In-House Counsel

Quasi-legal work, knowledge management, technology, and offshoring all stirred together

By Rees Morrison

The general counsel of the company best known for Church?s Chicken writes in ACC Docket, Vol. 26, April 2008 at 24, about a wonderful stew of management initiatives for legal departments (See my post of Oct. 19, 2007: Church?s Chicken offshores trademark work.). I commend four of them

1. In the article, Kenneth Cutshaw explains that he recognized that Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA?s) are frequent but mostly not worth lawyer time (See my post of April 9, 2008: quasi-legal services and references cited.). A law department should not handle everything that exudes a scent of legal.

2. The method stores what people need to know, thereby improving consistency and quality along with speed. Here is knowledge management in its essence.

3. This is a good use of technology, too, because it appears to me that the offshore personnel have developed something like a document assembly package (See my posts of Jan. 4, 2006 and Feb. 6, 2007 and June 20, 2007: document assembly at CISCO for NDAs.). Obviously, too, the whole system takes advantage of the Internet and telecommunications.

4. The legal process outsourcing company emails the completed NDA to the employee at Church?s who asked for it or can send it directly to the party who should sign it (See my post of Jan. 27, 2008: CIT and offshore NDA preparation.). Thus, we have some client self-service.

An excellent goulash of management techniques (See my post of March 11, 2007: a similar example from Kraft Foods.): quasi-legal, KM, technology and offshoring.

Full post as published by Law Department Management on April 20, 2008 (boomark / email).