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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

A misnomer: institutional knowledge of firms is mostly individual knowledge

Posted on September 12, 2010
Although much touted, serious doubts exist in my mind about the efficacy of so-called institutional knowledge of law firms. I have no doubt that individual partners who work on a series of matters over several years with a company come...

Law departments, pessimism and the spirit of compliance

Posted on September 12, 2010
Jeff Kaplan, guest blogger, takes up the ongoing question ?whether a company?s compliance and ethics officer should report administratively to the general counsel. (Informational, as opposed to administrative, reporting to boards by C&E officers is now fairly pervasive...

Is it typical to include SEC filing fees, stock exchange registrations, or compliance training costs in budgets?

Posted on September 12, 2010
One of my benchmark participants asked how common is to include in the general counsel?s budget costs for SEC filing fees for 10-Qs and 10-Ks, registration fees for the New York Stock Exchange, or costs for third-party vendors that supply...

Four more legal departments and their assemblage of posts (Amex, Bank of America, Barclays, HSBC, and Pfizer)

Posted on September 09, 2010
One tiny game I have been playing has been to search this blog for references to large law departments when they submit data for my General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey. Recently, Bank of America did so I played the pied...

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Sony Ericsson? legal department: convergence, IP rights specialists, and joint venture

Posted on September 09, 2010
Here are four points drawn from Legal Strat. Rev., Summer 2010 at 23, which interviewed Sony Ericsson?s general counsel, Jonathan Pearl. (As an editorial note, these points ? and other collections of points about a particular legal department ? don?t...

A view that the economic slump has boosted the stock of in-house counsel

Posted on September 09, 2010
Cassandra?s dominated the past year in terms of predicting layoffs by legal departments, doing more with less, marginalization by cost cutting. But a contrary view peeked through the clouds in an interview from Legal Strat. Rev., Summer 2010 at 20....

Three noteworthy points from IBM?s legal department: primacy of talent, client education through intranets, and offshoring

Posted on September 09, 2010
A recent post summarizes IBM?s establishment of global legal delivery units (See my post of Sept. 9, 2010: two centers with dozens of lawyers.). The same article from which that development came, Legal Strat. Rev., Summer 2010 at 14, contains...

IBM restructures its legal department to set up global legal delivery centers

Posted on September 09, 2010
An intriguing article in Legal Strat. Rev., Summer 2010 at 14, describes how IBM?s legal team of 500 people has created a ?legal delivery center? in Michigan and one in Dublin, Ireland. I can foresee at some time a center...

The general counsel of IBM highlights three transitional challenges for lawyers who move in-house

Posted on September 09, 2010
Robert Weber, the general counsel of IBM, assumed that position in 2006 when he left his partnership at Jones Day. He commented on the adjustments he had to make to succeed in-house and pointed out three in Legal Strat. Rev.,...

A Taiwanese legal department with two other unusual features

Posted on September 09, 2010
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TMSC) is the world?s largest dedicated semiconductor foundry, with $10 billion in revenue in 2008. An American lawyer, Dr. Richard Thurston, heads its nearly 70 full-and part-time legal department employees, according to Legal Strat...

Super set of 17 posts from the SuperConference

Posted on September 08, 2010
At a conference, it is easy to daydream, lose yourself with your iPhone, edit a memorandum, and generally miss what the panelists say. Or, you can focus on extracting from even the dullest presentation nuggets that inspire you about law...

Deep down, law firm leaders may not want law departments to improve

Posted on September 08, 2010
I am not trying to provoke. My logic is that partners may sense that the less effective a legal department, the more it needs outside legal assistance. Obviously, lack of internal capability in specialized areas of law results in more...

In the dark about law departments in Africa

Posted on September 08, 2010
References on this blog to legal departments in Africa are hard to find. I am sure hundreds and hundreds of them thrive and manage very well, but their exploits have only rarely come to my attention (See my post of...

An easy way to arrange for e-rooms and extranets through a specialist provider

Posted on September 08, 2010
You don?t have to design, host and maintain your own extranets. Service providers will let you contract to user their extranet capabilities ? also known as e-rooms, but there may be a difference in definitions ? and make the step...

More examples pulled together of legal departments pulling together

Posted on September 08, 2010
Hard as it may be to get traction for a change within a single legal department, it is significantly harder to corral several law departments to march in one direction. Yet it happens. Several general counsel agree to do something...

A look back at posts about the costs of electronic discovery of documents

Posted on September 08, 2010
It bedevils me that so much is written about the incredible costs of electronic discovery, yet little empirical research publicly available helps us get behind the headlines to the fine print of reality. Even so, I have written quite a...

Ways current and future to assay the relative quality (or attractiveness) of posts on this blog

Posted on September 06, 2010
Readers might want to know which of the posts on this blog offer the most value. I wish I knew! Meanwhile here are some methods to move toward an assessment of a post?s relative quality. Each month I look back...

Attrition as a byproduct of major promotions: a study that needs to be done

Posted on September 06, 2010
It seems inevitable that when a lawyer is promoted to be a direct report of the general counsel or to be the general counsel, disappointment ? sometimes bitter discontent ? plagues those who believed they had a shot at it...

Lessons learned by a veteran about contract management software

Posted on September 06, 2010
Kevin Potts, VP of Product Management and Marketing at Emptoris, a leading provider of contract management software, left a hefty comment on one of my recent posts. His lessons learned deserve wider play and I couldn?t resist some editorial remarks.....

How many of your lawyers have left and become a public company general counsel?

Posted on September 06, 2010
One of the speakers at a panel at the InsideCounsel Superconference was the General Counsel of Johnson Controls. He said with evident pride that over the past 20 years seven people had left the law department and become the general...

World?s most advanced study of legal department staff and spending benchmarks

Posted on September 06, 2010
The General Counsel Metrics study, exceeding 600 legal departments around the world, has elevated fundamental management metrics to a new level. Far more global than Hildebrandt?s, more balanced by company size than Empsight?s, with much broader coverage than ALM?s, and...

Three priority levels for contracts handled by a legal department

Posted on September 06, 2010
The most important contracts handled by a legal department are those with customers. Whoever wants to purchase your company?s goods or services deserves the most attention and creativity. No customers, no company. Second in priority come contracts with suppliers...

Talent management techniques, including on-boarding and competency ladders

Posted on August 25, 2010
One panelist at the InsideCounsel SuperConference was the General Counsel of Johnson Controls, Jerry Okarma. His 55-lawyer legal department has a standardized on-boarding process for lawyers around the world. Otherwise, he said, there would be lots of different understandings...

Management ideas from a speaker (trademarks, newsletters, and business plans)

Posted on August 25, 2010
The General Counsel of LG Electronics spoke at the InsideCounsel SuperConference on May 25 th. I note three of his practices. One is that his lawyers train ad agencies on the basics of intellectual property, such as trademarks and copyrights....

A two-by-two framework to categorize knowledge characteristics of a law department

Posted on August 25, 2010
An article several years ago laid out an organizing framework for knowledge in the form of a basic four-cell matrix. Visualize theory and practice as labels for the two rows and content and process as labels for the two columns....

Six poor reasons why in-house candidates aren?t promoted to serve as the new general counsel

Posted on August 25, 2010
With posts here and there about the odds of an internal promotion to the top legal spot compared to a recruitment of a new person to that position, let?s pause to state the shaky reasons why recruitment happens more than...

Tracking patterns of telephone calls by in-house lawyers in partial lieu of tracking time

Posted on August 22, 2010
It would be an easy matter, technically, to log all calls made by a lawyer to a client within the company and all intra-company calls from clients to the lawyer. This recording would disregard all content, storing and aggregating only...

Another blog on law departments ? In-House Rants ? and a nice word for this one

Posted on August 22, 2010
Tim Corcoran, who recently left Altman Weil to join HubbardOne, posted a meaty piece on what he reads. In the midst were four blogs related to legal departments, including those of the ACC and Law.com. Third, Tim brought to my...

Solid steps to consider if your legal department handles a steady flow of contracts

Posted on August 22, 2010
The General Counsel of LG Electronics spoke at the InsideCounsel Super Conference on May 25 th. The subsidiary he serves racks up $6 billion in sales yet has only five lawyers. He said there was no headquarters legal group so...

LPO providers in the Philippines, with seven named

Posted on August 22, 2010
I culled the ideas, and much of the phrasing, of what follows from an email message dated Aug. 16th from ValueNotes. In the last four to five years, the Philippines has emerged as a leading LPO destination, second only to...

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