time, three days was a reasonable response time. With the advent of e-mail, it was shortened to something more on the order of three hours and now with wireless connectivity it may be 30 minutes." I ran across...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

Encourage good conflicts at staff meetings, and an insightful method to improve

Posted on December 08, 2009
An interesting article in the Harvard Bus. Rev., Vol. 87, Dec. 2009 at 48, 55 extols the virtues of moderate conflicts among senior managers. A general counsel would do well to consider how to spark healthy disagreements among the lawyers...

Putative metrics on cost control efforts, but numerous questions about their usefulness

Posted on December 07, 2009
Hildebrandt, a business within Thomson Reuters, shared some data on cost control strategies from its 2009 Law Department Survey. It laid out a slew of metrics, but it is hard to know how real they are or what a general...

Fingerprint identification to log on to a laptop!

Posted on December 07, 2009
For a long-term client of mine, I have been issued a laptop because of the company?s stringent security efforts. To log onto the laptop I must not only enter my username and password but also pass a fingerprint test. It...

Fixed fee arrangements insisted on by Telstra?s legal team

Posted on December 07, 2009
Will Irving, general counsel at Telstra, says Telstra has put the Australian law firm Gilbert + Tobin on a fixed fee retainer arrangement after telling panel firms he wanted then to come up with something innovative. Gilbert+Tobin shares a "volume"...

A sizeable internship program for diversity candidates at Bristol-Myers Squibb

Posted on December 07, 2009
Bristol-Myers Squibb, winner of a 2009 Employers of Choice commendation from Diversity & the Bar, Vol. 11, Nov./Dec. 2009 at 16, operates a ten-week summer internship program for minority law students. This past summer the program allowed eight of them...

Ten best posts of October 2009 on LawDepartmentManagmentBlog

Posted on December 06, 2009
Ten thoughtful posts, with the underlined portion what you should click to read the entire post. I welcome thoughts on these posts. Online dispute resolution (the double-blind method) and benefits for legal departments (Oct. 20, 2009) A method not only...

If procurement (sourcing) wants to make inroads on legal spend, it has to team with the legal group

Posted on December 06, 2009
Procurement professionals may chafe at legal budgets: huge, scattered and opaque, wide variability, ad hoc decisions on retentions of firms, abysmal metrics, and generally a deplorable lack of discipline. Other than that, what legal spends conforms perfectly to model sourcing...

The end of hefty annual increases in total cash compensation for in-house attorneys

Posted on December 03, 2009
Hildebrandt, a unit of Thomson Reuters, shared some data on cost control strategies from its 2009 Law Department Survey. "Over the past several years, in-house attorneys have been receiving an annual 6-8% median increase in total cash compensation.? The recession...

?R&D intensity? ? a benchmark, but does it include the legal costs of IP development and protection?

Posted on December 03, 2009
An article in strategy + business, Winter 2009 at 42, states the ?R&D intensity? for 1,000 global companies. In 2008, the R&D intensity, which is the percentage of sales devoted to R&D, was 3.6 percent, the same as in 2007....

Do in-house counsels really spend more than 20 percent of their time looking for things?

Posted on December 03, 2009
Raymond Bayley, CEO of Novus Law, writes in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, Nov. 2009 at 47,that ?several studies show that lawyers spend more than 20 percent of their time looking for things. If you can bill 400 or more...

Do you want to see a marketing person at the pitch by a law firm? No

Posted on December 03, 2009
When it comes to pitches, the in-house lawyers at a recent panel said they're open to the business development team's involvement in the pitch process and cross selling. Sheri Qualters, writing for the National Law Journal, on Nov. 24, 2009,...

Implications if there is a clustering of settlement amounts in litigation

Posted on December 03, 2009
?It?s a range [of damages] of about 5 percent, one standard deviation from the mean.? That statement comes from Jeff Carr, FMC?s general counsel, whose database of litigation outcomes shows how consistently outcomes converge around a similar amount. The quote...

Law departments free-ride on law firms? huge associate recruiting and training costs

Posted on December 03, 2009
An economic model developed by NERA for the ACC and adjusted by Balanomics for research described in the ACC Docket, Nov. 2009 at 102-3, uses an estimate of what law firms spend to find and attract new associates. That estimate...

A deep thanks to all of you who helped this blog be chosen as an ABA Journal Blawg 100

Posted on December 01, 2009
Every time I hear from one of you, every comment left here, every cite to a post on another blog, every new thing tried on this blog enthuses me and keeps me going. It?s been brewing almost five years and...

A view opposed to my own about getting bills in draft from law firms

Posted on December 01, 2009
A month ago I criticized the practice of reviewing draft invoices from law firms (See my post of Oct. 25, 2009: don?t waste time on draft bills.). Sure enough, I then ran across an in-house counsel who favors the practice....

Growth over four years in the number of offshore legal service companies in India

Posted on December 01, 2009
In 2005 there were approximately twenty offshore legal-service providers, according to David Galbenski, Unbound: How Entrepreneurship is Dramatically Transforming Legal Services Today (2009) at 138. ?Two years later, in the spring of 2007, there were sixty legal-service companies ready to...

More than $60 billion spent in the US to prepare documents for discovery?

Posted on December 01, 2009
?America's 1,000 largest corporations spend more than $60 billion, or 50 percent of their total legal operating budgets on average, to prepare documents for litigation, which is the single largest legal operating expense for most corporations. The growth of electronically...

Benchmark data and the pernicious ?Law of Small Numbers?

Posted on September 30, 2009
According to the Law of Large Numbers, ?you can have a high degree of confidence in the average value of a sample if the sample includes a very large number of observations.? As explained in the NY Rev. of Books,...

Likelihood that general counsel push significant changes in their early years

Posted on September 30, 2009
?Longer tenure provides a better understanding of organizational policies and procedures and a reluctance to change past manners of operating.? (emphasis added). This quote from the Admin. Sciences Quarterly, June 1997 at 219, led me to wonder whether management initiatives...

More objections to notion of best practices: assumptions of givens, boundaries, and common measures

Posted on September 30, 2009
Another thought or three on why I mistrust palaver about ?best practices? (See my post of March 20, 2009: seven objections.). Best practices give short shrift to context of the legal department that is held out as fostering a best...

What?s in the castle? What?s inside in-house lawyer?s individual offices?

Posted on September 30, 2009
A lawyer?s office is her castle, her sanctuary, her expression of self, not to mention her frequent lunchroom. Having just issued my metapost on physical configurations beyond the office door, here let me zero in on the individual offices of...

Physical components of legal departments other than individual offices

Posted on September 30, 2009
This blog has passed on thoughts from time to time about the architecture of law departments (See my post of Sept. 16, 2008: physical layout of offices with 10 references.). It is a rare general counsel who has any significant...

Thoughts on why in-house counsel may be risk averse

Posted on September 30, 2009
For many fundamental reasons, the practice of law within corporations breeds caution and circumspection. Setting aside whether those who choose to attend law school start off more risk averse, or whether those three years foster it, other forces strengthen the...

Invoice lasagna ? tasty narrative stuff on top, scrumptious recaps at the bottom, noodles in between

Posted on September 29, 2009
In my ideal matter the law firm works on it under a fixed fee, so invoices are simple. Real life, however, mostly serves up hourly bills. Each monthly bill is like a layer in lasagna (See my post of Feb....

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #121 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes

Posted on September 29, 2009
Analysis of writing style on this blog. The most recent 17 pages of posts on this blog amounted to 7,686 words in 332 sentences. Passives were used ? sorry, I wrote passive constructions in five percent of the sentences. The...

Needed: independent audits of benchmark methodology, data, and basis for conclusions

Posted on September 29, 2009
Disappointed recently with sloppy benchmark efforts by several purveyors, I realized that the law department world lacks third-party assessments of benchmarking efforts. Journalists from time to time go a round or two with data from benchmark surveys, mostly compensation, but...

Previous | Next

Related Law Bulletins

Insurance Department Issues Second Annual Ohio Medical Liability Closed Claim Report
COLUMBUS — The Ohio Department of Insurance has issued its secon...

Injury Verdict Upheld in Chicago Police Department Auto Accident
A verdict awarded from a personal injury case in Chicago against t...

Department Of State Update on Implementation of E3 Visas for Australians
Our office receives many questions about when the new E-3 visa cat...