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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

How we can think about and define the notion of a ?primary law firm?

Posted on March 23, 2009
As the term is typically used by members of a law department, can we define ?primary law firm? (or variations such as ?preferred counsel,? ?key law firm?, ?go-to firm,? ?major law firm? and the like)? What makes a firm primary...

An embedded metapost on eleven more how-to?s

Posted on March 20, 2009
Having previously gathered my posts that recommend how to do something, in fact 44 somethings, I realized I have not updated that collection since Dec. 3, 2007 (See my post of Nov. 27, 2007: how-to?s with 23 references; and Dec....

Seven reasons why I question the infatuation with ?best practices?

Posted on March 20, 2009
I have skewered ?best practices? many times, yet haven?t pulled together all my arguments against them (See my post of March 4, 2008: three thoughts against best practices.). My list of counterpoints now numbers seven. You can?t duplicate the context...

Six advantages of discounts off standard rates compared to other cost-saving efforts

Posted on March 20, 2009
For a general counsel, discounts from standard billing rates enjoy some evident advantages over other methods of managing external costs 1. A discount is easy to describe to fellow executives. ?We knocked 10 percent off the firm?s rates? needs no...

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Rees Morrison?s Morsels #95 ? additions to earlier posts

Posted on March 20, 2009
Data visualization software. Tableau Software?s offering looks impressive. Its software is?based on a proprietary technology called VizQL, a visualization query language that makes information from databases and spreadsheets almost instantly accessible in an easy-to-read form...

A blunt message to law firms that minimizes research costs

Posted on March 19, 2009
Among the cost-cutting ideas accumulated in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, March 2009 at 47, here is a hard-nosed suggestion by someone: "When you're calling your law firm with questions, make it clear that if the lawyer on the phone...

Analysis of four broad topics on this blog that subsume multiple metaposts

Posted on March 19, 2009
The 250+ metaposts that I have compiled and embedded on this blog group into several broader topics. Most prominently, four topics account for a largest number of total posts. Software leads with 196 posts, which surprises me because I do...

Performance metrics from a matter management system presume effective policies and disciplined procedures

Posted on March 19, 2009
An article in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, March 2009 at 86, lays out a roadmap for how to get more from your matter management system (MMS). The author, Nanci Tucker, touts the performance metrics that an MMS can generate....

Refuse to pay travel-related costs if a distant firm wants to compete with good local firms

Posted on March 19, 2009
?When a new firm without local offices wants to do work for me, and I believe that there is a good fit, I ask that they internalize all costs and attorney time associated with travel as a condition of being...

Business units should assign a designated contract coordinator for the contracts process

Posted on March 19, 2009
"Use a designated contract coordinator from each in-house business unit, thereby streamlining the processes from ?review and revise? to final negotiation and execution of contracts in each unit. This minimizes the number of employees needed to finalize contracts...

Low monthly spending limits, without prior authorization, keep a tight leash on outside counsel

Posted on March 19, 2009
Among the 75 cost-cutting ideas in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, March 2009 at 42, is a method instituted by one contributor to the collection. "We have recently implemented additional billing guidelines. We continue to require monthly billing, but outside...

Part XXVII of a collection of embedded metaposts

Posted on March 19, 2009
Here are the latest embedded metaposts (See my post of March 8, 2009: Part XXVI.), each of which shows the number of references cited within them. 1. Bell curve (See my post of March 12, 2009: bell curves with 8...

Interns from a nearby law school can supplement your staff inexpensively

Posted on March 19, 2009
Here and there, law departments bring in interns from local law schools, either during the summer or term-time. Among the 75 cost-cutting ideas in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, March 2009 at 45, is to evaluate whether it is cost...

Postmortems are to die for, according to one tip for saving money in-house

Posted on March 16, 2009
An executive of the Association of Corporate Counsel compiles 75 tips for saving money in-house in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, March 2009 at 39. Number 7 goes a bit over the top I would say: ?The single greatest tool...

Fake objectivity in rigged competitive bids ? an unfounded complaint by disappointed firms

Posted on March 16, 2009
Ron Pol dislikes competitive bids. A diatribe against them in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, March 2009 at 22, piles on 15 practices he claims take place and undermine the process? benefits. One point reported ?relatively often,? is that the...

A case study of offshore assistance to a law department regarding contract review

Posted on March 16, 2009
According to an e-mail I received, a US telecommunications company needed over twelve thousand documents to be reviewed and filtered for pre-identified contractual issues and verified against certain online information. The law department asked Corplo, a legal support service (LSS)...

Some data about costs, win rates and topics of Requests for Proposals ? and my questions

Posted on March 16, 2009
Sheri Qualters of the National Law Journal, Feb. 25, 2009, summarizes an Altman Weil report, "What's the Real Cost of Responding to RFPs?? That study pegs the outlay by law firms on RFPs at $35,000 to $65,000 per RFP, ?or...

Samuel Johnson and a tension between reporting on management and recommending

Posted on March 16, 2009
Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755) "marked a revolution in English letters by being descriptive rather than prescriptive.? Unlike the efforts of the Acad�mie Fran�aise to fix meanings and pronunciations of French words, Johnson?s different goal was to...

After an RFP process, ask law firms confidentially to critique the process

Posted on March 16, 2009
?Post-tender debriefings,? in the New Zealand phrasing of Ron Pol from in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, March 2009 at 22, make sense, but he feels that firms that took part in the competitive bidding process will likely be loath...

Do law firms make you feel insecure when they appear before clients, or do they make you look good?

Posted on March 15, 2009
Some in-house lawyers prevent partners from law firms having direct contact with senior executives, partly from a fear of being upstaged and supplanted. ?If the partner comes across as smarter, more experienced, more likeable, what will become of me?? A...

Seven more cognitive traps in-house lawyers may fall into

Posted on March 15, 2009
Having laid out in prior posts ten ways our thinking fall short of rational objectivity, I was interested by seven more in Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Penguin Press 2008) at 345 (See...

Four more green technology suggestions

Posted on March 15, 2009
These four practices, lit up by Law Tech. News, March 2009 at 39, and its profile of Gardere Wynne Sewell jking@gardere.com make sense to me. I keep composting scraps of ideas for how law departments can improve the environment (See...

Law departments can subscribe to an online database of memoranda by Allen & Overy

Posted on March 15, 2009
As reported in the Fin. Times, Oct. 17, 2008 by Rod Newing, the UK firm, Allen & Overy, has created Diligence, an online database of legal memoranda prepared by its local offices or commissioned from local counsel. Law departments may...

Cost effective compliance risk assessment (continued by Jeff Kaplan)

Posted on March 15, 2009
This is the fourth in a series of five postings by Jeff Kaplan on compliance and ethics (C&E) programs and cost (See my post of March 8, 2009: embedding risk assessment into codes of conduct.). Here, I address the topic...

Fixed-fee for client satisfaction surveys and analysis, by Rees Morrison ? Part 4 of 4

Posted on March 15, 2009
Having introduced my set-cost offerings for benchmarking projects and for unlimited phone calls, I recently added a third for law department retreats (See my post of Feb. 25, 2009: benchmarking; Feb. 26, 2009: phone calls; and March 8, 2009: retreats)...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #94 ? additions to earlier posts

Posted on March 15, 2009
Ways to encourage ideas. Patrick Lamb left a very good comment to my post about ways to encourage discussion (See my post of Feb. 18, 2009: ten suggestions on how to hear from everyone in a group.). ?One of the...

Ten tips to make conference calls more effective

Posted on March 15, 2009
In-house counsel spend hours on conference calls, so any suggestions can make a difference in effectiveness. I took these tips from a post by Mike Dillon and tweaked them a bit (See my post of June 14, 2007: six suggestions...

A teasing statement of dramatic savings in litigation

Posted on March 12, 2009
The Financial Times included this tantalizing snippet in its Oct. 17, 2008 issue where an article discusses law department innovation (by Michael Peel). ?Another in-house lawyer who was seen as an original thinker was Dirk Tirez, whose work centred on...

Compare benchmarks of legal departments across industries by standard deviations

Posted on March 12, 2009
Is there a way to compare whether Company A in telecommunications is better than Company B in energy on lawyers per billion of revenue? A reports a benchmark figure of 8.2 while B reports 5.6, but the industries have very...

To bring work in doesn?t necessarily mean to add lawyers or workload

Posted on March 12, 2009
A throwaway line for general counsel who want to demonstrate their striving to reduce legal costs is ?We?re going to bring more work inside? (See my post of Aug. 4, 2008: BAE Systems.). The intention really boils down to ?We?re...

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