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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

An administrative task, not a legal task: annual certifications of directors

Posted on March 29, 2009
Publicly-traded companies must collect from each of their board members and ?named executive officers? (the top five by compensation as well as the CEO and CFO) a signed certificate regarding their possible conflicts of interest. The form is based on...

Five steps toward more reality in internal budgets

Posted on March 29, 2009
One of the most pernicious problems about budgeting is that people feel pressure to inflate what they ask for because they expect the person who reviews the rollup of budgets to deflate them. This is the problem of budget padding....

Some basic steps with priority setting to become more efficient

Posted on March 29, 2009
A friend sent me some ideas Steve Prokesch posted on April 21, 2008 for the Harvard Business Review site. I have slightly edited them. Compare your calendar with your priorities. Label the purpose of every regular or recurring activity on...

An ideascape for legal department managers ? Beware the Ideas of March! (Part I)

Posted on March 29, 2009
Landscapes set out plants; hardscapes array stonework; so an ?ideascape? describes how we organize our mental verbal resources. An ideascape for general counsel is one of my blog ambitions. This blog can help to organize and refine how managers of...

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Total of US corporate legal spend in 2008: $96 billion

Posted on March 29, 2009

A breakdown of outside counsel usage by practice area

Posted on March 27, 2009
A presenter at a recent conference on intellectual property showed a slide that sourced research by Martindale Hubbell. The pie chart on the slide had 10 slices, one for each of nine practice areas and ?other.? Litigation 37% IP 11%...

Pattern recognition and emotional tagging: two ways the brain can trip up

Posted on March 27, 2009
Depressing as it may be, I keep finding examples of how homo sapiens has less sapiens than we might hope. In the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, Feb. 2009 at 62, the authors trot out two more cerebral slip-ups (See...

Cons dominate pros when companies consider awarding inventors a residual share of income

Posted on March 27, 2009
At first glance, it seems fair to reward inventors who are granted a patent a share of the later income from that patent. But at a recent conference, the panelists rejected that incentive. The administrative difficulties of tracking and apportioning....

Nine myths held by some in-house lawyers about their management of law firms

Posted on March 27, 2009
Caution: a sharp-elbow post! The following assumptions, cherished beliefs in fact, addle the minds of quite a few in-house lawyers. I tried to list them according to their perniciousness, but that is too hard to do. Furthermore, the more informative....

Growth of the patent secondary market complicates life for in-house patent counsel

Posted on March 27, 2009
Work has become more complicated for patent lawyers as organizations have combined to create ways to buy and sell patents. What a recent conference presentation referred to as the ?secondary market? can be thought of as ?offensive buyers,? ?defensive buyers,?...

Will we see legal departments turn to offshore decision analysis?

Posted on March 26, 2009
Increased outsourcing of ?decision analysis? is one of the breakthrough ideas for 2009 in Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, Feb. 2009 at 38. The authors predict that third-party providers will ?structure decision alternatives, analyze data, and recommend or even take...

Will associate layoffs reduce the use of offshore legal service providers?

Posted on March 26, 2009
P.J. Thomas of Corplo Legal Outsourcing wrote me with an interesting point about layoffs of associates as a possible threat to the legal offshoring industry. ?There is a school of thought in the offshore industry in India which believes that...

The heart of client darkness: how hard it is to map client use of the law department

Posted on March 26, 2009
Managers of legal departments lack a descriptive metric for the degree to which in-house lawyers are relied on by clients. For example, no general counsel can say anything like ?30 percent of the VPs and above last year turned to...

Over the past 20 years, ten breakthrough developments in law department management

Posted on March 26, 2009
While on vacation, and musing over my 20-year career consulting to general counsel, I nominate these ten management changes as the most significant. For the sake of the hot-stove league, I have ranked them in declining order of importance. Go...

Issues of concern for Asian and Middle Eastern departments when they deal with external counsel

Posted on March 26, 2009
In the summer of 2008, Asian-Counsel surveyed law departments in Asia and the Middle East. One question asked in the http://www.pbpress.com/index.php?page=index&block=article&id=INIV3VX-OSHVGLZ-KFQMJNG-U49E8GJ survey was ?Which issues have you found to be of concern when dealing with outside counsel?? I estimated from...

Sociometers as a tool to assess interaction among lawyers and therefore productivity

Posted on March 26, 2009
Sociometers are small sensors that lawyers could wear at a retreat (See my post of Sept. 28, 2007: electronic name tags.). They record data about face-to-face interactions such as who is near whom and the location and duration of the...

Four methods at McDonald?s to integrate its global legal department

Posted on March 26, 2009
A profile of Gloria Santona, McDonald?s general counsel, includes a number of methods by which she creates a unified culture among the approximately 140 lawyers dispersed across 19 or 20 locations all over the world. One is that ?the entire...

Survey data on how Asian and Middle Eastern departments rate attributes when they choose law firms

Posted on March 25, 2009
Pacific Business publishes Asian-Counsel, which published the results of a survey in the summer of 2008 of its survey of law departments in Asia and the Middle East. One question asked in the survey was ?What three factors most influence...

A grid analysis can help you decide among various alternatives

Posted on March 25, 2009
Grid Analysis (also known as Decision Matrix Analysis, Pugh Matrix Analysis or MAUT, which stands for Multi-Attribute Utility Theory) is a useful technique to use for making a decision. I have paraphrased the following description from the excellent MindTools website...

A claim that for capability, the best law departments have dedicated IT staff, and an odd additional claim

Posted on March 25, 2009
One of the contributors to a recent article in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, March 2009 at 35. makes the statement that the most technically efficient legal departments are the ones with dedicated legal IT reporting to the general counsel...

The term ?local counsel? has multiple domestic meanings for law department managers

Posted on March 25, 2009
This post is not about the use of ?local counsel? to mean counsel hired in another country. One particular form of that includes firms privileged to practice before a country?s patent and trademark office (See my post of Aug. 7,...

The general counsel of McDonald?s is a member of the board of directors of Aon Corporation

Posted on March 25, 2009
Among her many claims to fame, Gloria Santona, the general counsel of McDonald?s, sits on the board of directors of Aon Corporation, a leading provider of risk management services, insurance and reinsurance brokerage and human capital and management consulting...

Ten plausible consequences of axing in-house lawyers

Posted on March 25, 2009
Risks from reductions in force among the lawyers of a legal team include the following: 1. Increases in time to accomplish tasks, reduction or delay in services, for example, contracts or patent filings, and any contractual work 2. More legal...

Cost-effective compliance (Part V) ? staffing issues

Posted on March 23, 2009
In this final posting in a five-part series on cost-effective compliance, Jeff Kaplan examines staffing issues. A critical component in maintaining an effective compliance program is expertise, and for some companies ? particularly large ones in regulated areas ? there...

Survey data on five ways that Asian and Middle Eastern law departments recruit lawyers

Posted on March 23, 2009
Pacific Business publishes Asian-Counsel, which published the results of a survey in the summer of 2008. One question asked in the survey was ?What is the most common way your company locates and hires its in-house lawyers?? The respondents (an...

The Stepladder Technique to help everyone in a group come to grips with a problem

Posted on March 23, 2009
I paraphrased this method to generate and ponder ideas comes from the MindTools site. http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_89.htm Managers in law departments could find many circumstances in which to use it. Step 1: Before convening as a group, tell the members about the...

An out-of-left-field comment about the priorities general counsel should set for software

Posted on March 23, 2009
I can?t make sense out of an answer in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, March 2009 at 35. The question asked was ?What technologies would a new general counsel look to in setting up a legal department? What are the...

Examples that show why management practices all have strengths and weaknesses

Posted on March 23, 2009
Many managers who believe in some practice find it almost impossible to imagine that another manager, equally smart and experienced, disdains that process and advocates the opposite. It is true, nevertheless, that defensible arguments lodge against every practice, that someone...

When forced to reduce staff, seven changes a law department needs from its clients

Posted on March 23, 2009
Law departments in these parlous times suffer layoffs. True, the volume of work may decline as sales slump, but headcount reductions often do not correspond to reductions in workload. If not, if there are fewer lawyers to do essentially the...

Does its litigation spend or volume indicate anything about margins of a company?

Posted on March 23, 2009
An aggressive, creative company ? one that probably has higher margins than a less pushy company does ? is likely to face more lawsuits than a relatively stodgy company that sticks to its knitting. If the brash company challenges other...

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