Law Department Management: In-House Counsel

Home -> Law Blog Directory -> In-House Counsel Blogs

OR PHONE (866) 635-1838 for Bankruptcy Help, (866) 635-6190 for Divorce,
(866) 635-2689 for Personal Injury or (866) 635-9402 for Criminal Defense

Find a Local Lawyer

Bankruptcy (866) 635-1838
Divorce (866) 635-6190
Personal Injury (866) 635-2689
Criminal Defense (866) 635-9402

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

Another cut at the definition of processes, this time as organizational routines

Posted on August 19, 2010
?Organizational routines can be defined as repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent actions, carried out by multiple actors.? This definition, from Admin. Sci. Q., March 2003 at 95, seems very close to the ones I have fashioned for the term ?processes?...

Growth over two years in Australia/New Zealand benchmark survey

Posted on August 19, 2010
Back in March of 2008, the ACLA/CLANZ Legal Department Benchmarking Report 2008 delivered the results of a survey of more than 125 companies and government agencies that together spend over a billion Australian dollars on lawyers each year. The report...

Estimate of US electronic data discovery market doesn?t jibe with the hoopla about spending

Posted on August 19, 2010
The 2010 Socha-Gelbmann Electronic Discovery Survey estimates the value of the electronic data discovery (EDD) ?market in 2009 to have been about $2.8 billion, up about 10% from 2008.? The quote comes from Law Tech. News, Aug. 2010 at 1....

Lawyers per billion of total law departments compared to portions of departments

Posted on August 19, 2010
My most recent column for InsideCounsel analyzes benchmark metrics for law departments in their totality compared to the same metrics for portions of law departments that serve a particular country or region. To illustrate the difference, Samsung might provide data...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

Convergence of contracts ? now, that convergence makes sense

Posted on August 17, 2010
Corp. Counsel, June 2010 at 76, tells us that Microsoft, with more than 450 lawyers, had unwittingly proliferated 1,836 different kinds of contracts. To hack away at that profusion its legal department ?launched a new centralized contract tool last year...

The synecdoche error of using ?the XYZ firm? to describe a bundle of variant behaviors

Posted on August 17, 2010
A book review in the Admin. Sci. Q., Sept. 2003 at 525, praises Emmanuel Lazega, The collegial phenomenon: the social mechanisms of cooperation among peers in a corporate law partnership (Oxford 2001). The review raised the question for me of...

Formal architecture of a legal department compared to culture and ways of working

Posted on August 17, 2010
An article in the Admin. Sci. Q., Sept. 2003 at 401, distinguishes ?architecture? from ?culture? in organizational design. The architecture of a law department consists of the formal structures for assigning work, such as a litigation group, a business unit...

Insourcing patent prep and prosc with comments on scale and benchmarks

Posted on August 17, 2010
We learn from Corp. Counsel, June 2010 at 81, that Hewlett-Packard?s law department is retaking most of its patent prosecution work in-house. Two years ago, only 32 HP patents were prosecuted internally; in 2009 the company handled 350 in-house and...

Farming patent applications out to law firms and choosing among them based on ?events?

Posted on August 17, 2010
Corp. Counsel, June 2010 at 72, explains that Xerox farms out the work on its 1,000 patent applications to several law firms (See my post of Aug. 17, 2010: HP decides to move patent work in-house.). ?When Xerox needs to...

Nuts and bolts of Six Sigma techniques to improve litigation management at Textron

Posted on August 16, 2010
A meaty article in the ACC Docket, May 2010 at 75, details how the litigation group at Textron has put Six Sigma techniques to work. Textron?s initiative aims at ?promoting continuous improvement by using specific training, processes and tools.? Several...

The unknown risks or benefits of bringing in a general counsel from outside the department

Posted on August 16, 2010
?One of the few things that management theorists agree on is that recruiting bosses from outside is something that you should avoid if you can.? This quote, from the Economist, Aug. 7, 2010 at 65, speaks to CEOs, but do...

Assuming legal benchmarks reflect technological intensity and competitiveness, more ways to measure it for an industry

Posted on August 16, 2010
Having hypothesized that the legal intensity of a company is in part a function of the pace of technological change in its industry, I have written about how we might measure the technological intensity of an industry (See my post...

Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to see whether benchmark respondents are representative

Posted on August 16, 2010
Conscientious benchmark analysts should be concerned about whether their sample of respondents fair represents the entire population. My General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey, to take one example, has nearly 100 members of the Fortune 500 but are they sufficiently similar...

Some observations on data based on Corporate Counsel?s four best legal departments

Posted on August 12, 2010
A quartet of legal departments made the finalist list in Corporate Counsel ?best law department? contest (See Corp. Counsel, June 2010 at 68.). Unable to help myself, I cobbled together their benchmarks. This little sample harbors four observations. First, lawyers...

Motivational and knowledge barriers to in-house lawyers adopting good practices of others, internal and external

Posted on August 12, 2010
Management researchers have identified both motivational barriers and knowledge barriers to knowledge transfer. Within a law department of some size, the motivational barriers show up as competitive responses between senior lawyers, lack of economic incentives, resistance to change, and turf...

Fads of chief legal officers, with 12 named, compared to trends (20 named)

Posted on August 12, 2010
A trend may be a healthy movement to adopt something new, such as more para-professionals in legal departments, matter management software, benchmark metrics, or management by objectives. A trend simply says that increasing numbers of legal departments are adopting a...

Ten most thought-provoking posts from June on LawDepartmentManagementBlog.com, IMHO

Posted on August 12, 2010
Mindsets that ought to undergird effective alternative fee arrangements (June 2, 2010) Six ways of thinking need to mesh for a law department to have confidence that a law firm will perform well under an alternative fee arrangement. The ?standard...

Linking R&D spending and patent intensity to legal spending and staffing

Posted on August 10, 2010
R&D spending as a percentage of revenue probably associates closely to total legal spending as a percentage of revenue (See my post of Aug. 13, 2008: R&D spending and its association with total legal spending; Dec. 21, 2005: IP lawyers...

Google?s Sidewiki as an example of a knowledge development tool for legal departments

Posted on August 10, 2010
For all kinds of material on law department intranets, it would be good to accumulate comments and improvements by members of the department. An example of a tool that would make this easy is Google?s Sidewiki. With it you can...

Let contract specialists handle the legwork on contracts before the legal department runs with it

Posted on August 10, 2010
A good example of delegation and pushing in-house lawyers to add the most value comes from Corp. Counsel, June 2010 at 79. During 2009, Discover Financial Services, with 34 in-house lawyers, executed 700 business technology agreements and about 100 facilities...

Whether law departments should claim revenue from patent licensing and sales

Posted on August 10, 2010
Should a legal department that supports or runs patent licensing count revenue from it and talk about being a profit center? Consider Microsoft, as described in Corp. Counsel, June 2010 at 76. The company?s intellectual property and licensing group manages...

Thoughts on fees of investment banks as the critique might apply to fees of leading law firms

Posted on August 10, 2010
Investment bank fees and elite law firm fees share a trait: altitude. In fact, the British competition agency, the Office of Fair Trading, has started an investigation into investment bank fees for equity underwriting. The Economist, June 19, 2010 at...

Perhaps convergence happens in part because law firms bow out?

Posted on August 09, 2010
A piece in Managing Ptr., July-Aug. 2010 at 49, explains how a major British law firm places its clients into a 2 x 2 portfolio matrix. The matrix sorts clients by attractiveness, which means either to strategically invest in them...

Ask your key law firm to run business simulations to educate your lawyers

Posted on August 09, 2010
Addelshaw Goddard, the UK-based law firm, lance.sapsford@addleshawgoddard.com offers an unusual perquisite for its major clients. According to a piece in Managing Ptr., July-Aug. 2010 at 49, it can ?run business simulation events designed to put in-house lawyers in the shoes...

International legal spend by law departments may vary according to whether the company is US-based or not

Posted on August 09, 2010
A phrase about international legal spending set me thinking. It comes from Managing Ptr., July-Aug. 2010 at 25, and covers highlights of Acritas? sharplegal report. Based on data provided from buyers of legal services totaling more than US$3 billion in...

Cantankerous views on a consulting group?s claims

Posted on August 09, 2010
Disclaimer: I compete with Huron Consulting Group. Huron recently announced its IMPACT? solution, which ?can save our clients anywhere from 15 to 40 percent ? directly improving their bottom line.? It rubs me the wrong way to read such a...

Part XLX of a collection of embedded metaposts

Posted on August 09, 2010
Ten more metaposts and the number of previous posts they cite (See my post of July 8, 2010: Part XLVIX). 1. American Express (See my post of July 30, 2010: American Express with 7 references.). 2. Compliance III (See my...

To improve decisions, complement a capable lawyer with decisional software

Posted on August 09, 2010
MIT Sloan Mg. Rev., Summer 2010 at 73, extols the benefits that accrue when companies match an experienced person with software that helps their decision making. ?Evidence-based decision making,? as the article refers to it, can contribute even in unstructured...

Goodbye legal guides and directories of lawyers; hello online searches and social networks

Posted on August 06, 2010
A panel of five general counsel, written about in Strategies, June 2010 at 19, proclaimed the death of traditional techniques to find outside counsel in a particular area or to validate a referral. ?All five general counsel agreed that Google...

Continued widespread negativity toward offshoring legal services

Posted on August 06, 2010
Sharp Legal Brands ? Global Elite (2009) from Acritas at 44, delves into attitudes of law departments toward their law firms outsourcing some tasks. One of the choices was ?outsourcing standardized or commoditized legal processes to companies in emerging economies...

Previous | Next

Related Law Bulletins

Insurance Department Issues Second Annual Ohio Medical Liability Closed Claim Report
COLUMBUS — The Ohio Department of Insurance has issued its secon...

Injury Verdict Upheld in Chicago Police Department Auto Accident
A verdict awarded from a personal injury case in Chicago against t...

Department Of State Update on Implementation of E3 Visas for Australians
Our office receives many questions about when the new E-3 visa cat...