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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

Beyond a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to a Legal Exposure Plan

Posted on March 06, 2009
The law department of Carillion develops an annual Legal Exposure Plan for each of its major client groups. As described in Ann Page and Richard Trapp, Managing External Legal Resources (ICSA 2007) at 16, the plan covers multiple ways ?to...

Law departments and Research & Development

Posted on March 02, 2009

Benchmarks on specialists headquarters and commercial lawyers in international regions

Posted on March 02, 2009

Wide differences from recent survey between industries in lawyers per billion Euros

Posted on March 02, 2009

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EMEA benchmarking data and four comparisons to US benchmark numbers

Posted on March 01, 2009

A post in French about this blog and this blogster

Posted on March 01, 2009

Cost-effective compliance risk assessment [by guest author Jeff Kaplan, Esq.]

Posted on March 01, 2009

Eleven ideas for how to unify a global law department

Posted on March 01, 2009

A post for Spanish-speaking in-house lawyers

Posted on March 01, 2009

Feed readers and aggregators for this blog and other blogs on law department operations

Posted on March 01, 2009

Cartograms to depict data about law departments

Posted on March 01, 2009

The high, hidden costs of layoffs and one bad way to do them

Posted on March 01, 2009

A potpourri of management points in a recent article about a UK law department

Posted on March 01, 2009

General counsel make a difference in corporate governance, specifically insider trading

Posted on March 01, 2009

Fixed-fee, unlimited calls with Rees Morrison on law department management ? Part 2 of 4

Posted on February 26, 2009
Some general counsel would simply like to talk about a situation and get some expert advice, immediately and in flexible doses. They can?t afford a big, expensive consulting project; they don?t want to wade through endless pages of reading. To...

Podcast by this blogger on offshoring, competitive bids and secondments

Posted on February 26, 2009
Paul Boynton Esq. of In-House Legal, a production of Legal Talk Network, recently interviewed me for a podcast. I spoke for about ten minutes about offshoring, competitive bids and secondments. Those topics, Paul and I had agreed, are among the...

Collective action by law departments to loosen conflicts rules

Posted on February 26, 2009
As I understand a recent article, heavy hitters in the banking world have agreed some conflict of interest rules that more realistically adapt to current realities. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, March 2009 at 62, explains that Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs,...

A full law department after pouring together InBev and Anheuser-Busch

Posted on February 26, 2009
What has happened since InBev mixed its law department with Anheuser-Busch?s? We know from Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, March 2009 at 61, that a few months after the November 2008 merger the legal team had stirred together 250 lawyers. The...

Introduction to ?descriptive metrics? that quantify key characteristics of a law department

Posted on February 26, 2009
Someday we will be able to describe with numbers most of the primary characteristics of any law department. Such ?descriptive metrics? are numbers that convey something about how a law department operates. For example, concentration of spending on law firms:...

No snark about how law departments

Posted on February 26, 2009
Snarky writing cleverly spoofs the powerful and respected. It pokes sophisticated fun at those in high positions and cleverly mocks them. But there is no snark in law-department land. No general counsel gets lampooned. Why? Money muzzles snark. Simple...

Please try my first poll on Law Department Management Blog

Posted on February 26, 2009
You are all invited, at least those of you who review and approve legal bills, to test drive my new polling capability. The question is on the upper right, below my blook notice. Pick your answer from the choices and...

Supplemental comments about decision-tree software by a partner who uses it

Posted on February 26, 2009
Brian Daley, the author of an article I cited (See my post of Feb. 22, 2009: software to depict and quantify decisions.), was kind enough to email me with some additional explanation. I have slightly edited the following excerpts. ?I...

Fixed fee for a law department?s benchmarking project! ? Part 1 of 4

Posted on February 25, 2009
My aim has always been to keep marketing out of this blog, so I down-play the fact that I am without doubt the universe?s absolutely greatest consultant to general counsel. OK, well, my mom agrees. But it is only fair...

Square foot costs divided into occupancy costs calculate an in-house lawyer?s office footprint

Posted on February 25, 2009
A month ago this blog dropped the bombshell that facilities costs for US law departments range around $25 per square foot (See my post of Jan. 29, 2009: based on US office rates nationwide.). That post left room to ask:...

Attrition rates at law departments range upwards from seven percent

Posted on February 25, 2009
According to the Altman Weil 2008 Law Department Metrics Benchmarking Survey at 108, the larger the law department, the lower the median percentage of lawyers leaving the department, as a percentage of the total number of departmental lawyers. In other...

Too bad that academics rarely pay attention to law departments

Posted on February 25, 2009
I am a closet academic, as long-time readers might have noticed. Ideas, research and writing interest me, and my blog posts are sometimes tiny efforts to teach. Too bad no group of law or business academics vigorously study and debate...

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

Posted on February 25, 2009
Polar diagrams. Florence Nightingale used a polar diagram, similar to a pie chart, to depict illnesses and injuries, according to Gregory Berns, iconoclast: a neuroscientist reveals how to think differently (Harvard Bus. Press 2008) at 43. A polar diagram shows...

An essential benchmark metric: lawyers per billion of revenue

Posted on February 25, 2009
The many posts on LawDepartmentManagementBlog about the ratio of lawyers per billion of revenue fall into three clusters: metrics for a specific company; explanations of what drives the metric; and wider-ranging coverage about the metric. In the course of describing...

Law departments and capitalized (depreciated) patent costs

Posted on February 25, 2009
Warning: I am not a CPA, but I try to be accurate, so I invite anyone to correct me on this topic. A patent is an asset that depreciates. As defined by Fireworks Zone, ?Depreciation is writing off a tangible...

Pulling together several ideas about how law departments can come up with new approaches

Posted on February 24, 2009
A notable summary comes from an article in the McKinsey Quarterly, 2008, No. 4, at 131, by two Stanford professors that has to do with what facilitates positive change. ?First, [leaders] can think constantly about how to develop the most...

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