In-House Counsel

Postmortems are to die for, according to one tip for saving money in-house

By Rees Morrison

An executive of the Association of Corporate Counsel compiles 75 tips for saving money in-house in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, March 2009 at 39. Number 7 goes a bit over the top I would say:

?The single greatest tool inside counsel can use to reduce costs [!!] is to do a rigorous after action or lessons learned at the conclusion of each matter. That process should focus on two elements: First, what could your team have done more effectively and more efficiently? Second, what could your company do to avoid repeating a negative situation or re-creating a good process??

The twin inquiries make sense, but I would not go so far as to elevate post-mortems to the top of the heap of money-savers nor would I advocate conducting them after every matter (See my post of May 27, 2008: post mortems with 7 references.). The knowledge-extraction effort makes sense on large matters and only on those where what is extracted is likely to be available and help on subsequent, similar matters.

Full post as published by Law Department Management on March 16, 2009 (boomark / email).