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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

Asymmetric commitments in ACC?s Value Challenge?s Covenant with Counsel

Posted on April 25, 2009
Among the 16 commitments by clients and 17 by law firms in the Covenant with Counsel, part of the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) Value Challenge, are eight paired commitments, both sides agreeing to related undertakings (See my post of...

Reciprocal commitments in the ACC Value Challenge?s Covenant with Counsel

Posted on April 25, 2009
The Covenant with Counsel, issued as part of the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) Value Challenge, sets forth 16 commitments by clients and 17 by outside counsel. Eight of them fit together as pairs, as golden rules for relationships, as...

Operationally, no distinction between policies, procedures, processes, and practices

Posted on April 25, 2009
Semantically, we can define and differentiate these four terms but operationally, in day to day usage, these terms blur. Here is my attempt to distinguish the terms, with the terms laid out in diminishing order of formality. Policies lay out...

Successful lawyers and the self-serving attribution bias

Posted on April 24, 2009
The self-serving attribution bias blinkers most of us, as commonly ?individuals see themselves as fully responsible for their successes yet blame external sources for their failures.? Thus, as explained in the Academy of Mgt. Perspectives, Vol. 23, Feb...

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A nine-box grid used to evaluate in-house counsel

Posted on April 24, 2009
At a global financial firm, the tool used to evaluate the lawyers has three rows for performance and three columns for potential, a nine-box grid. As to performance, the manager assesses a lawyer as high, medium or low; as to...

?What?s in it for me?? and the uphill fight to get unidirectional information reporting

Posted on April 24, 2009
In-house lawyers dislike one-way information flows. That is the reason why timely data entry into matter management systems often goes AWOL; lawyers charged with plugging in data perceive that the data only goes one way, up, and returns no benefit...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #99 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes

Posted on April 24, 2009
Honored to be on a list of top ten legal blogs. James Dunning, a former UK general counsel, selected Law Department Management for his recent list of top ten legal blogs, calling it ?a detailed and frequently updated blog from...

Median total pay of S&P 500 CEO compared to median cash pay of general counsel

Posted on April 24, 2009
According to an article in Academy of Mgt. Perspectives, Vol. 23, Feb. 2009 at 18, median CEO pay in 2006 at S&P 500 companies was just over $8 million. That figure is the ?sum of the salary, bonus, stock awards,...

Is it true that in-house lawyers dislike change more than their clients dislike change?

Posted on April 24, 2009
?Lawyers, as a group, have a higher aversion to change than business people.? This adamant quote comes from Janet Langford Kelly, Susan Sneider and Kelly Fox, ?The Relationship Between the Legal Department and the Corporation,? in Successful Partnering Between Inside...

Cisco?s guidelines, 70 pages of them, for patent preparation and prosecution

Posted on April 22, 2009
Striving to codify its best practices for ?prep and prosc,? willing to take time to train lawyers and scrutinize processes, setting the stage for offshoring some of its work, Cisco?s patent group maintains what must be a sophisticated and complete...

The consolations of philosophy

Posted on April 22, 2009
The subject of knowledge, the most important asset of an in-house lawyer, ultimately reduces to philosophical ruminations. Ruminations on my part have sometimes resulted in posts on this blog. A few draw on ideas from individual philosophers (See my post...

Update on my poll regarding percentages reduced after review of invoices from law firms

Posted on April 22, 2009
Having launched my first blog poll in late February (See my post of Feb. 26, 2009: Vizu poll on overall percentage reduction in bills reviewed in past six months.), having summarized the results a week later (See my post of...

The study of the mind ? psychology ? and the mental state of in-house lawyers

Posted on April 22, 2009
Almost three years ago I pulled together several terms from psychology that are relevant to the operations of legal departments (See my post of July 21, 2006: psychology and several of its concepts, all blended into this post.). Thereafter, repression...

LSAT scores as potential drivers of performance and metrics

Posted on April 22, 2009
If law departments disclosed the average LSAT score of their lawyers (the standardized test everyone takes who applies to a US law school), might that metric predict some key benchmarks? For example, might lawyers per billion of revenue decline as...

?Some People Here Perceive the Partner as Wily?

Posted on April 22, 2009
? ? that is, he works our organization and the personalities to his own advantage to get more business for his Firm. So, at times, people are suspicious of his motives,? noted the GC. Law firm partners are under tremendous...

Zero-based staffing decisions by general counsel

Posted on April 22, 2009
Janet Langford Kelly, Susan Sneider and Kelly Fox, ?The Relationship Between the Legal Department and the Corporation,? in Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (Robert Haig, Ed.) Vol. 1, Chapter 16 at 16-19. ?A tool that works for the...

Legal-department management memology ? Part III, concepts

Posted on April 22, 2009
Management concepts are broad ideas I chose and ranked ten of them in one post (See my post of Feb. 1, 2009: ten most important concepts: client, decisions, information flow, objectivity, productivity, quality, risk, structure, talent, and value) and then...

?The Partner Is Too Doctrinaire?

Posted on April 22, 2009
? ? instead of thinking like a businessman. He tends to be very technical and focus more on the minute aspects of the matter rather than the bigger picture of what is the right strategy for us,? observed the Associate...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #98 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes

Posted on April 20, 2009
A course in law school, ?Practicing Law In-House.? Profiled in ACC Docket, Vol. 27, April 2009 at 94, David Benck, general counsel for Hibbett Sports , teaches a course at Samford University?s Cumberland School of Law. His course ?teaches aspiring...

As the economy shrinks, so do paychecks of in-house counsel, if they are still employed

Posted on April 20, 2009
At Silicon Valley Bank, the legal department's 10 attorneys did not receive merit salary increases this year. Leslie A. Gordon, GC California Mag., April 16, 2009, noted this reverberation from the economic slump. Many other law departments have experienced such...

Productivity metrics on dictation compared to typing

Posted on April 20, 2009
?The average computer user types at 33 words per minute, 19 words per minute for composition tasks. The average person speaks at a rate of 150 words per minute for standard conversation, although trained dictators can speak significantly faster.? We....

Strategies for the transfer of knowledge by in-house attorneys who retire

Posted on April 20, 2009
For inside counsel, nothing is certain but death, taxes and retirement ? and general counsel certainly know that many of their lawyers will retire from the department some day (See my post of Dec. 19, 2005: ?contented? attorneys in-house face...

Google Trends and what (little) my first look reveals about law department management

Posted on April 20, 2009
Having read about Google Trends, I reflexively researched several key terms for this blog. Searchers with Google have had a steady propensity to look during the last several years for ?legal department;? searches for ?law department? have been tailing off...

Fill-in-a-gap lawyers for legal departments

Posted on April 20, 2009
For some matters, Yahoo is now bypassing conventional law firms altogether in favor of outfits such as Paragon Legal or Axiom Legal, which rent out senior lawyers to handle short-term projects. Yahoo has used such temporary attorneys to handle legal....

One-half the billing rates for partners in major, non-rim US cities (aka regional firms)

Posted on April 20, 2009
The cost advantages of sending work to so-called regional law firms can be startling. The ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey found that the average hourly rates (after discounts) paid by the ACC members for work performed by partners/associates handling litigation...

Status report on embedded metaposts on this blog

Posted on April 18, 2009
Your humble scribe aspires to no less than a multi-year effort to collect and intelligently comment on as much about management of legal departments as possible. The online corpus, now nearly 4,300 posts, offers visitors much to read and ponder....

?Making the legal department?s functions more transparent by quantifying what the lawyers do and reporting it?

Posted on April 18, 2009
General counsel want to show clients the value produced by the legal team, but often haven?t a persuasive way to convey that. The new general counsel of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Christopher Dewees, wants the efforts of his dozen or...

Lawyers in merged law departments (Bank of America and Merrill Lynch) must reapply for jobs

Posted on April 18, 2009
The merged legal department of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, with a combined team of around 700, is in the midst of slimming down. According to Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, April 2009 at 66, last December the legal staff...

Very low number of law firms instructed by the FTSE 100

Posted on April 18, 2009
Legal Week Intelligence collected data from 317 UK companies, including 54 from the FTSE 100. ?The average number of law firms used by the FTSE companies increased from eight to nine since 2003.? This surprising finding comes from Corp. Counsel,...

EMC?s law department: rapid growth, metrics, and GC?s responsibilities

Posted on April 18, 2009
Let?s tease some thoughts out of unprepossessing facts from an article by Paul Dacier, the general counsel of EMC Corporation, that appears in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, April 2009, at 7. He scatters some figures throughout his piece and...

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