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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

Ethics in a company and the supporting role of the legal department

Posted on October 07, 2008
Having just written about the ethics programs at Lockheed Martin (See my post of Oct. 3, 2008: four activities to promote ethical awareness.), I bestirred myself to sort through my posts on ethics and what?s been written here about expectations...

Ethical awareness at Lockheed Martin

Posted on October 03, 2008
During a recent PLI conference, James Comey, the general counsel of Lockheed Martin, described several ways in which that company impresses on its employees, continually, the importance of ethical behavior. Comey?s law department supports each of these activities...

Associations and affiliation groups for women in-house counsel

Posted on October 03, 2008
The National Association of Women Lawyers will host the Fourth Annual General Counsel Institute in early November. The topics to be discussed include several on law department management. NAWL is not alone in its attention to women who practice law...

The global legal department challenge: a shared sense of being one law department

Posted on October 03, 2008
The Gucci Group law department, under general counsel Cheryl Solomon, has more than 30 lawyers and paralegals located in London, Italy, France, the United States, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. That dispersion of lawyers around the globe, described in ACC Docket,...

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Part XIX of a collection of embedded metaposts

Posted on October 03, 2008
The blog has extruded ten more embedded metaposts with URL links (See my post of Sept. 16, 2008: Part XVIII.), each of which shows the number of references cited within them. 1. Annual reviews (See my post of Sept. 21,...

Can project managers co-exist with litigation managers?

Posted on October 02, 2008
Large lawsuits have lots of moving parts. They seem to be ripe for the skills of project managers, people who are trained in how to get the right resources at the right time to the correct activity. As mentioned in...

Litigation management Part III -- intellectual property litigation costs

Posted on October 02, 2008
So many posts on Law Department Management have had something to say about the costliness of patent litigation that I decided to corral them here (See my post of March 10, 2005: IP litigation costs; March 29, 2005: patent litigation...

Litigation management Part II ? 9 more techniques assembled

Posted on October 02, 2008
Earlier I pulled together my extant metaposts that relate to litigation management (See my post of Oct. 2, 2008: 12 metaposts.) Here I add 10 other techniques available to general counsel that enhance their oversight and direction of litigation. 1....

Litigation management Part I ? topics already collected on this blog

Posted on October 02, 2008
How best to handle lawsuits brought against a company has stimulated from this blogger large amounts of commentary. Ideas about how best to hire a qualified and cost-effective litigation firm fall under my category, Outside Counsel Management (See my post...

Speed dating to meet providers of services to law departments??

Posted on October 02, 2008
A company called Corporate Counsel Exchange reached me yesterday and made me an offer I can certainly refuse. Some months from now, I can attend an event where I will be guaranteed 10 meetings with ?general counsel who are interested...

General counsel as the voice and face of a company in some situations

Posted on October 02, 2008
A recent example of general counsel under the klieg lights was the joint appearance on Capital Hill of the general counsel of Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google. Whether the general counsel takes on the role of spokesperson depends on such factors...

Twitter, general counsel and law departments

Posted on October 02, 2008
Yup, I actually logged on to Twitter and rounded up the usual suspects. Pretty bleak, since when I searched ?general counsel? all of 10 appeared. But that was much better than ?law department? which came up with 1 hit and...

Competition in law departments

Posted on October 02, 2008
General counsel ? indeed all managers, one hopes ? want capable, ambitious people to report to them and a measure of competitiveness among them. Even so, they disapprove if competitive drives by those reports threaten the manager?s position (See my...

My webinar this Tuesday on RFPs: questions, boilerplate, guidelines, and benchmarks

Posted on September 28, 2008
Preparing for my upcoming webinar on September 30th about RFPs to law firms, I pulled together four recommendations that I have not written about. 1. Anticipate questions. Once your Request for Proposal (RFP) is in good shape, have two lawyers...

Enlightenment values for enlightened general counsel

Posted on September 28, 2008
A thoughtful book, Susan Neiman?s Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grownup Idealists (Harcourt 2008), argues that the values of the Enlightenment thinkers ? Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Kant and others in roughly the 18th century ? still stand us in good...

Nine insights a general counsel might share if invited to speak at a law firm?s partner retreat

Posted on September 28, 2008
Many general counsel are invited to speak at retreats of their primary firms. Here are some topics that will bring value to the partners and derivative value to the law department. 1. Myths likely held by the law firm about...

Lawyers feel more comfortable with words than with images

Posted on September 28, 2008
?Lawyers are generally not fond of images. Words are their trade. Attorneys? antipathy toward visualization is confirmed in several psychological studies.? This quote comes from the J. of the Legal Writing Inst., Vol. 14, 2008 at 92, and the article....

When you send an RFP, lay out clearly the format in which you want the responses

Posted on September 28, 2008
An RFP sent to ten or more law firms generates lengthy and detailed responses. If firms can reply as they see fit, your evaluation team will have a hard time picking out of the mass the comparable answers. Better, much...

The twelve-week RFP calendar

Posted on September 28, 2008
How long does an RFP process take? Here are some guidelines, but the bottom line is that three months should accomplish it. That means that this process doesn?t fit if you need to select a firm to represent you in...

A gathering of key law firms in a summit to explore cost cutting

Posted on September 28, 2008
A profile of Anne Chwat, the general counsel for Burger King Holdings, in Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, Sept. 2008 at 71, mentions she hosted a summit in 2008 for her company?s primary external law firms. The summit?s purpose was ?to...

Do you need a signed confidentiality agreement before you send a firm an RFP?

Posted on September 28, 2008
General counsel, of the species homo lex riskus aversus, instinctively want to clothe their request for proposal in the chain mail of a non-disclosure agreement (See my post of May 3, 2007: NDA?s and confidentiality commitments.). ?Upon penalty of legal...

Role of law departments regarding D&O questionnaires for members of the Board of Directors

Posted on September 28, 2008
Publicly-traded companies periodically ask their Directors to complete a questionnaire about their independence. One use for the information is to maintain Directors & Officers insurance coverage. Some companies perform the check up more than once a year...

Cottage industries for law departments, as seen in trade show sponsors

Posted on September 25, 2008
An earlier post covered the three most populous categories of sponsors at the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) Annual Meeting (See my post of Sept. 21, 2008: law firms, discovery, and compliance.). As I contemplated the group of sponsors as...

Cisco -- the law department most-written about on this blog

Posted on September 25, 2008
Preparing to write something about Cisco, I rummaged through my past posts. Amazed, I found 30 that cite the company?s law department (See my post of June 30, 2006: much publicity about Cisco?s law department.). That is 25 percent more...

Posts about this blog qua blog

Posted on September 25, 2008
I have often written about this blog (See my post of Feb. 20, 2006: first anniversary and 1,000 posts; Feb. 20, 2007: two years and 2,000 posts; Feb. 5, 2008: third anniversary comments; Dec. 5, 2007: my pride in this...

MetLife?s summary of legal accomplishments by its Legal Affairs group

Posted on September 25, 2008
MetLife has published a handsome Annual Review 2007, which includes in its 33 pages one on its Legal Affairs group. Every activity described in the section marks a contribution by Legal Affairs of ?critical support and guidance that enhanced MetLife?s...

Ice-breakers at offsites

Posted on September 25, 2008
A vital goal for most law-department retreats is to have the lawyers get to know each other better. Familiarity helps build trust and teamwork. One technique to help accomplish that goal, as well as to start the retreat off in...

Blogs and social networks as free sources of information useful to law-departments

Posted on September 22, 2008
A huge source of information about the law resides in blogs. The ABA Journal, Vol. 94, Sept. 2008 at 54, drawing on responses of approximately 850 lawyers to a nationwide survey, states that two percent of American lawyers maintain a...

Four points about law firms from an Economist column

Posted on September 22, 2008
Insights about huge law firms, publicly-traded law firms, their profit margins, and commercial ?nous? all appear in one item in the Economist, Aug. 23, 2008 at 55. Vast revenue at huge firms. Baker & McKenzie brought in annual revenues of...

Postmodernist views on law-department management knowledge

Posted on September 22, 2008
In the final decades of the 20th century, a backlash to Enlightenment values came to be known as postmodernism. ?Postmodernists are hostile to the idea that truth can be objective, are skeptical of the authority of science and resist the...

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