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

Pedantic or precise: to discriminate between related management terms

Posted on March 12, 2009
Tease me for hair-splitting or praise me for hair-raising perspicuity, I will still continue to write about differences between similar management concepts. Many posts on these pages express my effort to use management terms precisely and correctly, such as the...

The more hardball you play, the better you hit the experience curve

Posted on March 11, 2009
It makes sense to me that lawyers in large departments tend to specialize more. They see more examples of any given issue than do Jill-of-all-trades generalists in small departments. The more experience you accumulate, the quicker and more skillfully you...

Four more simple steps to help the environment

Posted on March 11, 2009
Readers, please send me your law department?s tips for going green. Here are four more ideas. Provide trash containers that have round holes for cans and bottles. Recycle toner cartridges. Discard computer equipment responsibly. Encourage car-pooling...

Benchmark and talent information from the US Postal Service?s Law Department

Posted on March 11, 2009
I quote and comment on two extracts from the online brochure of the US Postal Service?s Law Department. ?Over 220 attorneys make up the Postal Service?s in-house ?law firm.? Led by a General Counsel appointed by the Postmaster General, the...

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

General counsel aren?t fired for late processing of invoices

Posted on March 11, 2009
Here?s an item for the ?go-figure? bucket: a general fired for processing legal fees late? As reported in the Fin. Times, Oct. 17, 2008, Michael Mocniak, was the general counsel of Calgon Carbon during 2005. The Financial Times reports that...

People in law departments alter behavior (game the system) to hit goals

Posted on March 11, 2009
What gets measured gets manipulated. Clever people always figure out ways to make the most of reward goals or decision-making. If money in a law department depends on metrics, there will be efforts to spin and manipulate the numbers. People...

Between leading companies in the same industry, wide ranges on lawyers per billion

Posted on March 11, 2009
A senior executive at a legal services company wrote me. He sent data about differences between law departments in the same industry in terms of lawyers per billion of revenue: ?Here are some Lawyer/Revenue ($Bn) figures (that may not be...

Correlate attributes of management initiatives to cost and productivity benchmarks

Posted on March 11, 2009
An earlier post explains how law departments can describe their management initiatives by combinations of two attributes portrayed on a scatter-gram (See my post of March 11, 2009: management initiatives on double axes.). Mere description of attributes has limited value...

A method to describe management initiatives on double axes

Posted on March 11, 2009
We can describe management initiatives in law departments by various attributes, picking two at a time, and depict the intersection as a scatter-gram. Take mentoring programs. Two ways to describe a program would be duration and investment. In one law...

Another clue toward the number of lawyers practicing in-house in the United States

Posted on March 09, 2009
A longitudinal study of 4,160 people who became lawyers in 2000 found that only two years later four percent of them served as in-house counsel. That percentage seems high, since rarely do corporate law departments hire lawyers straight from law...

An article and seven more posts on fully-loaded costs per hour

Posted on March 09, 2009
Since my last metapost on what it costs a company to support each hour of its internal attorneys (See my post of Aug. 27, 2008: fully-loaded cost per lawyer hour with 31 references.), I have accumulated several more posts (See...

Unusual facts about Michael Critelli, once Pitney Bowes? general counsel and later its CEO

Posted on March 09, 2009
A profile in the Fin. Times, June 13, 2007 by Alan Cane, traces the career of one-time general counsel and then chief executive of Pitney Bowes, Michael Critelli. The piece dropped four tidbits. Critelli moved in-house for ethical reasons. After...

Comparative metrics and observations about this blog

Posted on March 09, 2009
Fascinated as I am with Web 2.0 and blogs, I offer some more analyses from free sites on the web. Am I competitive? How Rank figures out rankings of blogs, and my page rank is 3. What does that mean?...

Larger law departments always can find some money to spend if they need to

Posted on March 09, 2009
I admit to a belief based on no data: large law departments always have some rainy day cash they can spend. General counsel of big departments steward large budgets and can almost always find funds, if they want to, to...

Two descriptive metrics on counsel retained: fee concentration with firm size and effective rate

Posted on March 09, 2009
General counsel should focus on concentration of their external spend rather than on the number of firms paid (See my post of March 24, 2005: concentrate spending instead of converging law firms.). For example, a concentration target might be 75...

Cost-effective compliance risk assessment (continued by Jeff Kaplan)

Posted on March 08, 2009
This is the third in a series of postings by Jeff Kaplan on compliance and ethics (C&E) programs and cost. In the second I examined one cost-effective approach to C&E risk assessment, which is to embed risk assessment into training...

A source of data on fees and total legal costs ? public records of a city

Posted on March 08, 2009
On March 8, 2009, the Augusta Chronicle reported on fees paid a law firm for its work on bond issuances. The named firm earned $400,000 for its work on a $160 million water and sewer bond in 2004; $126,000 for...

Part XXVI of a collection of embedded metaposts

Posted on March 08, 2009
Here are the most recent embedded metaposts with URL links (See my post of Feb. 20, 2009: Part XXV.), each of which shows the number of references cited within them. 1. Academics interested in law department management (See my post...

Descriptive metrics part I: in-house lawyers of a law department

Posted on March 08, 2009
The members of a law department yield many descriptive metric (See my post of Feb. 26, 2009: start of a series on such metrics.). To review, a descriptive metric puts some aspect of a law department in numeric terms, which...

Without spend management software, law departments get their data from accounts payable

Posted on March 08, 2009
If law departments lack software to track external expenses, they may rely on accounts payable to generate whatever figures they need. This point struck me after I read astute blogger Ron Friedmann and his lament about the lack of technology...

Larger law departments may get a leg up from network externalities

Posted on March 08, 2009
Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Penguin Press 2008) at 135, refers to ?what economists call network externalities, the benefit of pooling information between multiple employees and agents.? As when fax machines became common...

Attrition in law departments and consequences of it

Posted on March 08, 2009
For most law departments, the turnover rate of lawyers is much lower than that of employees elsewhere in the company. Even so, we hear quite a bit about lawyer departures, voluntarily or otherwise. Some posts here on this blog look...

Bill write-offs criticize the in-house lawyer who took them or the firm that suffers them

Posted on March 08, 2009
If an inside lawyer who is responsible for a law firm on a matter manages it well, there should be no write-off on any invoice. The firm will have staffed the work appropriately, timekeepers will have toiled efficiently and billed...

Fixed-fee for Rees Morrison at law department retreats ? Part 3 of 4

Posted on March 08, 2009
One of the most common management-related activities is the lawyer or departmental retreat (See my post of Feb. 12, 2008: retreats and conferences with 8 references.). To provide general counsel with one option to consider for their retreat, I created...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #93 ? additions to earlier posts

Posted on March 06, 2009
Information theory and leakage of information in law departments. According to information theory, each transmission of information diminishes the accuracy of what is transmitted (See my post of May 23, 2008: every relay doubles the noise and cuts the message...

?Periodic written matter updates? as a very common demand by law departments?

Posted on March 06, 2009
I am surprised that the fifth most common obligation imposed on law firms, according to the most recent Serengeti survey, is ?periodic written matter updates.? It takes time for firms to prepare write-ups, even if the style is formalized, and...

By some measures, diversity could be easier to achieve in a global law department

Posted on March 06, 2009
If you are a US-based company but have a sizeable contingent of Asian lawyers, do they count toward your diversity goals? I suppose not, because the idea of diversity is to have people of different attributes mixed in the same...

First official blog poll results ? a barbell result on bill write-offs

Posted on March 06, 2009
One week after this blog unveiled its first poll (See my post of Feb. 26, 2009: first blog poll.), I thank each of the dozen or so readers (as of yesterday) who took a moment or two to answer. The...

Profit margins correlate to lawyers per billion (and revenue per lawyer)

Posted on March 06, 2009
Consider this hypothesis: lawyers per billion correlates positively with an industry?s average margin of profit. The logic is that high technology and financial services, industries marked by relatively high profit margins, have more lawyers per billion than do commodity industries...

How they speak about some points of law department management in Britain

Posted on March 06, 2009
My funny American accent doesn?t come through on this blog, but previously I have called out terms that are distinctively British (See my post of Feb. 9, 2006: British terms and references cited; Nov. 30, 2007 #2: charge-out rates; and...

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...