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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

Primacy of intangibles for why some industries have more lawyers per billion of revenue

Posted on February 24, 2009
While discussing power laws, the McKinsey Quarterly, 2009, No. 1 at 13, argues that power curves for revenues of businesses (the sorted distribution of revenue, for example) are often a function of ?intangible assets -- talent, networks, brands, and intellectual...

Power law distributions in the sphere of law department management

Posted on February 24, 2009
In the sphere of law department management, power-law distributions probably describe a variety of distributions of data (See my post of Feb. 24, 2009: background on power laws.). Expensive lawsuits. Assuming $10 million in costs is the largest, the drop...

More power to power-law distributions

Posted on February 24, 2009
Cases cited by the US Supreme Court, punitive damages awarded by federal courts, damages sought by class action plaintiffs, revenues of law firms in a given year, lawyers at law firms, relative renown of law firms, and many other aspects...

Law librarians in law departments of corporations (an AALL Special Interest Section)

Posted on February 24, 2009
My friend Ruth Balkin told me about the Private Law Librarians Special Interest Section of the American Association of Law Libraries (PLL/SIS), and more specifically its Corporate Law Librarians' Group. The Group hosts a webpage. Johanna Bizub of Prudential and...

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?... have a large number of lawyers,? Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

Posted on February 23, 2009
An interview in the McKinsey Quarterly, 2009, No. 1 at 146, of Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, should hearten Google?s in-house team and most in-house lawyers. Toward the end of a long session, the McKinsey interviewer asked Schmidt about...

Ten ways how to stimulate and disseminate improved ways of working

Posted on February 23, 2009
?[I]nnovations spread quickly when organizations focus relentlessly on selecting and spreading ideas in ways that ease the burden of thought and action for everyone involved.? The quote comes from a thought-provoking article in the McKinsey Quarterly, 2008, No...

BHAGS (big, hairy audacious goals) for law departments as a way to goose achievement

Posted on February 23, 2009
Hundreds of peer-reviewed studies on setting goals show that measurable, specific, and somewhat (but not absurdly) difficult ones are best for motivating effort." Two authors of an article in the McKinsey Quarterly, 2008, No. 4, at 136, believe that ?motivating...

Three comments about a conference for UAE in-house counsel

Posted on February 23, 2009
The In-House Congress United Arab Emirates 2009 will be held in Bur Dubai on 4th March 2009. From the online notice, three observations struck me. The first is that the website page states in red print ?Note: Registrations for the...

Opposing views of law departments and law firms on litigation

Posted on February 23, 2009
A partner at Ogilvy Renault, Brian Daley, succinctly contrasts the perspectives on litigation of law departments and law firms. Writing in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, Jan./Feb. 2009 after page 48, Daley observes that ?When approaching litigation, outside counsel focus...

36 contract management systems for law departments, courtesy of David Munn

Posted on February 22, 2009
David Munn spoke at the ACC Annual Meeting, Oct. 30, 2007. His materials listed 36 programs for contract management, ranging from relatively inexpensive programs, through matter management systems that include contract management features, to full-blown CLM systems...

David Munn?s reference materials on contract management systems for law departments

Posted on February 22, 2009
Hats off to David Munn for his efforts to pull together sources of information on contract management. I extracted this material from his blog. Although I believe legal departments should not have administrative responsibility for contracts, it is still useful...

Three trends regarding the costs of ineffective compliance [by guest blogger Jeff Kaplan

Posted on February 22, 2009
I welcome guest blogger Jeff Kaplan, one of the country?s foremost legal experts on compliance and ethics. Are there practical ways of containing or even reducing compliance and ethics (?C&E?) program costs while still maintaining an effective program? I believe...

Global Legal Professional certification for offshore LPO staff

Posted on February 22, 2009
Maya Karwande, then a rising senior at Tufts University, wrote a paper on Legal Process Outsourcing. that the blog Legally Yours published on July 19, 2008. You can learn about the Global Legal Professional certification from its website, but I...

Getting to the root of decision-tree analysis: a clear explanation

Posted on February 22, 2009
An advertising supplement in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, Jan./Feb. 2009 after page 48, very clearly describes decision-tree analysis. Brian Daley BDaley@ogilvyrenault.com of Ogilvy Renault writes: ?At its most basic, a decision tree is a diagram that starts with two...

Ugly effects of a narcissistic general counsel

Posted on February 22, 2009
An earlier post considered self-centeredness in young lawyers (See my post of June 30, 2007: narcissism and demographic groups.). What about narcissism in a general counsel? strategy + business, Issue 54, Spring 2009 at 119, mentions that ?The personality traits...

Ten clues to the onset of complacency by your primary law firms

Posted on February 22, 2009
Although frustratingly difficult to measure or proved, these tell-tale signs of settled contentment can alert you to the entitlement expectations ? and diminished levels of service ? of complacent law firms. I have not tried to list them in order...

General counsel learn more about management from ?action verbs? than from ?achievement verbs?

Posted on February 22, 2009
Linguistics philosopher Gilbert Ryle made a distinction between what he called task or action verbs and achievement or success verbs. In the context of legal departments, ?write off? and ?settle? are task verbs (they refer to doing something); ?economize? and...

?I Love Them? [by guest blogger Bruce Heintz]

Posted on February 22, 2009
? enthused the GC, as he was describing his primary law firm to a third-party interviewer conducting a client satisfaction assessment for the law firm. But, what does a law firm have to do to get this kind response? Is...

Taking time off to consider vacations by in-house counsel

Posted on February 22, 2009
One element in the calculation of fully-loaded internal costs are vacation days (See my post of Aug. 27, 2008: fully-loaded cost per lawyer hour with 31 references.). Therefore, conscientious and obsessive, I spent time one recent holiday collecting my posts...

Four years of creating LawDepartmentManagementBlog.com

Posted on February 20, 2009
Today is the fourth anniversary of this blog and it began with 4,053 posts.. As has been my custom each year, herewith a retrospective (See my post of Feb. 20, 2006: one year and 1,000 posts; Feb. 20, 2007: retrospective...

Something new: online questions submitted to me and a podcast interview to answer them

Posted on February 20, 2009
My friend and fellow blogger, in-house counsel Hanna Hhasl-Kelchner, has kicked off a new way to help people with legal management questions. People are invited to submit questions and I will do my best to answer them. On her ?Ask...

?Assess the Skills of My People, How They Measure Up and What I?ll Need in the Future?

Posted on February 20, 2009
? pleaded the GC, as he shared the weight of his responsibility for building a strong law department during a chat with the relationship partner from one of his primary law firms who had achieved the level of Trusted Advisor....

Part XXV of a collection of embedded metaposts

Posted on February 20, 2009
Here are the most recent embedded metaposts with URL links (See my post of Jan.30, 2009: Part XXIV.), each of which shows the number of references cited within them. 1. Accounting concepts such as accrual (See my post of March...

Ambivalency of general counsel toward cross-selling by partners

Posted on February 20, 2009
Based on my consulting impressions, general counsel are not all that enamored with cross-selling by partners of a firm they have retained. (By the way, I define cross selling as an effort to persuade a purchaser of one kind of...

Codes of Conduct and the conduct of legal departments

Posted on February 20, 2009
A good example of fuzzy overlap between a legal department and other functions lurks with Codes of Conduct. How far should a general counsel claim to be the ethical beacon for the company? To what degree is ethical behavior a...

A wonderful method for collective learning by the leadership group of a law department

Posted on February 19, 2009
The general counsel of Rockwell Automation, Doug Hagerman, has graciously allowed me to excerpt his description of a learning project he undertook. Every law department could try a variation on this technique. ?Faced with the challenge of wanting key members...

Which metric is better: revenue per lawyer or lawyers per billion of revenue?

Posted on February 19, 2009
Maybe this is six of one, half a dozen of the other. I think that lawyers per billion lets someone more quickly compare their metric to another company?s metric or a benchmark survey. ?If the figure is 5 per billion...

Ruminations on a descriptive metric for supervisory responsibility of law department attorneys

Posted on February 19, 2009
It would be convenient for the cognoscenti of law department management to be able to describe numerically levels and spans of control. For example, if a 10-lawyer department has four lawyers who report to the general counsel (?direct reports?), the....

A large and global intellectual property function at Philips

Posted on February 19, 2009
The Dutch giant, Philips, has a huge group called Intellectual Property & Standards (IP&S). According to IP Review, Iss. 24, Winter 2008/2009 at 34, IP&S has a headquarters team of 45, and ?some 500 people spread across 16 countries.? It...

Another example of insurance against litigation and legal costs, this time for patents

Posted on February 19, 2009
IP Review, Iss. 24, Winter 2008/2009 at 22, describes insurance policies of SAMIAN Underwriting Agencies, working with CPA Global, that offer clients ?insurance for up to 10 patent families when clients are renewing patents. This allows clients to enforce their...

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