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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

Continued decline reported in use of law firm extranets by law departments and speculation on four reasons other than inconvenience

Posted on September 24, 2010
Serengeti?s survey data from 2009 shows that ?the use of law firm extranets decreased again this year with only 8.7% of the respondents using an extranet provided by at least one of their firms (continuing to decline each year from...

Maybe law departments should scrap evaluations of favored firms?

Posted on September 23, 2010
Evaluations of long-serving law firms by inside lawyers who work with them inevitably shift to high scores and little differentiation in results. If the lawyers did not like the firm, they would have used them less or not at all,...

Every now and then, a double blind review of the budgets and outcome on a large matter

Posted on September 23, 2010
Here is a speculative suggestion. Double blind evaluate a few matter budgets of outside counsel and the outcomes of those matters. Follow the bouncing red ball below. A lawyer who was not involved in the matter should rate the success...

If buyers now hold sway, it is not just because of corporate client cost pressures

Posted on September 23, 2010
A piece in the NYSBA J., Sept. 2010 at 28, by Silvia Hodges, includes the ubiquitous sentence: ?Ever-increasing cost pressure in companies has shifted the power from the law firms to the clients.? Wait a minute. What about management skills...

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Work hard for pomodoros ? with an egg timer ? to fight against the indulgence to procrastinate

Posted on September 22, 2010
In-house staff like to put off undesirable tasks. Everyone does. So a simple technique described in Law Practice, Sept./Oct. 2010 at 12, appeals to me, Set a wind-up egg timer to ring at 25 minutes: a chunk of time called...

Quick-reference procedures guides would help legal departments

Posted on September 22, 2010
An article in Law Practice, Sept./Oct. 2010 at 12, recommends that law firms develop ?quick-reference guides for how the various jobs in the firm are done, and by whom.? Let?s transplant the constructive suggestion to our domain. ?Start by having...

Study claims that general counsel always visit law firm websites when selecting firms

Posted on September 22, 2010
Wicker Park Group last year announced that it had surveyed general counsel at major companies and found that ?100 percent of respondents visited a law firm?s website when evaluating and purchasing legal services.? That unanimous finding boggles me but given...

Although not my view, six more arguments against competitive bidding processes

Posted on September 22, 2010
Two years ago I catalogued ten reasons not to stoop to competitive selections of outside counsel (See my post of Oct. 10, 2008: reasons to oppose competitive bids.). Still strongly in favor of that method, I recognize that opponents might...

Welcome to another general counsel with a blog, Jon Olson?s General Counsel Diary!

Posted on September 22, 2010
A couple of weeks back I welcomed a law department blawg to the fold and now need to dust off the ceremony again (See my post of Aug. 22, 2010: In-House Rants.). Jon Olson, the top lawyer for Blackbaud, has...

Relative complexity of legal departments calculated as an entropy index of diversification

Posted on September 22, 2010
An entropy index of diversification is an indicator widely employed in management research to quantify relative diversification among companies. It is based on the number and distribution of line-of-business activity in each company, which I think could be comparable to...

Three tablespoons on placement and recruitment issues

Posted on September 21, 2010
Three observations about people management surfaced from a recent discussion. One was that the merry-go-round of lawyer recruitment, departure, and new recruitment in China and Brussels causes consternation. Job hoppers command 20 percent increases and get cars or other perquisites...

Picture the advantages of graphics to convey complexity, ironically explained with text

Posted on September 21, 2010
A thoughtful article in Wired, Oct. 2010 at 66, praises drawing pictures (or exploiting other forms of visualization) to convey complex ideas ? exactly the sort that in-house counsel often deal with when multiple considerations bear on a takeover, a....

Structured settlements and a connection to, you guessed it, benchmarks

Posted on September 21, 2010
NYU?s Law School Mag., Fall 2010 at 89, has a piece about the research of a Tax Policy Fellow regarding structured settlements. With a structured settlement, ?a defendant agrees to resolve a personal-injury tort claim with periodic payments over time...

Law departments, ponder the spread of large, funded, business-like non-firm LPOs

Posted on September 21, 2010
Chock full of numbers, history, and specifics, an article in the ABA J., Sept. 2010 at 42, covers many of the entrepreneurs, and the investors who fund them, who are eating away at law firms? hegemony. Law departments that don?t...

The clear relationship, but murky benchmarks, of R&D spending and legal spending

Posted on September 20, 2010
A correlation exists, I am sure, between corporate R&D investments and legal investments. More patents mean more in-house patent lawyers or external patent counsel, larger annuity payments, more frequent licensing arrangements (See my post of Dec...

Not all benchmark respondents want to complete a survey in English

Posted on September 20, 2010
Law departments are everywhere, in every country, yet only some of their lawyers speak English, at least well enough to take an online survey. I looked back at the first 910 respondents to the General Counsel Benchmarks Survey to see...

Useful commentary for in-house counsel on brains

Posted on September 20, 2010
My former colleague at Hildebrandt, Mark Sirkin misrkin@hildebrandt.com, published a clear and useful article about the human brain ? ?a user?s guide? ? in the NYSBA J. Sept. 2010 at 38. How well in-house lawyers understand the brain and effectively....

Ten best posts of July 2010 ? or, to be honest, ten that seem to me really crunchy

Posted on September 16, 2010
No one has written to say that my retrospective selections have any value, but I keep doing them ? with thumbnail summaries ? because it pushes me to rethink my material and consider priorities of ideas. Your thoughts by email?...

Putting a firm?s value where its client?s money is -- a firm offers: pay us what you think our legal services were worth

Posted on September 16, 2010
The always-stimulating newsletter of Laurence Simons reports that UK firm CMS Cameron McKenna has unveiled a ?new marketing campaign [that] includes fixed fee options, discounts for placing all your legal work with the practice and, perhaps most frightening of the...

Managers in legal departments probably feel little concern about law schools and their preparation of graduates

Posted on September 16, 2010
A piece in the NYSBA J., Sept. 2010 at 22, by a Dean at Pace Law School considers how well law schools prepare students for the real world of practicing law. Under the topic ?Market Pressure Exposes Problems,? she asserts...

Part XLXI of a collection of embedded metaposts

Posted on September 16, 2010
Natural log one of metaposts with references (See my post of Aug. 9, 2010: Part XLX.). 1. Africa (See my post of Sept. 8, 2010: Africa with 9 references.). 2. Benchmark survey of General Counsel Metrics (See my post of...

Tension between limited core staff and deepened bench strength

Posted on September 15, 2010
In-house managers of outside counsel want as few lawyers as possible at a firm doing their work. The benefits of a core of dedicated lawyers are well known: familiarity, and competence, confidence. Work with a small group and you work...

A general counsel to live-tweet from Corporate Counsel Forum Europe

Posted on September 15, 2010
Here is a new role for a general counsel: Twitter reporter. I read in LinkedIn that ?The FT's [Financial Times] general counsel Tim Bratton will be providing live Twitter updates from next week's Corporate Counsel Forum Europe.? The Financial Times...

Three thoughts law firm budgets for matters: time period, zero average variance and ranges

Posted on September 13, 2010
Budgets of time ? two months to complete the debt offering ? may be less susceptible to gaming and slippage than budgets of cost ? $85,000 to complete the debt offering. On the other hand, cost is more in the...

I stand corrected: mistakes confessed by this blogger and an admonition to all managers

Posted on September 13, 2010
To err is human, to forgive the divine right of blog readers. When I realize I have been wrong on something, I should admit it and take the more correct view. All managers should strive for the same humility and...

Thanks to those who subscribe to this blawg by RSS feed and an invitation to you others

Posted on September 13, 2010
My loyal readers don?t miss anything because they subscribe through one of many services that handle RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. During the past week, Feedburner tells me that this blog averaged 871 feed subscribers and 148 of them visited...

Exponential increases that managers of law departments encounter

Posted on September 13, 2010
A previous post collected my references here to linear increases, where one number rises in step with another number. As you add lawyers, your compensation paid rises linearly (See my post of July 25, 2010: 11 references to linear changes.)....

Attention providers of software to legal departments: I will blog about sales to named legal departments

Posted on September 12, 2010
Charles Christian and his informative Orange Rag, which targets mostly law firms, had in the most recent issue a note that ?eBay has selected CT TyMetrix 360 as its global legal spend management platform. eBay?s legal department currently works with....

A resource for legal departments to find ?distinguished neutrals? ? arbitrators and mediators

Posted on September 12, 2010
The Executive Director, Darren Lee, of the National Association of Distinguished Neutrals, wrote me. I looked briefly at the group?s website which claims that ?With over 400 members throughout the United States, the NADN is the largest public roster of...

A possible RFP question: what has your firm done to protect against hackers?

Posted on September 12, 2010
It is too easy to adorn RFPs with questions that do not in the crunch make a palpable difference to the in-house counsel who evaluate the RFPs and choose firms. Experience, depth of talent, subjective impressions of quality, and cost...

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