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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

Commercial definitions of industries may obscure more fundamental legal differences between groups of companies

Posted on February 16, 2011
Everyone is comfortable with the trade?s definitions of broad industries: manufacturing, insurance, aerospace and the like. All well and good for many purposes, not so good for legal department comprehension. We may need a breakdown of companies that reflects more...

Small vendors (90%) dominate in the legal cottage industry, so rewards and risks increase

Posted on February 15, 2011
Charles Christian?s American Legal Technology Insider, Feb. 2011 at 3, describes the newly formed Legal Service Providers Association (LSPA). The LSPA aims to provide legal product and service vendors with access to training, educational programs, supplier discounts, and other resources...

The structure of a law department and its operations reflects a design evolved over time, based loosely on fundamental ideologies

Posted on February 15, 2011
?All design can be understood as ideology embodied.? This aphoristic quote, from Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Knopf 2010) at 201, refers to the architecture ? the design ? of the Internet. Decentralized,...

?Innovation platforms? and matter management systems

Posted on February 15, 2011
Tim Wu, in his stimulating but scary book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Knopf 2010) at 112, makes much of the term ?innovation platforms.? The Internet is certainly one of the latest and greatest in...

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Market capitalization per lawyer: its association with total legal spending per unit of revenue and numbers of lawyers

Posted on February 15, 2011
Starting with data from 39 large US and Canadian manufacturing companies that participated in the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey in 2010, I took their market capitalization and divided it by their number of in-house lawyers. At the median, those...

Comparison of 2010 benchmark survey respondents and US Fortune 200 industry distribution

Posted on February 15, 2011
A recent study presents data on the distribution of companies by industry in the Fortune 200. It is the Litigation Cost Survey of Major Companies, presented at the Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth, (Northwestern School of Law,...

From US manufacturers, about one lawyer per 10,000 employees but barely any association with total legal spending

Posted on February 14, 2011
To find out whether lawyers per thousand employees makes any difference in total legal spending. I took data from 39 US and Canadian manufacturing companies that participated in the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey last year. For each I calculated...

Law departments of common carriers likely have different legal footprints

Posted on February 14, 2011
According to author Tim Wu, four industries have been identified as ?public callings?: telecommunications, banking, energy, and transportation. Utilities such as water and sewage companies could be added to the list. ?Each plays an essential role in the workings of...

The Kronos effect and some applications regarding law departments: eat what you kill with a different spin!

Posted on February 14, 2011
Kronos, the second ruler of the universe according to Greek mythology, learned from the Delphic oracle that one of his children would dethrone him. Prudently, Kronos proceeded to eat his children. That vivid image of incestuous cannibalism, the opposite of...

Hats off and welcome to Tim Bratton, a GC voice new to the legal blogosphere

Posted on February 14, 2011
When Tim Bratton, the general counsel of the prestigious Financial Times, casts his pen into the ring of blogging, it is good to take note and doff the hat. Even if Bratton disagrees with my earlier ?tossed off? post about...

It?s a skewed sample of management practices we draw on -- survival bias warps our understanding

Posted on February 14, 2011
Scott Berkun, The Myths of Innovation (O?Reilly 2007) at 7, attacks the myth that innovation has a methodology. One reason we can?t follow a recipe to be creative is that we can?t take an objective view. ?The problem is that...

Four notes on good methodology for a survey of law departments

Posted on February 10, 2011
The Litigation Cost Survey of Major Companies, presented at the Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth, (Northwestern Univ. School of Law, May 10-11, 2010), can tutor all of us who do surveys of law departments. Several of the...

Bizarre, but the largest law firms bring in more revenue than many (most?) of their corporate clients

Posted on February 10, 2011
As I contemplated the enormity of DLAPiper, soon to top the law firm league tables of size, and other legal leviathans whose annual fees exceed $1 billion dollars, it struck me that many corporate clients can only aspire to such...

For law departments, first-adopter advantages and disadvantages and the follower?s dilemma

Posted on February 10, 2011
New management practices can boost the pioneering law department or can hobble it. We tend to think that the first-mover gains a competitive advantage: if you are the first to pay firms by credit card or the first to beta...

World?s largest law firm institutes minimum fee requirements for new clients

Posted on February 09, 2011
My friend, Pete Benedetti of doeLegal passed on to me an interesting item. It will rankle general counsel. Legal Week reported that DLA Piper, soon to be the largest law firm in the world, has distributed to partners a 2011-2014...

Various methods of ?voting,? such as for which law firms will be invited onto a panel

Posted on February 09, 2011
Kenneth Arrow?s impossibility theorem, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1972, proved that no voting system can satisfy a limited set of rational and reasonable conditions. That?s sad, but, still, several methods to vote exist, flawed...

Fifteen significant management developments over 150 years relating to law departments and their use of outside counsel

Posted on February 09, 2011
A fascinating categorization by Steven Johnson puts 200 of the most important innovations and scientific breakthroughs from the past 600 years into four categories. In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From ? The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead 2010)...

Welcome to LeadingInHouse.com, another blog on law departments and specifically about coaching and leadership

Posted on February 08, 2011
Perry Cone, the former general counsel of Citizen?s Insurance and now with GrayRobinson, has inaugurated his blog on leadership and coaching for in-house lawyers. He draws on his experience managing in-house teams as well as his wide-ranging reading. The blog...

Digraphs to help understand and quantify a process

Posted on February 08, 2011
James Stein describes ?digraphs? in his book How Math Explains the World: A Guide to the Power of Numbers, from Car Repair to Modern Physics (HarperCollins 2008) at 3. According to Prof. Stein, ?A digraph is a diagram with squares...

Skewed and leptokurtic distributions of law department size

Posted on February 08, 2011
Normal bell-curve distributions of data produce a skewness statistic ? the left or right spread of the data ? of about zero. The more skewness is positive the more the data bunches toward the low end of the range, the...

SuperConnect blog book review

Posted on February 08, 2011
The book by Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood, Superconnect: Harnessing the power of networks and the strength of weak links (Norton 2010) triggered enough posts on this blog to warrant a blook review (a blog book review). I did not...

Five techniques to help you solve problems that could use some creativity

Posted on February 08, 2011
Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From ? The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead 2010) at 110 to 123, discusses five ways to make more fertile your intuitive, serendipitous inventiveness. Go for a walk, he suggests, or more generally relax...

Information spillover as an advantage that grows with increasing size of law departments

Posted on February 08, 2011
To use a term often employed by Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From ? The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead 2010), his book was germinative. Many ideas for this blog came to me from his discussion of the lessons...

Eight suggestions for your department to learn more about your client?s business

Posted on February 08, 2011
Information spillover as an advantage that grows with increasing size of law departments From my various consulting projects, here are some practices of legal departments, listed in no particular order, that help them keep in touch with their clients? business...

Evaluate law firms and the grade them on their defensiveness!

Posted on February 07, 2011
?Twice a year, Pfizer gives each firm a report card ? and then grades them on how well they take the feedback.? In roughly those words the general counsel of Pfizer, Amy Schulman, described the feedback her department?s 19 alliance...

Management ideas for general counsel can be expressed in terms of set theory notation

Posted on February 07, 2011
In mathematics and logic, a set is a collection of items. RFPs [r], for example, are a member of the set of outside counsel management methods [M], so we could write in set notation r ? M. Dotted line reporting...

Average in-house costs of a group of very large US companies stayed level for nine years?

Posted on February 07, 2011
A report entitled the Litigation Cost Survey of Major Companies, presented at the Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth, (Northwestern Univ. School of Law, May 10-11, 2010) at 7, gives data on expenses of about 48 major law...

Equations on this blog help us understand: Eq. = insight

Posted on February 07, 2011
Mathematics does so much, yet on this blog the total number of actual equations cited has so far only reached eight. Since we all count on equations for insights with metrics, I have collected them. Here is the list of...

Fortune?s 100 best companies to work for, but the top ones have law departments with low management profiles

Posted on February 07, 2011
Do companies that lead in employee-friendliness, such as those honored by Fortune, have law departments that get mentioned for management prowess? No. Does that silence imply anything derogatory about their law departments? No. I searched among my 6,153 posts for...

Indices of all kinds of aspects of law department operations

Posted on February 04, 2011
I have been thinking about indices, by which term I mean collections of metrics that combine to form a single measure. Everyone knows the Consumer Price Index: the aggregated and weighted prices of a basket of common goods and services...

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