In-House Counsel

Upscale research into how large companies purchase corporate legal services

By Rees Morrison

The Program on the Legal Profession, based at Harvard Law School, is collaborating with the American Bar Foundation (ABF) on a project to examine the processes by which the legal departments of large corporations go about finding, selecting, and evaluating outside counsel. The project's approach is to use in-depth interviews with general counsel of Fortune 500 companies, publicly available data, and a survey of general counsel to develop, in the words of the ABF?s 2007 Annual Report at 39, "the first systematic examination of the structure of purchasing of corporate legal services."

I applaud academic thinking applied to the management issues of corporate law departments, because there has been too little of it (See my posts of July 4, 2006: empirical law department research; Oct. 23, 2005: the dearth of academic, empirical research; and May 5, 2006 ? academics who care about law departments.). Mostly I hope that the findings of the project bring fresh perspectives and insights.

Full post as published by Law Department Management on February 24, 2008 (boomark / email).