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.
Post Frequency: 6.6/day Last Entry: November 20, 2009 at 04:37:09 Recent Entries: 2040
By Rees Morrison
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Plenum spaces and pony walls: ways lighting and sound affect the productivity of workers
Posted on November 20, 2009?Countless studies show that proper lighting and acoustic levels play a key role in increasing workplace productivity.? The point is made in an article in Law Practice, Nov./Dec. 2009 at 39 by experts at PDR Corp, that it is better...
Four more environmentally progressive ideas that legal departments might adopt
Posted on November 20, 2009An article in Legal Tech. News, Vol. 16, Nov. 2009 at 39, describes the environmental efforts of a 40-person law firm. It adds several ideas, and quantifies some of their benefits, to my previous collection (See my post of March...
To strengthen your company and improve the quality of your work, train your clients
Posted on November 19, 2009An earlier post today describes a method of training, spaced education, that could help in-house lawyers when they train clients (See my post of Nov. 19, 2009: spaced education.). To find other instances where this blog refers to client education,...
Train clients or members of the legal department using ?spaced education?
Posted on November 19, 2009People learn much more effectively if they spread out their learning over a period of time, rather than cramming, and if they are tested as they proceed, rather than at the end. Those are the two primary tenets of what...
One of this year?s Nobel prizes for economics speaks to the make-or-buy choice for legal services
Posted on November 19, 2009That all economic transactions are costly in terms of finding, contracting with, and enforcing the arrangement we know from the seminal work of Ronald Coase, winner of the 1991 Nobel prize for economics. Finding the right price to pay among...
Some recent firsts on or about this blog
Posted on November 19, 2009If bloggers don?t tinker and take chances, their blog dries up and blows away. So I keep trying out new things, and welcome ideas for more (See my post of Feb. 20, 2009: first blook, metapost, and article on blog;...
Why set restrictions on firms if you can?t monitor or enforce them?
Posted on November 18, 2009Law departments can say they reject certain practices by law firms, but if no way exists to detect the improper behavior, why encrust your outside counsel guidelines with a toothless prohibition? A leading example of thundering against the wind is...
Problems with asking in-house attorneys to cut their individual budgets from the prior year?s level
Posted on November 18, 2009A financial institution a few years ago told each lawyer who managed outside counsel to reduce by 10 percent the amount the lawyer had approved the previous year. That mandate makes little sense. Consider five unwanted consequences. Frustration ? in-house...
A hyperpost ? collection of metaposts ? on general counsel
Posted on November 18, 2009Hundreds, if not thousands, of posts on this blog refer to general counsel. Most use the term ?general counsel? to stand in for the entire legal department, only a few pertain specifically to characteristic traits of person as an individual...
Two more speculations on consequences most in-house lawyers growing up in law firms
Posted on November 18, 2009A recent post suggested six personality traits of lawyers that inhibit change (See my post of Nov. 12, 2009: six traits that inhibit change.). Andrew Davis of Exari left a good comment, and I thought I would stand ?on the...
Vexatious value: my article on law firm value and eleven propositions
Posted on November 17, 2009Eleven of my ruminations on the vexing issue of law firm value are laid out in my latest article, in the National Law Journal, Nov. 9, 2009 at 8. Click here to download Download 09-11-10 Rees Morrison Value In-House NLJ...
Is a benchmark metric of average number of matters per firm meaningful?
Posted on November 17, 2009No But allow me to elaborate. If you retain fewer firms, the average number of matters will rise, all other things being equal. If you define matters more broadly, the number will fall. If you allow firms to charge time...
Seven variations on rate freezes from the traditional choice of one or two years
Posted on November 17, 2009A no-increase-in-rates mandate for law firms does not have to be limited to the choice of whether the freeze is for one year or two. Many variations and combinations of the following ideas are conceivable. 1. If any lawyer works...
More books, from a while ago, about effective operations in legal departments
Posted on November 17, 2009To the approximately 28 books I have already found, Google?s book search added a few more about legal department operations and management. I have listed all the information that Google provides. Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education-New England Law Institute - Corporate...
Lists on Twitter and their use for in-house counsel
Posted on November 16, 2009I Twitter infrequently although I see steadily increasing traffic here from Twitter. When people retweet one of my items or write their own with a link, readers click through. Today I noticed that my tweets are on three ?lists.? Here...
?Radiohead billing? or pay what you think the law firm?s service was worth
Posted on November 16, 2009The band Radiohead lets fans download its music and pay whatever they wish ? including nothing. Janet Moore janet@globalRainmaking.com mentions this method of pricing services in Strategies: J. of Legal Marketing, Vol. 11, Oct. 2009 at 10, and I played...
Intriguing ideas from two parts of a three-part lump sum arrangement with a law firm
Posted on November 16, 2009What do you think of this sentence in an article about alternative fee arrangements on the international scene? ?[O]ne large European multinational paid a lump sum in exchange for three things: first, a hotline service from the multinational?s legal department...
Beyond 5,000 posts, and a menagerie of metrics about my RSS feed readers
Posted on November 16, 2009Readers who add me to their RSS feed are near and dear to me. One or two do a day and it cheers me up. ?Now, there?s someone,? I say to myself, ?who has a discriminating eye for blog quality!?...
Which benchmarks in-house counsel find most useful ? take my poll before you peek at the early results
Posted on November 15, 2009Only eight people have taken the moment or two to complete my poll, to the right, about the most useful benchmark metrics for their legal department. Do it now; don?t read the answer below! Seven of the eight respondents (87.5%)...
Sixth set of blogs that have referred visitors to Law Department Management Blog
Posted on November 15, 2009This post continues my series of 53 thanks. I appreciate it when other blogs or websites cite one of my posts or include me on their blog roll. In the past three months I ran across another 17 (See my...
5,000 posts (!), a million+ words (!!), and 55 months (!!!) on this blog
Posted on November 13, 2009Huzzah!!!! This is my 5,000th post, just as I leave for a week?s vacation in London. During the 55 months since this blog began late in February 2005, an average of three posts a day have appeared. The total number...
Software providers to legal departments sometimes partner with consulting firms trained on their products
Posted on November 13, 2009If you visit the website of Mitratech, one of the leading providers of software for legal departments, you may notice the coterie of consultants who have been trained on how to help develop, plan and implement the TeamConnect software. Nine...
The holy grail, ineffable and unattainable, of an ROI calculation for an entire legal department
Posted on November 13, 2009?A particular bugbear of mine is the application of financial metrics to nonfinancial activities. Anxious to justify themselves rather than be outsourced, many service functions (such as IT, HR, and legal) try to devise a return on investment number to...
Clarification on the amount of time at work that general counsel are committed by others
Posted on November 13, 2009I wrote once about general counsel and the significant percentage of time scheduled for them by others, time that is not in their control (See my post of Sept. 8, 2008: you need a good administrative assistant to manage your...
If we can?t nail down historical ?facts,? we can?t presume to convey best practices
Posted on November 13, 2009An interview of the eminent historian John Lukacs by Historically Speaking, Vol. 10, Sept. 2009 at 14, makes two observations about historical knowledge that apply to legal department knowledge about management practices. Lukacs points out that ?we think in words,...
A framework for improved decisions
Posted on November 13, 2009Thomas Davenport, in the Harvard Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, Nov. 2009 at 116, suggests that organizations can improve decision making in four steps. Put in terms of a legal department, they are: 1. ?Managers should begin by listing the decisions...
Criticism of the reporting lines of Bank of America?s beleaguered general counsel
Posted on November 13, 2009Given the legal tar pits engulfing BofA, you might think that its general counsel would be and has been the right-hand of the CEO. Wrong on both. Edward O?Keefe, the new general counsel for the bank?s 525 lawyers, reports only...
A prompt-acceptance advantage to be on a panel, but quite a drubbing on fees!
Posted on November 13, 2009The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), revisiting its coveted roster of preferred firms, designed a fast track. If an invited firm agrees quickly to the terms of the new agreement, which extends for three years and emphasizes fixed fees and...
Siemens? general counsel also acts as the CEO of its U.S. division (sic)
Posted on November 13, 2009Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, Nov. 2009 at 15, says that Peter Solmssen, Siemen?s general counsel has also been acting CEO of its U.S. division since September. I find that dual role troubling. Practically speaking, how can someone do a decent...
The in-house career conundrum, but some finer points about paths
Posted on November 12, 2009For most in-house counsel, how the general counsel can clear a career path for them is a conundrum. According to Cheryl Solomon, general counsel of the Gucci Group, if a lawyer has primary responsibility for a major business unit it...
Six personality reasons why change may be particularly difficult in legal departments
Posted on November 12, 2009If you are a general counsel frustrated by how hard it is to change ways of working in your department, perhaps it is some solace to understand why. From my experience as a consultant to legal departments and therefore a...
In broad terms, how general counsel allocate their time
Posted on November 12, 2009For several years I have shown a slide during speeches that estimates the percentage of time general counsel spend (1) serving the Board, CEO and peers, (2) handling their own legal work, (3) guiding other lawyers in-house on substantive legal...
End of year offer for law department management blooks ? buy one, get two free
Posted on November 11, 2009My three blog books (outside counsel management, talent management and structure) each compile several hundred posts on their topic, offer additional commentary to the structured layout, offer recommendations, and include many forms of indexes and search tools...
Survivor trauma and sometimes the laid-off are better off
Posted on November 11, 2009Your law department had to lay off a lawyer or two. Is that the end of it? No. A long-term study of employees at Boeing over a decade of deep downsizing found that ?survivors can suffer just as much, if...
The larger the legal department, the less the general counsel does hands-on legal work
Posted on November 11, 2009During a discussion on management with Cheryl Solomon, general counsel of the Gucci Group, she mentioned that she does quite a bit of actual legal work. It includes review of contracts, negotiations, pleadings, and work product created by other lawyers...
Are general counsel of moderate-size departments personally involved in half the choices of law firms?
Posted on November 11, 2009Cheryl Solomon, general counsel of the Gucci Group, leads a team of 30 lawyers and paralegals worldwide. I interviewed her recently about a number of management topics. One was my belief that general counsel only occasionally get involved with retentions...
Benchmark goals change behavior and sometimes reveal the plasticity of numbers
Posted on November 11, 2009"You can't prevent people from gaming numbers, no matter how outstanding your organization. The moment you choose to manage by a metric, you invite your managers to manipulate it. Metrics are only proxies for performance. Someone who has learned how....
A new country for LPO suppliers, this time New Zealand
Posted on November 10, 2009Nearly all my posts about offshore legal resources relate to India. Still, I have mentioned similar undertakings in a number of other countries yet here is a new entrant: New Zealand (See my post of April 13, 2008: Malaysia and...
A bracelet that tells you when you are too emotionally caught up in a decision or situation
Posted on November 10, 2009Someday soon, in-house counsel might wear an emotion-sensing system designed to help them keep a cool head when negotiating, litigating, or dealing with obnoxious people. The Rationalizer, still under development by Philips, consists of a bracelet that measures the wearer?s...
Merged law departments sometimes face limits on how much the cost basis can increase
Posted on November 10, 2009Posts before this one have dealt with the effects of a merger mostly in terms of law department headcount (See my post of Jan. 16, 2009: layoffs after mergers with 9 references.). Another post-method method by which companies squeeze out...
Net rating scores based on evaluations of outside counsel at GE Canada
Posted on November 10, 2009When lawyers at GE Canada rate external counsel, they state how likely they would recommend the external lawyer to someone else. As explained in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, Oct. 2009 in an ad supplement by Ogilvy Renault after page...
A heavy subject, weighting survey responses and other data
Posted on November 10, 2009Raw numbers have some usefulness, but much more if they are fitted into a context by being weighted. So, for instance, 100 patent applications filed in 2009 tells something about a law department, but that number weighted by R&D spending...
Arguments for and against tracking internal time
Posted on November 10, 2009The simplest time tracking system asks lawyers to estimate the percentage of time they worked on individual matters each time period, such as a week or month (See my post of Nov. 22, 2008: internal time tracking with 16 references.)....
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #124 ? posts longa, morsels breva
Posted on November 10, 2009General counsel compete with their peer executives in a company. Humans being what they are, proud and possessive, it follows that general counsel compete at least some of the time with their peer executives. Notwithstanding the internal exchange of legal...
Consumer surplus, another term for ?value? from law firms
Posted on November 10, 2009?Consumer surplus is the aggregate net benefit that consumers receive from using goods or services after subtracting the price they paid.? This definition of an economist?s term, from MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 51, Fall 2009 at 95, hearkens back...
Costs of arbitrators as compared to costs of presenting the arbitration case (almost 1 to 4)
Posted on November 08, 2009The International Chamber of Commerce studied the distribution of costs in arbitrations between arbitrator and institutional charges (hiring the judges) and lawyer fees, expenses related to witnesses and experts, and document charges (putting on the case)...
Licensing patents may be a pot o? gold for a few, but it?s usually over the rainbow
Posted on November 08, 2009General counsel may seek to drive some revenue as a result of their department?s patent licensing efforts, but the imagined returns are four leaf clovers. An article in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 51, Fall 2009 at 72, states that...
Metrics on parade: broad benchmarks, specialized data, departmental numbers and ad hoc requests
Posted on November 08, 2009I have been compiling a guide to law department benchmarks. While researching it, I realized that this blog has hundreds of metrics, but only some of them fall into a category most general counsel would call benchmarks. They would define...
Going beyond your skill and knowledge level is not a risk just for in-house lawyers
Posted on November 08, 2009Recently I took in-house counsel to task who fail to consult with outside lawyers if they get in too deep. Ken Grady in turn took me to task and made some good points. ?Do in-house counsel err from time to...
Pros and cons of Requests for Services from clients
Posted on November 08, 2009I have worked recently with a legal department that requires clients to complete an RLA (Request for Legal Advice) which goes into the department?s matter management system. If more than a couple of hours of work will be needed from...
Overall performance evaluations less useful than aggregated partial evaluations
Posted on November 08, 2009I often see, and as often doubt the value of, one particular question at the end of forms for in-house lawyers to evaluate the firms they use: ?Overall, how would you rate the firm??(See my post of Nov. 16, 2005:...
A neat way to keep your outside counsel guidelines current: embed online references
Posted on November 08, 2009Rather than distribute hardcopy updates to outside counsel guidelines (environment forbid!) or even tediously email them items that have to be updated, move into the 21st century. Insert where appropriate in your guidelines language to the effect of ?We expect...
Malpractice recoveries by law departments
Posted on November 08, 2009Among the deepest and darkest secrets of law department land, what they recover in malpractice claims lies hidden and buried. Law firms want nothing to come to light and law departments for their part are probably embarrassed. Even preening departments...
Capable general counsel combine leadership and management
Posted on November 06, 2009?We can make the distinction between leadership and management conceptually, but in practice I don?t think we should.? An excellent point for general counsel, made by management guru Henry Mintzberg in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 51, Fall 2009 at...
Global contracting staff outnumber legal staff by two to one (CSC) ? a useful metric?
Posted on November 06, 2009Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) has, according to an article in the Practical Law J., Vol. 1, Nov. 2009 at 71, ?over 400 global contracting staff.? Its legal group has around 100 lawyers, which means around 200 total legal staff if...
Evaluating recent posts on evaluations of law firms
Posted on November 06, 2009Long, long ago I zeroed in on law firm assessments (See my post of Nov. 16, 2005: evaluations of law firms with 9 references.). Since way back in ?05, this blog has accumulated many more posts on the topic. Examples...
Report-outs that out lawyers who flout e-billing rules for outside counsel
Posted on November 06, 2009E-billing software applies rules to invoices, such as ?no person can bill more than 10 hours in a day,? or ?time of unapproved billers will be rejected.? But rules are made to be broken, and some in-house lawyers consistently break...
When in-house counsel assess the performance of a firm, push them to give specific examples
Posted on November 06, 2009We are all defensive, so if a law department lawyer criticizes a law firm, the partner who hears the criticism (and tries dutifully to acknowledge it, appreciate it, take it to heart as constructive advice) inwardly may seethe and deny....
Evaluate firms on attributes, but also ask your attorneys to say how important those attributes are
Posted on November 06, 2009If you ask your lawyers to evaluate the importance of various attributes of law firms ? responsiveness, knowledge of the law, creativity and the like ? you should also ask your lawyers to indicate the importance to them of the...
Wal-Mart to require outside law firms to have flextime policies ? over-reaching?
Posted on November 06, 2009The National Law Journal reports a new requirement from Wal-Mart?s legal group on its outside counsel. ?Law firms must have flextime policies if they want to do legal work for Wal-Mart.? Associate general counsel Joseph West told an audience at...
In-house lawyers may deal constantly with corporate policies, but win no friends
Posted on November 06, 2009"Twenty-nine percent of the corporate lawyers [attending a conference] believe policies and procedures are a necessary evil -- but believe they are evil. Forty-nine percent believe the policies and procedures are not completely worthless in influencing employee behavior, but almost...
Part XLII of a collection of embedded metaposts
Posted on November 05, 2009Ten more embedded metaposts (See my post of Oct. 25, 2009: Part XLI), each bedraped with the number of its back references. 1. CEO and influence on law department (See my post of Oct. 28, 2009: CEOs with 27 references.)....
Prospects for a reliable pool of comments about the performance of law firms
Posted on November 05, 2009We are in the midst of another broad-scale effort to compile law department evaluations of law firms. This time the Association of Corporate Counsel leads the charge, and claims early in the battle to have lots of cavalry behind it....
How to push good faith efforts by in-house lawyers to do a decent job on law firm evaluations
Posted on November 05, 2009As with tracking time, entering data into matter management systems and capturing know-how, in-house lawyers see very little benefit to themselves, individually, for their administrative effort of evaluating law firms. They know who they like and don?t like and the...
How can matter management systems average an ROI of 36% of outside counsel spend?
Posted on November 05, 2009?Average reported savings from using matter management systems were 36.8% of outside legal spending.? Incredible, and not to be believed. The claim comes from the 2008 ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey, which obtained survey responses from hundreds of ACC-member law...
Ten posts that interested this blogger the most from September 2009
Posted on November 03, 2009Click on the links to read the full post. No grounds for ?moving away from the RFP mentality of too many law departments? (Sept. 9, 2009) Contrary to some views, RFPs are underutilized as a tool to learn from the...
A choice for evaluations of law firms: by passage of time, at conclusion of major matters, or a mix
Posted on November 03, 2009Those legal departments whose attorneys grade law firms most commonly do the exercise every six months or once a year. As an alternative choice, departments can follow a policy of evaluations when major matters end. My objection to semi-annual or...
Do you know enough to know when you don?t know enough and ought to retain outside counsel?
Posted on November 03, 2009?Am I competent to handle this problem or should I check with outside counsel?? Regrettably, some in-house counsel choose poorly. More regrettably, the less competent lawyers choose the most poorly. ?When we lack a particular skill we not only overestimate...
?Do more with less? ? heard all the time but dare we probe a bit?
Posted on November 03, 2009Any general counsel on a panel, many journalists finishing off an article on in-house departments, and all consultants in pitches to general counsel scatter this phrase everywhere. Gospel it has become that workloads are up and resources are down. I....
Pay for software now, but maybe wait years for organizational changes to take full advantage of it
Posted on November 03, 2009"It usually takes five to seven years for IT investments to produce substantial returns because it typically takes that long for companies to make the organisational changes needed to capitalise on the new technology,? opines the Economist, Oct. 24, 2009...
Twists and turns when general counsel measure the accuracy of law firm budgets for matters
Posted on November 03, 2009?Comparing individual law firms? forecasts against the company?s actual spend with those firms is a useful key performance indicator.? That belief ? matter budgets compared to actuals tell something ? comes from an article in the Practical Law J., Vol...
Possible purchase by unit of UK bank of CPA Global, one of the largest Indian LPOs
Posted on November 02, 2009Guest author Bob Unterberger sent me this item, which I edited slightly. The UK financial giant Lloyd's Bank is close to buying CPA Global, one of India's largest LPOs. The New York Times reports that Lloyd's will purchase CPA Global...
Corporate policies and legal departments
Posted on November 02, 2009Corporate policies cover many, many activities of company employees. They make up one form of codified behavior (See my post of Oct. 10, 2006: policies of law departments compared to practices; and Oct. 25, 2006: guidelines compared to policies.). Sometimes...
Six practical steps to kill the kudzu of corporate policies
Posted on November 02, 2009In-house lawyers who have a masochistic streak might swing a scythe against the invasive species known as corporate policies (See my post of Nov. 2, 2009: corporate policies with 12 references.). James Nortz, the director of compliance for Bausch and...
Help wanted on blog posts about records retention and legal department management
Posted on November 02, 2009Send me some bloggable information! Become a guest author or an anonymous contributor! Despite nearly 5,000 posts, this blog doesn?t have much about the role of in-house counsel and corporate document retention practices. Widely scattered posts offer little about this...
To cut information overload, general counsel like short lists of things to do or consider
Posted on November 02, 2009Numbered lists of steps ? 10 ways to reduce outside counsel costs, for example ? appeal to many people. A list presupposes that the compiler gave some thought to which points were most important. A list implicitly claims that who...
You?re goofing off if you read this post while at work
Posted on November 02, 2009A study done in 2007 found that ?our minds drift away from our tasks fully one-third of the time.? That tidbit from Wired, Nov. 2009 at 56, set my thoughts to wandering ? about moments of time off at work....
Strategic plans for legal departments revisited on length and implementation
Posted on October 30, 2009The Practical Law J., Vol. 1, Nov. 2009 at 70, describes several aspects of the 100-lawyer department of Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), primarily those related to its current strategic plan (See my post of June 25, 2008: strategic plan with...
Shortcomings of the ubiquitous benchmark metric, lawyers per billion of revenue
Posted on October 30, 2009An article in the Practical Law J., Vol. 1, Nov. 2009 at 70, offers a benchmark calculation about Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). That calculation creates an opportunity to reflect on the shortcomings of the common benchmark, lawyers per billion...
Credentials and professionalism on the ascendancy in legal departments
Posted on October 29, 2009Professionalism runs rampant in legal departments ? not just lawyers. More and more members of legal departments at least have the opportunity for additional education and recognition as a trained person in their area, a hallmark of professionalism. This idea...
A benchmark based on an index of how distributed is a department?s spend on external counsel
Posted on October 29, 2009An article in the Admin. Sciences Quarterly, Vol. 54, June 2009 at 282, describes an index to measure how even or skewed distributions of nonprofits funding were from multiple sources. The same formula should describe the distribution of spending by....
Definition of a strategic plan and some implications for general counsel
Posted on October 29, 2009An article in the Admin. Sciences Quarterly, Vol. 54, June 2009 at 272, somewhat ponderously defines strategic plans as ?formal documents that articulate organizational goals and the means by which to achieve them over a specified period of time and....
How to tell if a correlation between two sets of numbers is statistically significant
Posted on October 29, 2009I have written frequently about correlations (See my post of Feb.13, 2008: correlations with 16 references.). What I haven?t explained is how to find out whether a correlation is one that you can rely on. The statistician?s term is ?statistically...
Sponsored links when you Google matter management systems and legal departments
Posted on October 28, 2009On a lark, I ran a Google search for the combination of ?law? and ?matter management system.? In the sponsored links at the top, first came LexisNexis? CounselLink, followed at number four by Bridgeway?s eCounsel, and number six EAG?s CaseTrack....
CEOs vis-à-vis the legal department
Posted on October 28, 2009Several posts point out the vulnerability of general counsel when the CEO leaves (See my post of May 14, 2005: GC vulnerable when CEO is removed; June 20, 2007: most risk to GC when new CEO comes from outside company;...
Punctuated equilibrium in legal departments
Posted on October 28, 2009The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould popularized the theory that evolution proceeds from relative dormancy sometimes by leaps and bounds. Punctuated equilibrium, Gould named it, and the idea spread far beyond fossils and Darwin. Punctuated equilibrium may be an apt metaphor...
Open-source software may actually be open-wallet software
Posted on October 28, 2009By guest author Steven Levy of Lexician. Recently the Association of Corporate Counsel hosted a session titled ?"Inexpensive/Free Applications for Your Law Department.? The speakers extolled the virtues of open source software as ?free applications.? Every parent understands that there...
Principal determinants of the number of direct reports to a general counsel
Posted on October 27, 2009As I write in my blook on law department structure, ?In U.S. law departments, the number of direct reports to the general counsel rises gradually with the number of lawyers, but plateaus at around six.? What accounts for the number...
Whether general counsel can be objective about how they managed and why
Posted on October 27, 2009"The idea that those who actually took part in great events or lived through particular times have superior understanding to those who come later is a deeply held yet wrongheaded one." This quote from a book by Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous...
Philosophical views on our ability to express and organize law department management
Posted on October 27, 2009This blog aspires to bring more understanding to the art of legal department management. To that end, I have tried to define relevant terms, sketch applicable concepts, and organize the 4,900 posts in ways useful to general counsel. The hill...
Metrics are just numbers; benchmarks are metrics that compare you and inform you
Posted on October 27, 2009Northeast Utilities is a utility holding company whose units serve about 1.9 million customers, generate revenues of about $5.8 billion, and employ about 6,200 workers. General Counsel Gregory Butler heads a team of 40 lawyers and 18 staff. In the...
Part XLI of a collection of embedded metaposts
Posted on October 25, 2009Ten more embedded metaposts (See my post of Oct 4, 2009: Part XXXX), each roped to the number of its back references. 1. Appearance, looks (See my post of March 26, 2008: physical appearance with 11 references.). 2. Discounts IV...
Get invoices in final form, not drafts that are then resent after review
Posted on October 25, 2009One senior in-house lawyer I know likes to get invoices in draft form. His defense of that practice is that once a firm sends a bill in final form, any write offs or changes cause internal problems for the firm....
Some unpleasant sides of people management in legal departments
Posted on October 25, 2009This blog has put its boots on and waded into the ugly stream of bad interactions among co-workers. After all, in legal teams as elsewhere frustrations and grievances lurk and often spread (See my post of Oct. 24, 2006: rumors...
?Legal process outsourcing is a $4 billion industry,? according to Xerox?s general counsel
Posted on October 25, 2009That quote comes from Don Liu, general counsel of Xerox, in David Galbenski, Unbound: How Entrepreneurship is Dramatically Transforming Legal Services Today (2009) at 37. His estimate seems high, but perhaps spending from the UK is included (See my post...
The improvidence of a separate group that only audits and reviews bills
Posted on October 25, 2009Some large law departments have set up teams whose job it is to review bills of outside counsel. I don?t favor that approach. First, anything a team can do should be something e-billing software can do, such as checking for...
?A given level of business activity generates this much legal work?
Posted on October 24, 2009A general counsel I know, well respected and a veteran, states this and believes it to be profound. He is mistaken, I think. Nothing dictates a cause-and-effect link between an amount of business activity and how much legal work it...
A 23% ?incremental value creation? from an RFP-cum-convergence process
Posted on October 24, 2009The ACC Docket, Vol. 27, Oct. 2009 on an ad after page 64, describes a cost saving result for outside counsel expenses that is nothing short of astonishing. When Bruce Futterer became general counsel of General Electric Canada in January...
More suggestions about how to listen effectively
Posted on October 24, 2009To my earlier post about listening techniques (See my post of Oct. 19, 2008: ten sound suggestions.), three more vibrated at me from a recent article in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, Oct. 2009 at 40. 1. Ask thoughtful questions....
Identify ?components? of matters and request firms to bill them on a fixed fee
Posted on October 24, 2009A thoughtful approach to the pricing of external legal services, dubbed ?component pricing,? appears in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, Oct. 2009 at 23. Johnson & Johnson developed the method. Its basic tenet is that unit pricing ? a price...
Unusual expenses ineligible to be billed according to outside counsel guidelines
Posted on October 24, 2009Rooting through a set of guidelines for outside counsel, I chanced upon several expenses of law firms that various legal department pronounced were not to be billed. Those included ?extensive microfilming,? ?continuing legal education seminars,? and ?special publications...
Free benchmark report; total legal spend per regional lawyer compared for EMEA and Asia-Pacific
Posted on October 22, 2009Email me if you would like a copy of the 2009 Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) benchmark survey or the Asia-Pacific (APAC) survey. Compiled by Laurence Simons, legal recruiters, and Rees Morrison, they cover 123 EMEA legal departments and...
New document assembly offering online, at no cost (WhichDraft.com)
Posted on October 22, 2009Guest author Steven Levy reports on a new development: WhichDraft.com is a new and interesting free online contract site run by two experienced attorneys. This appears to be both a simple and reasonably powerful document assembly tool. It has a...
Four techniques -- staffing models -- when you manage a law firm on a matter
Posted on October 22, 2009When managing a law firm?s work on a matter, one step is to choose the partner for your matter. Law departments take that right for granted these days. It would be another step to limit how many paralegals, associates, and...
Why law firms agree to volume discounts and thus the leverage legal departments enjoy
Posted on October 22, 2009Why do law firms grant discounts that rise with the volume of fees paid them? 1. Decreases marketing and selling costs. If a law firm spends a certain percentage of its revenue on marketing, that percentage of the fees above...
Seek oral advice from your law firms, unless you expressly request a memorandum
Posted on October 22, 2009This cost-control measure caught my eye in the outside-counsel guidelines of one company and in the management style of another company?s legal team. It makes sense, to my way of thinking, to have the default method of communication be oral,...
An extranet that goes beyond what a matter management system typically shows
Posted on October 21, 2009At ILTA 2009, a partner from Mallesons showed what they call ?Mallesons Connect.? It is an extranet system for one of their largest clients. Its purpose is to provide transparency to the client about the services on their behalf provided...
An online decision tree for import/export law, and the potential for similar systems
Posted on October 21, 2009At ILTA 2009, John Alber, a partner at Bryan Cave, described a system his firm developed to give advice on certain export and import questions that many companies encounter. For an annual fee of ?a couple of $100,000,? subscribers can...
Value perceptions and keeping up with price changes
Posted on October 21, 2009Reflecting on the much-discussed gap between fees paid law firms and value delivered by them, I recalled my wife?s common statement: ?Rees, you haven?t kept up with the costs of things.? Every time I gripe about something being expensive --...
Eight ways to improve your revenue-per-lawyer benchmark metric
Posted on October 21, 2009Recent benchmark surveys by Laurence Simons,legal recruiters,and Rees Morrison report on 123 Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) legal departments and 57 Asia-Pacific (APAC) legal departments, respectively. Email me if you would like a free copy and specify which one...
Further ruminations on value delivered by law firms
Posted on October 21, 2009Toiling on an article about the bedeviling issue of value from firms, I decided to pull together what I have written about the topic other than those in an earlier metapost (See my post of Aug. 21, 2009: value compared...
Online dispute resolution (the double-blind method) and benefits for legal departments
Posted on October 20, 2009One of the ten disruptive technologies presented by Richard Susskind at ILTA 2009 was online dispute resolution. He specifically mentioned SquareTrade and CyberSettle. In his remarks, Susskind explained the double-blind method where two parties can come to terms without disclosing...
In-house lawyers are untrained project managers and process analysts
Posted on October 20, 2009Richard Susskind, speaking at ILTA 2009, expounded on the distinction between project management and process analysis. Project management is a sophisticated discipline with many tools and best-known methods. Project management controls and coordinates non-routine legal work that lasts for a...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #123 ? posts longa, morsels breva
Posted on October 20, 2009Payments to outside counsel expressed as constant currency. ?Constant currency? means to state amounts in a currency expressed in relation to its purchasing power in a specified currency. For example, a legal department might calculate its constant dollar spend by...
Three calculations that benchmark analysts should use
Posted on October 20, 2009This post is for the mathematically intrepid. Present skewed data on log scales. My benchmark projects always lead me to think of normalizing data by company revenue: lawyers per billion, total legal spend per billion. From a recent article, however,...
Increase in total legal spending in 2008 mostly tracked increases in compensation
Posted on October 20, 2009Gina Passarella, writing in the Legal Intelligencer, Oct. 14, 2009 on the Thomson Hildebrandt 2008 Law Department Survey (ed. Jon Bellis), extracts some findings that suggest internal budgets were kept mostly flat other than modest increases in compensation...
Three critical attributes for attracting and engaging employees
Posted on October 20, 2009A report from the Corporate Executive Board identifies 38 attributes in what it calls the Employment Value Proposition (EVP). Out of 38 EVP attributes of an organization, they found two to be the top drivers of commitment: ?Manager Quality? and...
An index of collegiality and camaraderie in a legal department and what it might indicate
Posted on October 19, 2009A report on talent from the Corporate Executive Board identifies 38 attributes of an ?Employment Value Proposition.? Sorted into five broad categories, one is ?People? and includes ?camaraderie? and ?collegial work environment.? How might a general counsel measure the ?friends...
How to figure the ROI of CLE, if we had some benchmark data
Posted on October 19, 2009General counsel invest their department?s money and time each year in professional development courses (See my post of May 25, 2008: CLE with 30 references.). Some of that expense must be borne because of state law requirements imposed on lawyers...
The second-mover advantage and law department practices
Posted on October 19, 2009Journalists covering the legal industry love to write about innovative practices. A scoop is a piece on the next big flavor. Some general counsel, too, would like to come up with the latest and greatest management technique. But a solid...
Considerations when you assign a lawyer to oversee the relationship with a primary firm
Posted on October 19, 2009I like the idea of having a lawyer in the department oversee the relationship with a law firm that handles significant amounts of work (See my post of May 18, 2007: inside counterpart appointed for each major firm; Aug. 18,...
Document assembly as a solution to contract management challenges
Posted on October 19, 2009A post by Andrew Davis on the Exari blog added several ideas to my post about the four issues can actually benefit from document assembly (See my post of Oct. 7, 2009: contract management?s four key concerns.). His main point...
Heat maps as a way to portray risks of litigation
Posted on October 15, 2009Let?s start with how to create a heat map. Take all the litigation pending against your company and assign each lawsuit a percentage from 1-100 on the likelihood that you will pay some non-trivial amount in settlement or judgment. Then...
On this blog, a premium on discount posts
Posted on October 15, 2009Discount arrangements are common, according to law firms and departments (See my post of Dec. 31, 2008: 75% of law firms surveyed said clients request discounts; Oct. 11, 2009: law firms might offer discounts if given chance to work in...
Call legal departments ?global? if they have 25%+ of their lawyers on two other continents
Posted on October 15, 2009Some observers call law firms ?global? if they have at least 25 percent of their lawyers oversees, I read in David Galbenski, Unbound: How Entrepreneurship is Dramatically Transforming Legal Services Today (2009) at 37. Why not apply the same threshold...
Someday, a formula regarding international revenue and in-house lawyers overseas
Posted on October 15, 2009Don Liu, general counsel of Xerox, states in a recent book that ?Fifty-three percent of Xerox?s revenues and related legal work is not based solely on U.S. law.? I wonder if Liu is simply stating that a bit more than...
Five publicly-traded companies that consult heavily to legal departments
Posted on October 13, 2009In the cottage industry that serves legal departments, full of small companies, a very few live in mansions. Those heavyweights are publicly-traded service providers. In that elite group, a handful provides a range of forensic, technological, and management consulting services...
Benchmark data and the pernicious ?Law of Small Numbers?
Posted on September 30, 2009According to the Law of Large Numbers, ?you can have a high degree of confidence in the average value of a sample if the sample includes a very large number of observations.? As explained in the NY Rev. of Books,...
Likelihood that general counsel push significant changes in their early years
Posted on September 30, 2009?Longer tenure provides a better understanding of organizational policies and procedures and a reluctance to change past manners of operating.? (emphasis added). This quote from the Admin. Sciences Quarterly, June 1997 at 219, led me to wonder whether management initiatives...
More objections to notion of best practices: assumptions of givens, boundaries, and common measures
Posted on September 30, 2009Another thought or three on why I mistrust palaver about ?best practices? (See my post of March 20, 2009: seven objections.). Best practices give short shrift to context of the legal department that is held out as fostering a best...
What?s in the castle? What?s inside in-house lawyer?s individual offices?
Posted on September 30, 2009A lawyer?s office is her castle, her sanctuary, her expression of self, not to mention her frequent lunchroom. Having just issued my metapost on physical configurations beyond the office door, here let me zero in on the individual offices of...
Physical components of legal departments other than individual offices
Posted on September 30, 2009This blog has passed on thoughts from time to time about the architecture of law departments (See my post of Sept. 16, 2008: physical layout of offices with 10 references.). It is a rare general counsel who has any significant...
Thoughts on why in-house counsel may be risk averse
Posted on September 30, 2009For many fundamental reasons, the practice of law within corporations breeds caution and circumspection. Setting aside whether those who choose to attend law school start off more risk averse, or whether those three years foster it, other forces strengthen the...
Invoice lasagna ? tasty narrative stuff on top, scrumptious recaps at the bottom, noodles in between
Posted on September 29, 2009In my ideal matter the law firm works on it under a fixed fee, so invoices are simple. Real life, however, mostly serves up hourly bills. Each monthly bill is like a layer in lasagna (See my post of Feb....
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #121 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on September 29, 2009Analysis of writing style on this blog. The most recent 17 pages of posts on this blog amounted to 7,686 words in 332 sentences. Passives were used ? sorry, I wrote passive constructions in five percent of the sentences. The...
Needed: independent audits of benchmark methodology, data, and basis for conclusions
Posted on September 29, 2009Disappointed recently with sloppy benchmark efforts by several purveyors, I realized that the law department world lacks third-party assessments of benchmarking efforts. Journalists from time to time go a round or two with data from benchmark surveys, mostly compensation, but...
To set you thinking: guidelines for the number of core staff scaled to fees projected on a matter
Posted on September 27, 2009It is sound management for a legal department to insist that its primary firms designate a core group of lawyers who will bill most of the fees on a matter. That core-staff notion has ample intuitive appeal. What?s needed are...
Most-favored nation status should apply, if at all, only on a fee volume basis
Posted on September 27, 2009It is arguable that law departments deserve discount levels like those granted to other clients of a firm where the discount is based solely on the volume of fees paid in a year. If your law department spends $2 million...
The cascade from corporate goals down to individual lawyer objectives
Posted on September 27, 2009This is high-level stuff, but it helps to put several pieces and terms in place. Start with an image of an upside-down pyramid where the top level is your corporation?s goals. To further those corporate goals ? why the legal...
Goldilocks in-boxes -- legal work that balances challenges and churns
Posted on September 27, 2009A recent study found "There was a 50/50 split between those [law departments] choosing to retain the volume-based work and those choosing to send out the volume work and retain the more complex work in-house," reports Legal Strat. Rev., Summer...
Burbling rocks and water sounds inspire poetic reveries
Posted on September 27, 2009A few offices nestled in law departments ooze the serene contemplativeness of a Japanese rock garden: calm, ordered, soothingly lit, an oasis in chaos. As you relax, you notice it isn?t incense burning, or the Monet poster, or even the...
My article on the esoterica of power-law distributions (exponential indices, anyone?)
Posted on September 27, 2009Power-law distributions rarely crop up in lunchrooms and hallways. Lawyers often feel uncomfortable with mathematics, let alone something as esoteric as a function with an exponent. But reluctance and distaste does not change the fact that a number of occurrences...
The kinds of mistakes that get you fired, and the mistakes that legal departments accept
Posted on September 27, 2009According to Christine Baker, inside counsel with Realogy Corporation , ?Mistakes will not get [a law firm] fired. But lying about your mistakes or trying to shift blame will. Either act will destroy the relationship?the first immediately, the second gradually...
?Broken deal? fee reductions for transactions that don?t get done
Posted on September 27, 2009Some law departments negotiate fee arrangements with law firms whereby the department (a) pays upon the successful completion of the transaction and (b) pays a substantially reduced amount if the transaction does not go through. Commonly done with major acquisitions...
Various ways to handle discounts given by law firms
Posted on September 27, 2009Close to 40 posts on this blog have to do with discounts granted by law firms (See my post of Nov. 26, 2006: discounts with 15 references; Jan. 21, 2008: 10 more posts with variations on discounts; and Dec. 26,...
Posts on creativity since my last accumulation
Posted on September 26, 2009It has been a long time since I assembled the posts on this blog about creativity (See my post of Oct. 29, 2006: creativity with 11 references.). The topic is too important for comments about it to lie dispersed and...
The status ?Of Counsel? has no significance for lawyers in legal departments who manage outside counsel
Posted on September 26, 2009For law firms, the ?Of Counsel? designation makes a difference, even though it can signify several different circumstances of the particular lawyer. For in-house lawyers, the differences are meaningless. Of Counsel lawyers might not make capital contributions, but in-house counsel...
Would an all-star legal department result in lower total legal spending as a percentage of revenue?
Posted on September 26, 2009If effective management all comes down to people, why wouldn?t a legal department staffed only with Harvard Law Review editors not drive total legal spending as low as possible? They would think rings around other in-house groups in negotiations and....
Total legal spending as a percentage of revenues has remained relatively constant over past five years
Posted on September 26, 2009Total legal spending as a percentage of revenue (TLS/Rev) leads the metrics pack in terms of importance (See my post of Dec. 5, 2007: stability of the ratio over a decade; and Jan. 12, 2009: benchmarks over time with 8...
Differences between benchmark comparisons on industry, revenue, and number of lawyers
Posted on September 26, 2009A recent post describes a multi-column chart that color codes a law department?s metrics against key benchmarks (See my post of Sept. 22, 2009: three comparisons on nine benchmarks.). It reminded me that I have long felt the most meaningful...
Management decisions rest on social values of the manager
Posted on September 23, 2009?Any technique of social control, however, involves human interests and the exercise of power over men. This means that any suggestion of a method for the solution of a social problem is shot through with normative implications.? Found in a...
On my bucket list, ten metrics about outside counsel spend I hope I learn eventually
Posted on September 23, 2009Connoisseur of benchmarks that I am, I?m drawn to what we don?t know (See my post of Dec. 7, 2008: four missing metrics and my article; and May 20, 2009: time spent by in-house lawyers that is non chargeable is...
Actions a general counsel can take once she spots a block of commodity services
Posted on September 23, 2009Estimates have put the percentage of commodity work handled by legal departments as high as a third of all they do. Whatever the proportion, where general counsel identify blocks of relatively routine work, they can choose from a set of...
Unbelievable! Legal departments don?t expect action from law firms, just ?open discussions?
Posted on September 22, 2009An article by the president of BTI Consulting, published in Strategies, Vol. 11, Sept. 2009 at 6, lists as one of ?five new client priorities law firms can leverage to build business? a notion very strange to me and my...
An operating guide for support staff in a law department, perhaps
Posted on September 22, 2009Mark Prebble, Managing In-House Legal Services: Providing High Value Support for Your Organisation (Thorogood 2009) at 49, discusses support staff and both gives and takes advice: ?Without getting bureaucratic it is worth developing an operating guide for support staff, which...
Beware folks who are dim bulbs, unaware volts are dimmed bulbs
Posted on September 22, 2009According to the US Department of Energy, cited in an ad from Fortune, Vol. 160, Sept. 28, 2009 at 55, ?lighting is by far the largest user of electricity in commercial buildings. It consumes 38% of the total ? more...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #120 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on September 22, 2009For headcount calculations, sometimes a ?lawyer? isn?t a ?lawyer.? Discussing a consolidated legal department, a sidebar in Mark Prebble, Managing In-House Legal Services: Providing High Value Support for Your Organisation (Thorogood 2009) at 41, mentioned how hard it was to...
A clever chart that shows your department on three comparisons as to nine benchmarks
Posted on September 22, 2009During a recent consultation, I reviewed a chart that covered metrics for nine basic benchmarks. The chart had five columns, the first being the metric, such as outside legal spending per lawyer. The next column was 1st quartile, then 2nd...
Clients are from Pluto, lawyers from Mercury ? huge personality differences mean change is due
Posted on September 22, 2009Peter Kurer, the former chairman of UBS and before that its general counsel, spoke at the Legal Week Corporate Counsel Forum last week. One portion of his remarks sketched a typology of behavioral and psychological differences between business people and...
Quite a project for me to manage my posts on project management
Posted on September 22, 2009Project management skills come into play with project teams (See my post of Feb. 1, 2009: project teams of law departments with 39 references and 4 metaposts.). I have written about project management generally in legal departments (See my post...
Assertion that average legal department cut nearly 17 percent of their law firms in 2009
Posted on September 22, 2009An article by the president of BTI Consulting, published in Strategies, Vol. 11, Sept. 2009 at 6, asserts that ?the average company cut nine law firms ? nearly 17 percent ? from its current roster of legal service providers in...
Ten alternatives to executive search firms to recruit lawyers for your department
Posted on September 22, 2009Headhunters account for only a small portion of all the law positions filled for legal departments, the most senior ones at that (See my post of Sept. 16, 2008: search firms with 12 references,including estimates of 10-15% of positions.). For...
More information about the Belgian Post?s litigation management program
Posted on September 22, 2009Several months ago I passed on what information was then available to me about the impressive efforts of the Belgian Post to transform its use of outside litigation counsel (See my post of March 12, 2009: tantalizing ideas.). At the...
Eight reasons why partners might not offer good ideas for how legal departments can improve
Posted on September 21, 2009Even if solicited by a general counsel to offer candid feedback, for many reasons a relationship partner might only reluctantly and partially comment on the performance of a law department client. At least eight obstacles conspire two thwart useful observations,...
Insights into the HSBC offshoring to Malaysia of branch support
Posted on September 21, 2009Richard Hennity, a senior lawyer from HSBC, spoke at the Legal Week Corporate Counsel Forum last week. HSBC, with 850 lawyers and 1350 legal staff, has for three years run a six-lawyer offshore program in Malaysia (See my post of...
More details on the Rio Tinto offshoring deal with CPA Global
Posted on September 21, 2009Leah Cooper, the global managing attorney for Rio Tinto, spoke at the Legal Week Corporate Counsel Forum last week. Her remarks added nuance to what I have written previously about the company and its ground-breaking arrangement with CPA Global (See....
Two benefits of LPOs sometimes overlooked ? better work remains and technology gets funded
Posted on September 21, 2009A speaker at the Legal Week Corporate Counsel Forum this past week was from BAT (British American Tobacco). He mentioned two side benefits from using a legal process offshoring vendor. One was that if routine, commodity chores go to the...
Almost a decade ago, some up-to-date cost control measures ? has much changed?
Posted on September 21, 2009Burrowing through some old files, I stumbled on notes I took at a Fulcrum conference that in May 2000 focused on partnering. Tom Brooks, then the administrator of what was then AT&T?s legal department, spoke about their efforts. My notes...
How an offshore legal service provider can help organize your tangle of contracts
Posted on September 21, 2009A recent article clearly states how offshoring could help almost any legal department that has responsibility for a large number of contracts. Written by two Mindcrest principles, the article describes how they helped restore order to a large number of...
Good advice about law-student internships
Posted on September 21, 2009A piece in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, July/Aug. 2009 at 26, describes internship programs at the law departments of RSM McGladrey and Piper Jaffay. The lessons they have learned include, especially, that you have to plan for the internship,...
The neuroscience of why stories persuade and teach clients more enduringly than facts and numbers
Posted on September 21, 2009In-house lawyers should tell their clients more stories if they want to reach them effectively. Stories are the way humans learn best, according to an article in the J. of the Legal Writing Inst., Vol. 15, 2009 at 270. It...
Even in well-trodden bankruptcy, with public data and hearings, the value of lawyers is frustratingly hard to figure out
Posted on September 21, 2009An article in the Economist, Sept. 12, 2009 at 82, cites projections that the lawyers and others who will be awarded fees in the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers might reap nearly $1 billion, ?well above the $757 million they received...
?Trolls demanding tolls?: thoughts on markets where third parties invest in legal assets
Posted on September 21, 2009The Economist, Sept. 12, 2009 at 84, explores the emergent field of investments in patent portfolios. Citing Coller Capital, Intellectual Ventures, and Fortress, as active purchasers of patents, the article foresees patent investments as entering the financial mainstream...
Be of good chair! If you can, seat yourself on an ergonomic seat to boost your productivity and health
Posted on September 17, 2009It had to happen. A post on the humble chair, where in-house attorneys often spend more time than with their loved ones (See my post of July 29, 2007: to goose meetings, do away with chairs; and Feb. 7, 2008:...
Project management software doesn?t necessarily mean the discipline of project management
Posted on September 17, 2009I use the term ?project management? to mean a set of disciplines for keeping a complicated set of tasks on time and efficiently run (See my post of April 28, 2009: project management skills at SABIC Innovative Plastics; and June...
Let me publicize your law department?s licensing specialized software or if you sold a department a package
Posted on September 17, 2009This blog can help readers by naming legal departments that have licensed specialized software. If you tell me about those instances, as end-user or as consultant or as software provider, I will periodically summarize the information without attribution...
Two ways to state a trend of less spend on outside counsel, medians and percentages
Posted on September 17, 2009Serengeti has found consistently that the law departments in its survey have spent relatively more of their total legal spend on the law department rather than on law firms. The data in ACC Docket, Vol. 27, July/Aug. 2009 at 18,...
Historical data about inefficient representations don?t help RFPs provide a useful picture of costs
Posted on September 17, 2009The question is, how can a general counsel know what a bedrock cost is to handle a set of services? I have advised previously not to tell firms in an RFP what you spent historically, because that will frame their...
The ACC Value Challenge may have been co-opted by the law firms involved
Posted on September 14, 2009My previous posts about the ACC Value Challenge have presented various facets of it, but not fundamentally challenged its value, so to speak (See my post of Oct. 22, 2008: normal fees for high quality work; Oct. 19, 2008: complaints...
Part XXXIX of a collection of embedded metaposts
Posted on September 13, 2009Ten more embedded metaposts (See my post of Aug. 27, 2009: Part XXXVIII), each followed with the number of its back references. 1. Billing hyperpost (See my post of Jan. 2, 2009: 8 metaposts.). 2. Contracts(See my post of Sept....
Ten good questions to answer when you take on a secondee from a law firm
Posted on September 13, 2009These ten questions to answer will help you shape a successful secondment. They come from Mark Prebble, Managing In-House Legal Services: Providing High Value Support for Your Organisation (Thorogood 2009) at 73 . 1. What should the outcome of the...
Email box for members of a legal department to obtain work from clients, or not pick up work??
Posted on September 13, 2009Here is a bizarre way to get work from clients. As written in Mark Prebble, Managing In-House Legal Services: Providing High Value Support for Your Organisation (Thorogood 2009) at 24, ?Legal departments use a variety of methods to deal with...
Nurture an external network of people you can talk to about management issues
Posted on September 13, 2009?Selective networking should be a part of the day job, not just a ?nice to do? task.? I commend this idea from Mark Prebble, Managing In-House Legal Services: Providing High Value Support for Your Organisation (Thorogood 2009) at 19. Whether...
A hyperpost on statistics made up of seven metaposts
Posted on September 13, 2009The scattered distribution of posts here on statistics has reached the point where a hyperpost is in order. The accumulation so far consists of seven metaposts with a total of 84 back references (See my post of April 5, 2009:...
10 free courses to learn more about statistics
Posted on September 13, 2009Here are 10 totally free courses on statistics you can take on your own time to help you learn, improve and hone your stats knowledge (See my post of Jan. 20, 2007: statistics with 28 references.). Whether you just want...
No grounds for ?moving away from the RFP mentality of too many law departments?
Posted on September 09, 2009An article in Strategies: J. of Legal Marketing, Vol. 11, Aug. 2009 at 4, offers thoughts by Susan Hackett Hackett@acc.com about the ACC Value Challenge. Along the way she explains that the initiative is trying to move away from the...
One-third splits are predictable when you ask a group of GCs any question about the future
Posted on September 09, 2009The Intellectual Property Owners Association (in a report issued in May 2009) asked its members about the number of applications for new U.S. patents they foresaw in 2009. Are you surprised that 29 percent thought they would increase, 41 percent...
A doughty, we-can-do-it-ourselves ethos puts quality of legal services provided in doubt
Posted on September 09, 2009?A legal department which claims a high degree of self-sufficiency and prides itself on doing as much as possible in-house can be a cause for concern? writes Mark Prebble, Managing In-House Legal Services: Providing High Value Support for Your Organisation...
Minimum department size recommended by book is two
Posted on September 09, 2009Mark Prebble, Managing In-House Legal Services: Providing High Value Support for Your Organisation (Thorogood 2009) at 5, writes that ?My belief is that the minimum size for a viable legal department is two, one of whom may be a good...
Data from Asia-Pacific legal departments about their size distribution
Posted on September 09, 2009A survey conducted by Asian-Counsel published findings about the size of the ?legal/compliance teams.? Here are the size breakdowns, rounded off: 1 person (7%), 2-5 people (42%), 6-20 people (34%), 21-50 people (10%), and 51 or more (7%). This size...
What controlling costs of outside counsel is NOT
Posted on September 09, 2009Let?s tap on the shoulder some of the dancers that contend for the honor of the most effective way to lower spending on outside counsel. The winning dancer pirouettes at the end. Sourcing and procurement techniques. No matter how skillfully...
Infrequent problems with external counsel, given by Asia-Pacific survey respondents
Posted on September 09, 2009Having considered the infrequent reasons why legal departments select firms in Asia, let?s look at the infrequent concerns the same survey respondents expressed about dealing with law firms (See my post of Sept. 9, 2009: long-tail reasons for selecting firms...
Reasons given infrequently in Asia Pacific for why external counsel was selected
Posted on September 09, 2009A survey conducted by Asian-Counsel e-edition, Vol. 7, July/Aug. at 26, published findings about the factors which most influenced the respondents? choice of outside counsel. Many times I have written about the leading factors (expertise, responsiveness, fees, reputation and the...
Keys to effectiveness: role clarity, division of labor, core competencies, delegation, resources, and processes
Posted on September 09, 2009Each of these terms deserves lengthy treatment for the reason that they are crucial to the effective management of work in a law department. I think I ran across this list in material from the General Counsel Roundtable, but the...
The posts just keep on rolling about rolling averages
Posted on September 09, 2009The technique of averaging figures for set periods of time, such as for the previous three months, produces what is called a rolling average. Several posts on this blog have applied that methodology (See my post of Jan. 6, 2006:...
My ten most interesting posts during July 2009
Posted on September 05, 2009Here are the ten best from July. For each, the bracketed text after the header gives a brief description of the post; click on the post title to read it in its entirety. If you would like all the posts...
Eight basic categories of legal department software
Posted on September 05, 2009Amidst the large number of specialty packages (See my post of Feb. 9, 2008: law-department software applications with 59 references.), it is important for managers in legal departments not to lose sight of the basic software choices. It will make...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #119 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on September 05, 2009Corporate credit unions as a cost of lawyers. I had never thought of it, but if a company supports a credit union, its in-house attorneys can benefit. Thus, it is yet another cost that is unlikely to be allocated to...
Off-hand advice, not off-putting at all, on the off-chance that you deal off the cuff with off-the-main-road areas of the law
Posted on September 05, 2009An article in Asian-Counsel, e-edition, Vol. 7, July/Aug. at 18, gives advice to in-house attorneys who encounter a legal question or task that is unfamiliar to them. The three choices are cleverly summarized: ?Such in-house counsel generally have three options...
Even a narrow niche like corporate secretarial functions has oodles of software
Posted on September 02, 2009While building another post, I realized I had not assembled in one place my various comments on software for corporate secretarial functions. Not one to dally around, here are the eleven posts (See my post of July 19, 2006: corporate...
Calculating ROI benefits and costs (Part Two of Two) ? By guest author Steven Levy
Posted on September 02, 2009Previous posts about ROI calculation noted the time value of money and some of the complex factors affecting benefits. Nailing down the costs is no less complex, according to guest author Steven Levy. A valid ROI calculation includes the following...
Calculating ROI benefits and costs (Part One of Two) ? By guest author Steven Levy
Posted on September 02, 2009A valid ROI calculation, according to guest author Steven Levy, includes the following factors on the benefits side: 1. Time value of money, usually at the corporate internal discount rate (often ~10%/year). 2. Assignment of returns to the proper fiscal...
How does the Office of the Blogger feel about the term ?The Office of the General Counsel??
Posted on September 02, 2009It has an officious tone, an imperious that puts me off. Beating hearts and thinking brains are within, yet the clammy, 1984-ish ?The Office? may or may not oblige your obsequies. I like flesh and blood (See my post of...
Update with 48 posts that have contacts with contracts
Posted on September 02, 2009So much of what many in-house lawyers do has some connection to contracts that I quailed at the thought of wading through all my posts that pertain (See my post of May 16, 2006: misperception that all in-house lawyers do...
Metrics you might want to analyze about use of your department?s legal intranet
Posted on September 01, 2009If your department maintains a legal intranet, you might wish to track some of the same traffic metrics that bloggers do. You could monitor the number of visitors, visit length, pages viewed, and business unit represented. You could find out...
Research that some in-house career paths need to end; mandatory retirement policies?
Posted on September 01, 2009A report three or four years ago by the General Counsel Roundtable found that frustration by in-house attorneys regarding career advancement had not created difficulty for legal departments in attracting, motivating, and retaining attorneys. To the contrary, many legal departments...
Allow for the time-value of money in ROI calculations
Posted on September 01, 2009If you calculate your expected net return for an investment, be it dual monitors, document assembly, or databases, you should recognize the time-value of money by discounting costs and benefits for years in the future. Whereas many of your costs...
Increased use of legal support offshore threatens in-house jobs at home
Posted on September 01, 2009The publicity about the offshore deal between CPA Global and Rio Tinto gushes, an ink river about Rio. This blog has poured out its share, but here is another small stream. The author of an article in Corp. Counsel, Vol....
Effective billing rates adjusted for a law firm?s city cost of living?
Posted on September 01, 2009For many years, and possibly continuing today, Law Office Management & Administration Report (LOMAR) published a cost-of-living index for about ten major US cities. As I recall it, the monthly table used prices in New York City on a certain...
Seven high-level similarities between contract management and matter management systems
Posted on September 01, 2009These two packages, frequently found in law departments, raise similar issues. In fact, all databases raise issues of this kind, including intellectual property databases, document management systems, and corporate entity repositories. 1. Accountability for updates...
The open-book approach to reaching a flat-fee agreement with a firm
Posted on August 31, 2009We too often resort to factually emaciated RFPs, doling out facts on an as needed basis, restricting the questions that can be asked, and limiting due diligence. Telling the firms who are proposing too much takes time, runs risks, and...
A haiku on legal department management ? pith in 17 poetic syllables
Posted on August 31, 2009The J. of the Legal Writing Inst., Vol. 15, 2009 at 266, tells about asking law school students to try haikus. Seventeen syllables. I tried my hand. In-house lawyers, Silos or teams, Rules but people, Always altering Yes, Rees, stick...
A law firm that takes on a major block of work might set up an office near the client?s executives
Posted on August 31, 2009A chapter in Robert L. Haig, Ed., Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (Thomson Reuters/West 2009 Supplement), Sec. 78:21.20, describes a long-term relationship between ServiceMaster and Hinshaw & Culbertson. In 2002, the company and the firm agreed that Hinshaw...
Working backwards from a figure of $4 billion to be spent on e-discovery software and services
Posted on August 31, 2009The e-discovery niche, according to the ABA J., Vol. 95, Aug. 2009 at 29, is crowded with about 600 vendors. They are jostling for pieces of a large pie. George Socha, a consultant deeply involved in research about e-discovery vendors,...
Two-week free offer for my just-published blook on law department structure
Posted on August 31, 2009Finally, I have finished my blog book on effective law department structure. It is 143 pages, including the index. Unlike my blooks on outside counsel management and talent management, this one is written like a book, but with 100 or...
Ask your primary law firms to submit a periodic ?value report??
Posted on August 28, 2009As described in the ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Nov. 2008 at 101, the core law firms of Pfizer ? those that make up its P3 group ? submit periodic ?value reports.? In them firms ?identify their respective contributions in the...
A fixture of fixed prices, inflated cost estimates to cover a risk premium and contingencies?
Posted on August 28, 2009"Fixed fee arrangements are fundamentally flawed. As soon as you discuss them with the firm, the numbers increase to include the premium and contingency, and hey presto, you're paying more than you should have in the first place." This cynical...
Why aren?t more law firm lawyers paying attention to this blog -- how their legal department clients operate?
Posted on August 28, 2009One puzzling finding struck to me when I checked the latest poll results of who visits this blog? As of today, 111 people have responded to my poll on the upper right. Law department lawyers are exactly half of them...
A vacation picture of this blogger, his wife and his son (August 2009)
Posted on August 28, 2009In a rare departure from my Presbyterian style of just the facts or only the ideas, here is a photograph. That's my wonderful wife, Anne, next to me, lest you be unsure who is who. Just for the record, my...
Part XXXVIII of a collection of embedded metaposts
Posted on August 27, 2009Ten more embedded metaposts (See my post of Aug. 14, 2009: Part XXXVII), each conjoined with the number of its back references. 1. Benchmarks hyperpost (See my post of July 19, 2009: ten metaposts on benchmarks.). 2. Email effectiveness rules...
Track time by percentages instead of by actual numbers of hours
Posted on August 27, 2009A drawback of internal time tracking that asks lawyers to enter how many hours they worked on a matter is padding. Inevitably and inexorably, unless a client is charged for the time and therefore brings some market discipline to the...
Pros and cons of publicity for your legal department?s management initiatives
Posted on August 27, 2009There are benefits to having your department written about approvingly for its programs and management efforts. Most CEOs like it when their people and units get kudos. The members of your department feel proud and more engaged (See my post...
If members of the legal department feel engaged, they will perform better
Posted on August 26, 2009?More than 100 studies have demonstrated the correlation between employee engagement and business performance. ? But only one in four employees, on average, is ?engaged.? After that sad finding, strategy + business, Issue 56, Autumn 2009 at 49, continues with...
Five more tricks for the e-mail pro(ductivity)
Posted on August 26, 2009Tired from compiling e-mail tips (See my post of Aug. 26, 2009: 30 e-mail suggestions.), I staggered on and found some more. These come from the Harv. Bus. Rev., Sept. 2009 at 88. 1. ?To eliminate the need for recipients...
Avoid fragmented imbecility: to think hard, ignore email, refuse phone calls, and close the door
Posted on August 26, 2009A study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard a few years ago noted declines in IQ scores when knowledge workers were distracted by e-mail and phone calls. The decline, chronicled in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Sept. 2009 at 84, was an average of...
Thirty (30) suggestions for better e-mail effectiveness
Posted on August 26, 2009Here are 30 suggestions for how you and your colleagues can use e-mail more carefully and cope with the rising tide of it more effectively. 1. Train members of the department on e-mail effectiveness (See my post of July 20,...
Blook review on the four-volumes edited by Robert Haig of Successful Partnering
Posted on August 26, 2009Actually a four-volume treatise, Robert Haig, Ed., Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (Thomson Reuters/West 2009 Supp.), the huge supplement this year alone has generated two dozen posts (See my post of April 20, 2009: minority general counsel in...
Short half-life of an in-house lawyer?s knowledge is a long exaggeration
Posted on August 26, 2009I do not believe that the half-life of legal knowledge possessed by in-house counsel is all that short, indeed if the notion of steady brain drain has any reality. Nothing erodes the value of what a lawyer knows along the...
Various uses of scenarios for managers of in-house legal teams
Posted on August 25, 2009The technique of creating sets of realistic conditions, called scenarios, and thinking through their implications can significantly help managers prepare for the future. I have written previously about scenario applications (See my post of March 25, 2005: case studies of...
Budgets by firms, being forecasts, degrade quickly as you extend their timeframe
Posted on August 25, 2009"The accuracy of economic forecasts diminishes in months into the future." William A. Sherden, The Fortune Sellers: The Big Business of Buying and Selling Predictions (John Wiley 1998) at 63, goes further: "The average forecast errors percentages for real GNP...
Analyze ROI periodically during technology projects
Posted on August 25, 2009An article in Law Tech. News (LTN), Vol. 16, Aug. 2009 at 34, by Steven Levy, offers 10 ideas for how information technology staff should work with lawyers. One of them is to pull the plug on ?technology Vietnams.? As...
A questionable claim that more lawyers cuts outside spend in half, or that they are one-third the cost
Posted on August 25, 2009?Corporate Executive Board research reveals that reducing legal staff can actually lead to considerable increased legal costs. Companies with fewer in-house lawyers tend to spend twice as much as their peers with more lawyers.? I suppose if a department is...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #118 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on August 25, 2009Back references to metaposts on this blog. In the first 224 posts after number 4,500, I included back references to 215 metaposts. That is nearly one per post. Since I have 370 metaposts, almost anything I write could point to...
Further explanation about legal risk, productivity and careful review of email
Posted on August 25, 2009A recent post here pointed out that advice to take five or ten minutes to stress test an important email would necessarily reduce productivity (See my post of Aug. 19, 2009: 5-10 minute rule for email.). A fellow blogger, Mary...
Pessimistic findings for legal departments that want to create their own e-discovery team
Posted on August 24, 2009A late-breaking study of the electronic document discovery (EDD) market, by George Socha and Tom Gelbman, paints a grim picture about the ability of general counsel to develop and retain managers of EDD. ?Hiring at corporations also has been difficult...
We need to clarify the term "dedicated IT support"
Posted on August 24, 2009Two quite different definitions are possible for the term "dedicated IT support." Most people define such a person as someone who reports up the corporate technology organization but who spends full time supporting the legal department. The information systems group...
Adoption of technology goes beyond implementation of technology
Posted on August 24, 2009During a discussion with my friend Stephen Levy, he distinguished between implementing software and adopting it. A legal department can relatively easily implement software for the use of the department (install it on a server and get it up and...
When collected and analyzed, each metric can harm someone
Posted on August 24, 2009When talking with a friend recently, it dawned on me that every time a general counsel gathers metrics and ponders what they mean, someone in the law department is at risk. Metrics are never neutral numbers, existing on their own...
Four crucial but ill-defined words often used by general counsel: complexity, risk, quality, and value
Posted on August 24, 2009In his book, David Warsh, The Idea of Economic Complexity (Penguin Books, 1984) set me to thinking about omnipresent words managers in legal departments toss off that, curiously, lack clear definitions. Four of those vital but vague words include complexity,...
Law departments as ?complex systems?
Posted on August 24, 2009In the 1930s, Karl Popper, a philosopher of natural and social science, introduced the notion of society as an unpredictable complex system. At a smaller scale, the economy is a quintessential example of a complex system. According to William A....
Quality of similar-size firms varies less than their cost
Posted on August 24, 2009A law department can hire two five-hundred lawyer firms for similar services, paying one an effective rate of $450 an hour and paying the other an effective rate of $300 an hour. The difference between the two firms? costs on...
A statement to sign for commitment to pro bono involvement by a legal department
Posted on August 21, 2009Yesterday (See my post of Aug. 20, 2009: CPR statement.), I wrote that I suspected that general counsel have available to them to sign a statement in support of pro bono. That is indeed the case. Esther Lardent, the long-time...
Posts on the value law firms deliver compared to the fees paid them
Posted on August 21, 2009More than a score of posts on this blog survey the interplay between the amount paid law firms and the perceived worth of the services paid for. Roughly half of the comments pertain to specific billing rates and amounts billed...
Back references to unproven beliefs (myths) regarding management of legal departments and their firms
Posted on August 21, 2009An exercise for the mind is to catalogue beliefs held by lawyers legal departments that are myths, that serve some felt need but are inaccurate, that exhibit prejudice or wishful thinking not borne out by facts. For example, the easy...
Fifth set of 13 blogs that have referred visitors to Law Department Management Blog
Posted on August 21, 2009This post continues my series of thanks and gratitude. Both are due when other blogs or websites cite one of my posts or include me on their blog roll. I have thanked 53 so far, and here add another 13...
Statements by general counsel of support for good causes: ADR, diversity, billing standards, etc.
Posted on August 20, 2009The CPR International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution www.cpradr.org is a non-profit initiative of general counsel, law firms and legal academics ?whose mission it is to install alternative dispute resolution (ADR) into the main stream of legal practice...
During discovery, inside counsel might encounter limited access to adversary?s confidential information
Posted on August 20, 2009In-house attorneys face occasional challenges to their professional status, notably as to the attorney-client privilege when they give business advice, the degree of their objectivity as employees of their client, and whether they are admitted to practice in a given...
Online patent tool at Cisco lets engineers help with patenting process
Posted on August 20, 2009Several years ago, the inventive legal department at Cisco developed a tool that lets engineers start to figure out whether an invention is patentable. According to Robert Haig, Ed., Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (Thomson Reuters/West 2009 Supp...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #117 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on August 19, 2009Visitors from 29 non-US sites in the last 100. About 80 percent of the readers of this blog come from the United States. But a significant number of international visitors also come. For example, SiteMeter tells me that of the...
A trademark of this blog, metaposts, and here is one on trademarks
Posted on August 19, 2009The importance to companies of their brands and trade protections is evident (See my post of May 27, 2008: intangibles like trademarks account for 1/3rd of value of companies; Aug. 14, 2005: 248,000 new applications for trademarks filed with the...
Collaboration between a legal department and its law firms on the department?s intranet
Posted on August 18, 2009?The CBS Legal Department has created a new intranet, which is populated with substantive content designed to benefit CBS law Department?s in-house lawyers. This information, which is provided by both CBS? in-house lawyers, as well as CBS? retained outside law...
A questionable rule of thumb on make-buy: the inside cost should be one-third of the outside cost
Posted on August 18, 2009A citation in Robert Haig, Ed., Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel(Thomson Reuters/West 2009 Supp.), Vol. 1, Chapter 4 at §4:3, left me perplexed. The article mentioned in that chapter, presumably approvingly, discusses bringing more legal work in-house...
The 5-10 minute rule for important email messages, but it destroys productivity
Posted on August 18, 2009It seems perverse to slow down an in-house attorney who is deluged with email, but that is what authors in Robert Haig, Ed., Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel(Thomson Reuters/West 2009 Supp.), Vol. 1, Chapter 2 at §2:18, recommends...
More books read and drawn on for this blog
Posted on August 17, 2009Books are conversations. I write in them, underline copiously, dog-ear pages, and note ideas for possible blog postings. Books feed this blog (See my post of Feb. 1, 2009: thirteen books cited on this blog.). The latest sources include these...
Innovators face low odds of success, but legal departments need to keep trying new ideas
Posted on August 17, 2009In an interview for MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Spring 2009 at 67, Prof. Clayton Christensen warns that ?93% of all innovations that have ultimately become successful started off in the wrong direction; the probability that you?ll get it...
Expounding on legal risk management
Posted on August 17, 2009Since March 2008, when I last assembled posts on legal risk and risk management, I have expounded on both topics a fair amount (See my post of Nov.15, 2005: legal risk with 7 references, see risk management; and March 23,...
When managing law departments, how many practices exist? Thousands!
Posted on August 17, 2009How do we define a practice? I believe there are hundreds of solid practices that many, even most, law departments should recognize and contemplate for their own department (See my post of April 2, 2005: survivor bias and best practices;...
Performance mapping and key competencies
Posted on August 17, 2009In the words of Talent mgt., July 2009 at 26, "There are four steps to the performance mapping process. First, develop performance maps. Second, execute real-time evaluation with star performers. Third, document skills tables for key competencies. And finally, talent...
Part XXXVII of a collection of embedded metaposts
Posted on August 14, 2009Ten more embedded metaposts (See my post of July 26, 2009: Part XXXVI), each coupled with the number of its back references. 1. Bad behavior by managers II (See my post of March 31, 2009: nine more posts on poor...
More reMarx on DAS KAPITAL ? human, social, organizational, and physical
Posted on August 14, 2009Three varieties of ?capitals,? as they pertain to legal departments, have appeared on this blog: human capital, social capital and organizational capital. Human capital has the most accumulation. I devote an entire category to Talent Management but there have also...
No tiers on my pillow: flaws of tiered discounts from hourly rates based on volume
Posted on August 13, 2009Pfizer, wielding its mighty P3 program, likes to squeeze from its preferred law firms higher discounts the more it uses them. ?To effectively share in the benefits of economies of scale, we [Pfizer] implemented a tiered-volume discount structure, with the...
A book of myths that endanger external counsel, and three that in-house counsel would endorse
Posted on August 13, 2009A slim book sent me for review from Abacus Law humorously describes 35 dangerous myths lawyers in private practice might succumb to. Three of them, at least, pertain to services provide to legal departments. I have refashioned summaries of them...
You?ll feel so much better if you understand employee satisfaction
Posted on August 13, 2009What influences satisfaction levels among members of a legal department are numerous. To reel off some of them, they include amenities, client appreciation, the culture of the department, diversity, emotional intelligence, facilities, health, leadership, pro bono, quality of work, vacations,...
The irony of cost parity between US contract attorneys and LPO attorneys [Bob Unterberger]
Posted on August 13, 2009Is there any incentive for corporations to turn to LPOs for such tasks as document reviews when you compare current Indian rates with the recent downward trend in rates domestically? Fewer and fewer U.S reviews are being performed by the...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #116 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on August 13, 2009More poll results about the positions of readers ? have you taken the poll? Since about July 15th, 81 readers have taken my little poll about positions. As of Aug. 11th, poll takers from law departments rose from 58% to...
Risk management differs from compliance and internal audit ? but from legal?
Posted on August 13, 2009OpRisk & Compliance, Vol. 10, April 2009 at 29, makes the point that risk management is not like compliance and it is not like audit. One person interviewed for the article offered this view: "The other two [compliance and audit]...
Blook reviews of Trapp and Page on external counsel and Leeson on pirate economics
Posted on August 12, 2009Having published recently by first two blook reviews, (See my post of July 30, 2009: Leigh Dance book; and Aug. 5, 2009: Laura Empson book.), fairness urged me to recognize another pair of books. First is a UK-published book that...
Voice, governance, involvement influenced by the size of a law department
Posted on August 12, 2009I read recently that solid thinkers should never ignore the obvious. In that vein, here is an obvious observation about governance in law departments as it is affected by the size of the department. The smaller the law department, the...
The rational-choice model of economists as a framework for understanding legal departments
Posted on August 12, 2009A charming and informative book, Peter Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton Univ. 2009) at 5, takes as its bedrock model of individual decision making what economists call ?rational choice.? The rational choice framework makes three...
An argument, based on experience, for competitive fixed bids saving 10-15 percent of fees
Posted on August 11, 2009In my consulting projects, the first-round proposals in competitive bids for fixed fees to handle significant amounts of legal work have varied by fifty percent or more. Stated differently, comparable firms differ in their proposed amounts by upwards of fifty...
A tradeoff, or a ratio, between inside fully-loaded costs and outside payments
Posted on August 11, 2009Is it possible with legal departments that the less you spend inside the more you spend outside? Not as a percentage of total spending, because that calculation must total 100 percent: if you spend 30 percent inside you must spend...
A surfeit of posts on budgets
Posted on August 11, 2009In the nick of time after just-in-time budgeting (See my post of Aug. 11, 2009: four techniques for budgets.), I ran a comb through my output since the most recent metapost on budgets. Sure enough, out fell a slew of...
Just-in-time budgeting with four methods
Posted on August 11, 2009I have written extensively about budgets for legal departments, both internal and for matters handled by external counsel (See my post of Sept. 9, 2008: internal budgets with 27 references; and Sept. 12, 2008: internal budgets with 25 references.). Thus,...
Secondments are not only associates but also of partners
Posted on August 11, 2009I have always assumed that secondments apply only to associates. Barclays, however, upset my comfortable presumption since they recently obtained as a secondee a litigation partner from Simmons & Simmons. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, Aug. 2009 at 59, does give...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #114 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on August 10, 2009This blog footnoted in a treatise, in Blue Book citation form! Proudly I hail a citation to a post on this blog in a leading treatise, nothing less than Robert Haig, Ed., Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (Thomson...
Doubts about a six-out-of-ten rating of external counsel regarding their ?value for money?
Posted on August 10, 2009As part of a study conducted for a publication of CPA Global, reported in Legal Strat. Rev., Summer 2009 at V, respondents were asked an ultimate question: ?how they would rate the ?value for money? they got from external legal...
Operating costs of legal departments compared to those of law firms
Posted on August 10, 2009It has interested me how the operating costs of legal departments differ from those of law firms. Some figures for law firms on that point come from Patrick McKenna?s MCK Int?l Rev., Spring 2009 at 11. www.patrickmcKenna.com The largest expense...
A one-to-one ratio and a significant operations department (Abbott)
Posted on August 10, 2009Laura Schumacher, the general counsel of Abbott Laboratories, heads 162 lawyers and total staff of 328. The ratio of lawyers to staff is almost exactly even (See my post of April 18, 2009: lawyers as percentage of total legal staff...
A tool to explain e-discovery metrics and an encouragement to save money with lower-cost staff
Posted on August 10, 2009DiscoveryMetrics?, by Casewerx Development, focuses squarely on reducing a law department?s hemorrhage of expense in litigation -- document review. Manny Guerrero, a Partner and co-founder of Casewerx, sent samples of a DiscoveryMetrics dashboard and from looking at his slides it...
Dispersed benefits for a lawyer from external cost control, but concentrated costs
Posted on August 10, 2009Peter Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton Univ. 2009), especially 164-171, explains why pirate ships often had sailors who were both black and free, not slaves. In essence, the benefits of slaves onboard were dispersed among...
The economist?s ?signal? by departments when they announce they retain large law firms
Posted on August 10, 2009Peter Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton Univ. 2009) at 94, discusses the economist?s concept of signaling. ?The key to a successful signal is that it must be more costly for some types of individuals to...
Transaction-cost economics have broad applicability in legal department management
Posted on August 10, 2009?Transaction costs are the costs of making exchanges ? the time, effort, grief, and sometimes financial costs ? associated with coming to an agreement with someone else.? The definition comes from Peter Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of...
Eight myths procurement professionals harbor about US legal departments
Posted on August 10, 2009To be more accurate, these eight beliefs are not total inventions of sourcing heads. Some truth creeps in, as I have noted. Myth 1: Legal departments don?t know how much they spend. Fact: Most departments know their total domestic legal...
Client service by walking around: get off the Blackberry and talk to clients in their offices
Posted on August 07, 2009?Get off email and get out of your office," Stephen Swanson, Abu Dhabi Investment Co.'s chief legal officer, exhorted attendees at a recent conference. "Getting in front of your business colleagues will give you valuable information." This excellent advice appears...
32 steps each legal department can take to protect the environment (and reduce costs)
Posted on August 07, 2009In three previous posts I listed a total of 27 energy-saving ideas (See my post of April 27, 2008: ten tips; Oct. 12, 2008: nine ideas; Nov. 9, 2008: three ideas; March 11, 2009: four more steps toward environmental preservation;...
Don?t send RFPs to law firms, thinking it is a courtesy, when they aren?t really in contention
Posted on August 07, 2009It abuses both your legal department and the law firm to send an invitation to compete for work for which the firm is not a plausible contender. Your project team has to answer their questions, respond to their requests, keep...
A favorable byproduct of convergence: more opportunity for collective evaluations of firms
Posted on August 05, 2009If the lawyers in-house who retain outside counsel can choose whomever they want, it may turn out to be unusual for any of them to use the same counsel. With such divergence, evaluations of outside counsel will not be collective,...
LawProspector data on significant federal litigation and uses for general counsel
Posted on August 05, 2009LawProspector, founded in early 2008 by a group of attorneys working in the litigation support field, has gathered data on the largest active pieces of litigation in the US federal courts. This data ?is loosely defined by the intersection of...
Another blog book review (blook review?) ? 13 posts on Managing the Modern Law Firm
Posted on August 05, 2009Laura Empson, ed., Managing the Modern Law Firm: New Challenges New Perspectives (Oxford Univ. Press 2007), will mostly interest managing partners of law firms. That said, three chapters speak to concerns of general counsel, one on diversity, a fascinating chapter...
A journalistic charge against partnering firms, but where is the support for it?
Posted on August 05, 2009Sometimes journalists write something that makes sense to them, but offer no evidence. A sentence to illustrate follows an explanation of ?convergence? and gives a consequence of law firms that ?begin to operate as long-term partners, offering cost efficiencies and...
Research: embedded ties between law firms and departments lower rates yet can increase firm profits
Posted on August 05, 2009"Firms in which two thirds of their large corporate clients are in a long-term relations on average charge $4.07 less per hour for partners and $1.60 less per hour for associates than firms in which only one-third of their large...
Board member training in ethics and compliance, often conducted by the general counsel
Posted on August 04, 2009The Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics disseminated a seven-question survey to its members regarding board training. The Society got back 171 responses and published a summary, written by a partner of Jeff Kaplan, one of my guest bloggers, in...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #112 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on August 04, 2009Independent counsel to a Board of Directors. Even when a company has a legal department, Board members sometimes retain outside counsel (See my post of July 25, 2005: costs of Boards retaining independent counsel; Sept. 13, 2005: Carey International; Sept...
The Laffey Matrix for outside counsel costs
Posted on August 04, 2009Dan Williams of t-Mobile earns a big thanks for telling me about the so-called Laffey Matrix. The matrix is a table of hourly rates for outside attorneys and paralegals prepared by the Civil Division of the United States Attorney?s Office...
Contrast normative and positive descriptions of the managerial actions general counsel take
Posted on August 04, 2009The difference between normative economics and positive economics comes from Deirdre McCloskey, How to Be Human Though an Economist (U. of Mich. 2000) at 62-63. As the distinction applies to managers of in-house lawyers, a normative view says whether a...
Push your law firms to budget matters by means of a narrowing fee funnel
Posted on August 04, 2009Thinking about fixed fees the other day with a law firm?s Executive Director, I thought of a funnel for fee estimates. The funnel starts early in a matter with the law firm giving a broad but reasonable range for what...
How to add another monitor for your workspace, and why
Posted on August 04, 2009By guest author Steven Levy There is increasing evidence that having dual monitors generates huge productivity gains. If you have a laptop, you?re already set for dual monitors. You?ve got your new widescreen beauty; your laptop screen becomes the second...
A ?legal heat map? to identify offshorable legal services
Posted on August 04, 2009A long article about management initiatives in the legal group at Rio Tinto, in Legal Strat. Rev., Summer 2009 at 13, describes a service provider?s tool called a ?legal heat map.? The provider, CPA Global, a major LPO company, developed...
To compare different metrics, use the technique of stating them as standard deviations
Posted on August 04, 2009If you standardize the values of variables that vary on their measurements, you can compare their relative magnitude. For example, say you want to match how your department stands on cases per lawyer against paralegal base pay. The two metrics...
Who are you? Please answer the one-question poll on the right side ? early results
Posted on August 03, 2009So far, 50 people have been good enough to click on the poll to the right and indicate their position. The plurality are law department lawyers (46%), followed by law firm lawyers (16%) and service providers (14 percent). Non-lawyer members...
Two-way evaluations of individual performance ? internal of external and the reverse
Posted on August 03, 2009Monsanto?s legal department ?involves itself in succession issues for legal teams at their preferred providers,? according to Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, June 2009 at 65. I have previously written (See my post of Jan. 13, 2008: interventions that go to...
Global managing attorney, a big step from a non-lawyer director of operations
Posted on August 03, 2009Doctors only trust doctors, CPAs only respect CPAs, and lawyers only accept direction from lawyers (maybe). Since administrators (especially non-lawyers) can only go so far to tell lawyers what to do, it is not surprising that a large legal department...
Productivity bang for the buck with a large monitor
Posted on August 03, 2009Law Department Management Blog welcomes guest blogger Steven Levy. For a number of years, Steven was the Senior Director, Information Systems Department, Microsoft Legal and Corporate Affairs. You can dramatically improve your computer-time productivity with a simple ? and increasingly...
Consider whether the key partners at your major firms sit on Boards of other companies
Posted on August 03, 2009"Firms with partners who sit on the boards of directors of corporations that are not their clients are able to charge a higher price than firms without these types of ties." The authors who pointed out this correlation (Brian Uzzi,...
A 1910 reference to a corporate legal department from a vast collection of old newspapers
Posted on August 03, 2009I poked around on a site operated by the Library of Congress that has , compiled 1.2 million pages of American newspapers published between 1880 and 1922. Naturally, I searched the terms ?legal department? and ?law department.? ?Legal department? returned...
Does your compliance and ethics program do this ? a one-minute self test?
Posted on August 03, 2009By guest author Jeffrey M. Kaplan How would your compliance and ethics (C&E) program fare if evaluated under the Department of Justice?s corporate criminal charging standards or the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations? This one-minute self test - based on...
Data showing that the larger the legal department the larger the firms it retains
Posted on July 31, 2009Three authors (Brian Uzzi, Ryon Lancaster and Shannon Dunlap) present tabular data in Laura Empson, ed., Managing The Modern Law Firm: New Challenges New Perspectives (Oxford Univ. Press 2007) at 99. The table shows data for five groups of 133...
The debate over whether strong ties should decrease or increase rate adjustments
Posted on July 31, 2009If I were a general counsel, when I look at billing rate increases of my favored incumbent firms (See my post of April 16, 2009: incumbent firms with 11 references.), I would want to see two trends. One trend should...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #111 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on July 31, 2009Environmental nudges on e-mails. I like this message at the bottom of emails (See my post of Dec. 26, 2008 #4:: huge, wasteful disclaimer in the footer of every e-mail from a company.). ?Please consider the environment before printing this...
An assemblage of process improvement techniques
Posted on July 31, 2009Included in this overview are metaposts and comments that have to do with process improvement. It includes two metaposts on Six Sigma, as well as one each on process mapping, kaizen and cycle time (See my post of Feb. 13,...
Ten Best Posts of June 2009 from Law Department Management Blog
Posted on July 31, 2009Here are the ten best from my 99 posts in June 2009. If the brief description of the post entices you, click on the post title to read it all. If you would these posts in a file, email me...
Lawyer intelligence, judged by law school rank, might alter legal department management
Posted on July 31, 2009The authors of a chapter in Laura Empson, ed., Managing The Modern Law Firm: New Challenges New Perspectives (Oxford Univ. Press 2007) at 104, wanted to operationalize quality for the law firms they were studying. To operationalize is to devise...
A ?blook review? (a blogger book review) ? nine blog posts give a feel for a book
Posted on July 30, 2009Just as this blogger does not try for encyclopedic pieces or comprehensive treatments of topics, he no longer writes traditional book reviews. But he will plunder thoughtful points from a book, and has done so abundantly with Leigh Dance?s stimulating...
Thank goodness only a small percentage of partners are rainmakers
Posted on July 30, 2009General counsel may feel besieged by solicitors ? a pun lurks there on the English term for non-litigation lawyers and the common meaning of those who solicit. One view, however, is that ?In many firms, regardless of size or reach,...
?The professionalization of law firms in the UK started in the early 1990s?, and spread in-house
Posted on July 30, 2009The consequences of this change to legal departments occurred to me as I read E. Leigh Dance, Bright Ideas: Insights from Legal Luminaries Worldwide (Mill City Press 2009) at 161. Simon Slater of First Counsel expressed this view. Assume Slater...
Reporting lines, locations of lawyers, and broader geographic responsibilities
Posted on July 30, 2009Back in the day, companies thought of their international operations on a country-by-country basis and it made sense to have a local lawyer or two in-country report to the general manager of that country. Times change, as pointed out in...
On this blog, the Million Word March ? a whole lotta writin? goin? on
Posted on July 30, 2009Through its first 4,500 posts and 52 months, this blog piled up 903,932 words. The Word document in which I have combined those posts has margins of a half inch on all sides and totals 1,456 pages. Metrics nuts will...
Thank you, contributing (guest) authors on this blog! Are others interested in writing?
Posted on July 30, 2009Ideas and issues about management of corporate legal functions thrive outside of what I encounter or think up. To help remedy my blind spots, I have welcomed to date and very much appreciated the insights of six co-authors: Brad Blickstein,...
Cluster analysis, a statistical tool that could benefit legal department managers
Posted on July 30, 2009Academics who study the companies in an industry sometimes use a statistical technique called cluster analysis. ?Cluster analysis procedures generally use simple mathematical measures of distance or likeness to group individual firms on the basis of how similar or dissimilar...
Be fair, because, more than you, outside lawyers relive the hurdles they have jumped for you
Posted on July 29, 2009"I like in-house lawyers to stick to their side of the deal. It is simply unfair when the client expects you and your team to jump to a teleconference on a Sunday, and then pays your bills several months later...
A set of this blogger?s basic values and beliefs
Posted on July 29, 2009Readers of a blog deserve an explicit statement of the value system of the blogger. For those readers who care and who pay attention, they can figure out what I believe. Even so, for the others and for myself, here...
The idea of quantifying shifts in responsibilities of general counsel, based on HR departments
Posted on July 29, 2009Here is an interesting quote from BNA?s HR Department Benchmarks and Analysis 2008: ?HR departments are continuing a past decade trend of taking on more and more responsibilities. The percentage of HR departments taking on new responsibilities minus those giving...
Aspects of very large law departments
Posted on July 29, 2009I have defined a large law departments as one that has more than 20 lawyers (See my post of June 27, 2006: large law departments defined; and Aug. 26, 2006: four largest law departments in France.). The topic is, shall...
From the HR world, a metric of legal spending per capita, but it has little usefulness
Posted on July 29, 2009A report from BNA, HR Department Benchmarks and Analysis 2008, found the median per capita budgeted expenditure for HR departments was $1,082 per worker in 2006. The counterpart for legal would be total legal spending per corporate worker. I have...
Commercial arbitration can be shockingly costly and the fees are difficult to negotiate
Posted on July 29, 2009A recent article lambastes commercial arbitrations on the basis of their sometime costs. Writing in the NYSBA J., Vol. 81, July/Aug. 2009 at 30, Ronald Offenkrantz describes the unregulated and often unfettered charges of arbitrators. Various organizations set some rules...
Introduction to organizational capital and legal departments
Posted on July 29, 2009The following quote comes from Stephen Mayson, writing in Laura Empson, ed., Managing The Modern Law Firm: New Challenges New Perspectives (Oxford Univ. Press 2007) at 152. ?Organizational capital is thus distinct from both human capital (which is embedded in...
Some differentiators between spend management systems
Posted on July 28, 2009A guest author from Mitratech described some of the attributes that differentiate one package of spend management software from one another. The differences they cite include: 1. ?The level of billing detail they support (e.g. line items and sub-line items)...
Girdle-the-globe transactions as the counterpart of bet-the-company litigation ? blue moon events
Posted on July 28, 2009The gigantic law firms that circled the globe always talk about how valuable they are in a huge transaction that requires lawyers to combine from multiple countries. Of course, there are huge deals that require legal advice in many countries,...
A good senior-manager move: insist on an agenda before agreeing to attend a meeting
Posted on July 28, 2009A recent post invited readers to send me examples of good management. Dan Williams at T-Mobile obliged, and I thank him. He gave me permission to quote and cite him. ?I have an example that has stuck with me throughout...
New general counsel have about five days before assessments of them form and harden
Posted on July 26, 2009A thoughtful article in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Summer 2009 at 44, should unnerve newly appointed general counsel. Research shows that ?subordinates? expectations of the boss measured in the first five days of their relationship were strong predictors...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #110 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on July 26, 2009Exelon has an internal 1,750 billable-hour requirement. Corp. Counsel, June 2009 at 72, mentions this, which bolsters my point that the 1,850 hour ?standard? is too high. To put the difference in context, consider a five-lawyer department where inside spend...
Part XXXVI of a collection of embedded metaposts
Posted on July 26, 2009Ten more embedded metaposts (See my post of July 13, 2009: Part XXXV), each garnished with the number of its back references, for your perusal. 1. Benchmarks not otherwise covered (See my post of July 15, 2009: benchmarks with specific...
Another data-byte about spending on law firms in the United States
Posted on July 26, 2009?America?s lawsuit system is already the world?s most expensive, costing more than $3,300 for every family of four,? announces Trial Lawyer Earmarks. The site adds that ?less than 50 cents of every dollar actually [goes] to the victims.? Roughly speaking,...
Two fixed-fee offerings: due diligence for M&A and insurance administrative hearings
Posted on July 25, 2009Saul Ewing, a Philadelphia-based firm, launched its ?cost certainty commitment? in June 2009. Many law firms have agreed to work on various types of matters for a fixed fee, but I cite this particular one because of the publicity surrounding...
Two fixed-fee offerings: due diligence for M&A and insurance administrative hearings
Posted on July 24, 2009Saul Ewing, a Philadelphia-based firm, launched its ?cost certainty commitment? in June 2009. Many law firms have agreed to work on various types of matters for a fixed fee, but I cite this particular one because of the publicity surrounding...
Six Sigma projects in various legal departments
Posted on July 24, 2009Preparing for a presentation on Six Sigma as it can be applied by general counsel, I collected what I have written since my first metapost (See my post of Feb. 13, 2008: Six Sigma with 18 references.). Surprisingly different applications...
IBM blurs the line between inside and outside counsel with its ?virtual firm? of retirees
Posted on July 24, 2009Supporting the prolific IP department of IBM is a corps of nearly 100 retired IBM lawyers who practice as freelancers. This arrangement appears in Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, June 2009 at 77. That army of former in-housers made me wonder...
Some insights into who visits this blog
Posted on July 24, 2009During three consecutive weekday mornings, I downloaded from SiteMeter the visitors' detail. Of the approximately 300 visits, 224 were from different sites (which means that about 25 percent of the sites had more than one visit during those three days)...
Online networks may be able to share information securely with a legal department?s network
Posted on July 24, 2009General counsel may have some concerns about how the members of their legal groups can effectively use online social networks (See my post of Sept. 22, 2008: social networks such as Legal OnRamp or LinkedIn with 7 references.). One problem...
Big Blue?s big legal department: centralized, span of control, and matrix
Posted on July 24, 2009At one time decentralized, IBM?s legal department recently centralized as it ??dis-embedded? its lawyers from its business units and created a single global team.? This description comes from Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, June 2009 at 75, and reminds me of...
How to encourage your quiet lawyers to express their ideas in groups
Posted on July 24, 2009Maybe because so many readers of this blog are silent, their circumstances and ideas mute to me, I appreciate ideas for how to let people safely express themselves (See my post of Feb. 18, 2009: ten suggestions for how to...
Good managers laugh ? here?s a cartoon applicable to this blog
Posted on July 23, 2009To have a good sense of humor is part of being a good manager. To write blog posts without humor is a slog [I just wrote about going to war and one reason, along with freedom, God and rights was...
?When you go to battle, you hire the army not the soldier? ? not an apt metaphor for firm vs. partner
Posted on July 23, 2009This memorable quote struck me, but struck me as misguided. The rhetoric, in the sense of the underlying assumptions and method of persuasion, invokes at least these six points. a) Hire the army connotes big matters. Most legal matters are...
Compliance groups in legal departments and decentralized through the company
Posted on July 23, 2009From Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, June 2009 at 66, we learn about the compliance function at The Hartford Financial Services Group. ?The law department?s compliance group has a staff of 35 (13 of them lawyers); another 250 compliance officers, only...
Spend time with economics, a saving grace for managers, and bank on the pay off! Any interest?
Posted on July 23, 2009Many economic sub-disciplines have stimulating ideas to offer law department managers. I have gathered my posts on economics as a broad field, but thought I would highlight four recent sub-disciplines (See my post of Sept. 19, 2008: economic concepts with...
Always trying to improve this blog ?. and envisioning it five years from now
Posted on July 22, 2009To improve this blog I have tried several new ventures since my last update (See my post of Feb. 20, 2009: a retrospective on the prior year, my fourth as a blogger; and Feb. 26, 2009: firsts for this blog.)....
Five distortions that afflict groups: group think, false consensus, chill, and passive-aggressive, and dominance
Posted on July 22, 2009Groupthink: Group members can collectively ? and often unconsciously ? pressure dissidents to agree to a position the majority favors. According to James Dunning?s recent comment ??Groupthink,? as it is known in less eminent circles, can literally be lethal -...
Professional development must be the personal responsibility of each in-house attorney
Posted on July 22, 2009?Professional development is a fusion of career planning and development ? for yourself ? and continuing education and training in both the law and your company?s business ? for the benefit of your client.? This distinction comes from GC Mid-Atlantic,...
The burden of administrative time demands on in-house counsel
Posted on July 22, 2009The cliché ?doing more with less? implies spending more time on work that benefits clients, less on things that help the legal department run, i.e., administrative tasks. Whatever detracts from client service has lower value (See my post of May...
A patent benchmark ? percentage of applications filed by internal lawyers
Posted on July 21, 2009A recent article reports that IBM?s patent attorneys ?filed more than 70 percent of the company?s patents in 2008 for software and services.? The article does not say what percentage of Big Blue?s hardware and other patent applications are generated....
Committees in legal departments, how they differ from project teams, etc.
Posted on July 21, 2009Whereas a project team can be somewhat informal, a committee in a legal department is duly appointed and has more formally structured delegations (See my post of May 13, 2009: 11 committees in Exelon?s law department.). Also, a committee just...
Comments based on the Hartford?s litigation group
Posted on July 21, 2009The Hartford Financial Services Group won Corporate Counsel?s 2009 Best Legal Department award. It has 210 in-house lawyers supporting 2008 revenue of $9.2 billion. Further, ?All firms that do a significant amount of [litigation] work for the company are assigned...
Pros and cons of legal teams, where members work from different locations
Posted on July 21, 2009Virtual teams of lawyers, where not all of them are located in one place, occur more and more frequently, either with inside or outside counsel. An article in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Summer 2009 at 65, nicely lays...
Eleven reasons why a law department might transfer a pending matter to a different firm
Posted on July 20, 2009Few in-house managers blithely transfer matters underway from one law firm to another, but it happens ? or it ought to happen (See my post of Sept. 12, 2008: transfer matters to new counsel with 8 references.). Under various circumstances,...
Two secondment tips: build them into competitive bids and scale them to fees paid
Posted on July 20, 2009From an onging discussion on LinkedIin about secondments, I extracted two ideas offered by in-house attorneys. I added the bold font to highlight the comments: ?I think the only way to begin to secure a free secondee is when you...
Newsletters produced by in-house legal groups
Posted on July 20, 2009Among the many reasons the Hartford Financial Services Group won Corporate Counsel?s 2009 award for Best Legal Department is that in the fall of 2008 it launched a quarterly newsletter on ethics, compliance, and privacy. They call it The Hartford...
Fourth set of 13 blogs that have referred visitors to Law Department Management Blog
Posted on July 19, 2009Traffic is one reward for blogging, so I am always grateful when other blogs or websites either cite to one of my posts or include me on their blog roll. I have thanked 40 so far, and here add another...
Hyperpost ? ten collected metaposts ? on legal department benchmarks
Posted on July 19, 2009Mavens of metrics might want to see the full cupboard of metaposts that are available on this blog. Here they are! One group covers a range of benchmark topics (See my post of Feb. 25, 2008: practice area benchmarks with...
E-billing survey suggests not too many bills per vendor
Posted on July 19, 2009Eight well-known e-billing providers -- Allegiant, Bottomline, Bridgeway, CTTymetrix, DataCert, doeLegal, LawTrac, and Serenget ? provided data for a survey I sent to a total of 10 providers. I have written a series of posts about the analysis (See my...
Definitions of legal department management terms ? eleven more and an offer of a free download that presents nearly 100
Posted on July 19, 2009In my quest to create the OED (Online Explanations and Definitions) for legal department managers, I have made a decent start. This blog has defined upwards of 90 terms. I have compiled them, for anyone who emails me and asks...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #109 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on July 19, 2009Litigation up, or perhaps down, during a recession. "During an economic recession and certainly during this one, litigation revenues can be expected to increase as a percentage of the firm's total revenues" (See my post of June 28, 2009: spending...
Please describe (confidentially) the best example you have encountered of good leadership by an in-house lawyer
Posted on July 19, 2009Tell me your tale of a general counsel showing admirable leadership! Readers would like to hear about examples of general counsel who demonstrated admirable leadership or management. If you email me or call me [973.568.9110] with an example, I will...
Don?t even consider termination premiums with your law firms
Posted on July 17, 2009"Similarly, the parties can and should consider termination premiums in the event that a client abandons the project midstream or, having learned the lawyer?s strategy, opts to engage less-expensive counsel." This sentence, from Law Practice, Vol. 35, June 2009 at...
Should you expect your firms to bring you results from their competitive intelligence (CI) programs?
Posted on July 17, 2009A recent white paper cites an article that says ?in order to correctly anticipate potential risks to clients, firms can implement competitive intelligence (CI) programs.? Later, Future Law Office: Delivering Value-Added Legal Services in Challenging Times (Robert Half Legal 2009)...
Unexpected number of law firms and vendors per user of leading e-billing systems
Posted on July 17, 2009Eight prominent e-billing providers -- Allegiant, Bottomline, Bridgeway, CTTymetrix, DataCert, doeLegal, LawTrac, and Serengeti ? responded to a survey I sent to a total of 10 providers. The survey asked them to provide metrics for three questions (See my post...
If you send your RFP to fewer firms, each is likely to try harder and respond better
Posted on July 17, 2009A series of experiments has found that the more participants there are in a competition, on average the less hard people try. The studies are described in the Economist, July 11, 2009 at 82. It?s as if people have an...
More information about and applications of Information Theory
Posted on July 17, 2009Claude Shannon outlined the principles of Information Theory in 1948, and the applications of his seminal work surround us still. According to the astounding publication by Autonomy, Meaning Based Computing, 2009 at 23-24, ?Shannon stated that information could be treated...
Host an innovation tournament in your legal department to identify and reward good ideas
Posted on July 17, 2009Here is a mashup of ideas: cash rewards for cost saving ideas and a tournament to honor good ideas. MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Summer 2009 at 17, reviews a book about innovation tournaments. The book explains a method...
The frequent flyer way to unify a global legal department
Posted on July 17, 2009?At Hilton, I or another member of law department executive management team personally visited our locations with lawyers at least once every three months (or have the lawyers visit headquarters).? Tim Glassett, the former general counsel of Hilton Hotels, explains...
Who knows how much US law departments spend per year on US law firms?
Posted on July 16, 20091. According to one source, the top 200 law firms in the US earned $84 billion in 2008 (See my post of July 7, 2009: 200 largest US law firms and their revenue in 2008.). I have not seen estimates...
General counsel who travel frequently, especially those of global companies, need stamina
Posted on July 16, 2009"One of the most surprising lessons I've learned in this job is that you need to be in shape physically to lead a global function. That is a part of the balance you can't forgo. The travel and the hours...
SharePoint application for knowledge distribution at Hilton, a global legal department
Posted on July 16, 2009An example of how a SharePoint application helps a legal department appears in E. Leigh Dance, Bright Ideas: Insights from Legal Luminaries Worldwide (Mill City Press 2009) at 19. Tim Glassett, the former general counsel of Hilton Hotels and its...
Soft skills that benefit in-house counsel
Posted on July 16, 2009Most lawyers think of continuing legal education almost entirely in terms of the need to freshen their knowledge of a substantive area of law (See my post of May 25, 2008: CLE with 30 references.). Few think of the softer...
A three-ply description of the structure and roles of global legal department
Posted on July 16, 2009Three functional dimensions of a multi-national law department: ?general business lawyers with global responsibility, legal specialists in the core legal fields for the company's operations, and in-house lawyers on the ground in the main jurisdictions where the company conducts its...
Misguided elevation of creative solutions over effective solutions
Posted on July 16, 2009If an in-house lawyer asks a law firm for assistance, an important measure of that firm?s contribution should not be the degree of novelty of its solution. More telling measures are outcome and cost. Creativity, doing something new, is over-rated...
?Business and communication styles? of firms they like matter for in-side lawyers
Posted on July 16, 2009?Even if a firm has the expertise, if their business and communication style isn?t compatible with ours, it doesn?t really help.? This quote from a general counsel of a small company in Canada comes from Future Law Office: Delivering Value-Added...
A hyperpost on law firm marketing efforts
Posted on July 16, 2009Previous metaposts have compiled my comments on various aspects of law firm marketing: beauty contests, brands, cross-selling, and marketing (See my post of Nov. 28, 2007: law firm brands with 11 references; Jan. 28, 2008: brands, marketing, and cross selling;...
Data on number of invoices processed per user through leading e-billing systems
Posted on July 16, 2009In mid-May, ten providers of e-billing software received invitations from me to provide metrics for three questions. Two declined but eight sent me data: Allegiant, Bottomline, Bridgeway, CTTyMetrix, DataCert, DOELegal, LawTrac, and Serengeti. One question asked for the ?Number of...
Descriptive metrics ? the series so far ? and thoughts on the ill-fated effort to develop that idea
Posted on July 15, 2009At one point this Spring I set off on an ambitious series of posts about what I call ?descriptive metrics.? I persuaded myself that I had hit upon a higher-level way to quantify and depict legal department performance and characteristics....
Meet more posts on how to improve meetings
Posted on July 15, 2009More than two years ago I compiled what I had written about the infernal time sponge, meetings (See my post of April 22, 2007: meetings with 9 references.). Since then, in-house attorneys have endured countless more hours in meetings. To...
Number of invoices processed through leading e-billing systems
Posted on July 15, 2009In mid-May, I invited ten providers of e-billing software to answer three questions. I followed up several times with the invitees. Eight companies eventually sent me data: Allegiant, Bottomline, Bridgeway, CTTymetrix, DataCert, doeLegal, LawTrac, and Serengeti...
A surprising boost from technology thought by firms to enhance client service
Posted on July 15, 2009A surprising emphasis on technology training appeared in a recent white paper. A chart summarizes the survey responses from 150 lawyers among the largest in the United States and Canada, reported in Future Law Office: Delivering Value-Added Legal Services in...
A new website that curates the flood of law firm updates on substantive legal developments
Posted on July 15, 2009Robert Ambrogi, the prolific host of LegalLine.com and other activities internetal (to coin a term), points out a useful resource for in-house attorneys. In-house lawyers may want to learn from the published work product of law firms, but how do...
Six disadvantages of a decentralized system where local business leaders hire lawyers as they see fit
Posted on July 15, 2009In Inside Counsel, June 2009 at 54, Peter Wexler explains why he changed the decentralized structure at Schneider Electric to one where its practicing lawyers all report to him. The department has 90 lawyers, in 31 locations in 23 countries...
A claim about billions in value overseen by patent attorneys, but questions, always questions
Posted on July 14, 2009Whirlpool ?has more than $4 billion of new ideas in its innovation pipeline,? according to an article in talent mgt., Feb. 2009 at 46. The rest of the article looks mostly at how the company has fused technology and talent...
More data and observations about why legal departments choose a specific firm for a matter
Posted on July 14, 2009By law, it seems, all surveys of legal departments must include a mandatory question: ?Which of the following criteria is most important to you when you decide which law firm to retain?? Loopholes in the law allow the survey to...
Better meetings through devotion to facts based on reading during the meeting
Posted on July 14, 2009The legendary Prof. Edward Tufte, interviewed for MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Summer 2009 at 38, argues that meetings are more efficient if members devote much of their time during them to reading.. "I like enforced reading in meetings."...
The A3 technique of Toyota to boost the thinking of problem-solvers
Posted on July 14, 2009MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Summer 2009 at 30-31, gives an example of Toyota Motor Corp.?s method to achieve operational learning. Called the A3, because it fits on one sheet of paper of that size, it typically has a...
The false consensus effect and the blinders it creates for teams of peers
Posted on July 14, 2009The more that people are centrally connected to their peers, the more they tend to overestimate the degree to which their judgments are in agreement. Social scientists call this the ?false consensus effect.? So, for example, lawyers who report directly...
Wince at the suggestion that firms press for quarterly meetings with the general counsel
Posted on July 14, 2009A recent white paper quotes an article by Larry Bodine, who ?advises law firms to meet with general counsel at least once a quarter, at the client?s office? to talk about the client?s business. His quote appears in Future Law...
Tell law firms where they rank on metrics that matter to you, without identifying the firms
Posted on July 13, 2009To spur your key law firms, tell them how they compare to their competitors. This idea comes from Inside Counsel, June 2009 at 50, which recounts the tactic of Jim Bencer, the general counsel of Williams Co. His legal group...
If you invest in formal education for your lawyers, insist on repayment if they leave soon thereafter
Posted on July 13, 2009Some law departments (or their companies) pay for graduate programs taken by their lawyers. For example, someone might enroll in an executive MBA program or earn a project management certificate. For international lawyers, a resource like this is the Center...
Bring foreign-country lawyers to headquarters for a stint of training
Posted on July 13, 2009When a legal department has lawyers who are admitted in a foreign jurisdiction and have only practiced there, it is important to integrate them with the mainstream department. You might bring them to headquarters for a period of training and...
Part XXXV of a collection of embedded metaposts
Posted on July 13, 2009Ten more embedded metaposts (See my post of June 19, 2009: Part XXXIV), each embellished with the number of its back references. 1. Evolution, evolve (See my post of June 25, 2008: evolution with 8 references.). 2. General Electric (See...
Law departments extensively profiled on this blog: Cisco, DuPont, FMC, GE, McDonalds, Microsoft, United Technologies and Wal-Mart
Posted on July 13, 2009So far, I have collected posts and created metaposts on Cisco, DuPont, FMC Technologies, GE, McDonalds and Microsoft. These six total 154 posts (See my post of Sept. 25, 2008: Cisco with 30 references; June 7, 2009: DuPont with 32...
Ten most interesting posts on this blog of May 2009
Posted on July 11, 2009Some time having passed since I published 100 or so posts during May, I reread them all and chose the ten most provocative and interesting. For each, I wrote in brackets after the header a brief description of the post;...
Plotlines, a presentation technique more advanced than timelines
Posted on July 10, 2009In-house counsel who need to present complicated material to clients or outside counsel should consider the advantages of a plotline. As a visualization tool, timelines leave much to be desired (See my post of Feb. 16, 2008: flowcharts and summaries.)...
Mens sana in corpore sano: corporate lawyers and health
Posted on July 10, 2009To be able to ?run a good race? as an in-house lawyer over a period of years, it helps to stay healthy. An assortment of posts on this blog refer to physical health (See my post of Jan. 13, 2006...
Third set of resources from blogs and websites ? thanks to another 13
Posted on July 10, 2009Many blogs and websites cite to Law Department Management Blog, 27 of which I have previously thanked (See my post of June 17, 2009: 14 blogs/websites that have directed readers here; and June 26, 2009: 13 more referral sources.). During...
Ten benchmarks many general counsel wish they could obtain and ponder
Posted on July 10, 2009Having presented the ten most fundamental benchmarks for legal department managers, all of them available from various sources, I mention here ten benchmarks that many general counsel may wish were more available (See my post of July 9, 2009: ten...
Another set of 12 practice pros and cons
Posted on July 09, 2009Since my previous post on the advantages and disadvantages of fifteen practices (See my post of March 23, 2009: pluses and minuses of 15 practices.), I have accumulated a dozen more debate posts. 1. Break-outs or plenary sessions at large...
Don?t ask for a single budget, ask for scenarios of plausible outcomes in a matter and the associated fee estimates
Posted on July 09, 2009Jeanne Graham, writing in the Texas Lawyer, July 1, 2009, quotes the managing partner of Beirne Maynard & Parsons. His comments on decision trees are grounded in reality (See my post of June 17, 2009: decision tree software with 6...
Ten most fundamental metrics for general counsel and interested observers
Posted on July 09, 2009For US law departments that have more than five lawyers, here are the fundamental ten metrics: 1. They spend approximately 0.5% of their corporation?s revenue each year on their inside plus their external spend. 2. That benchmark for ?total legal...
Recommendations of software for litigation tracking that are new to me
Posted on July 08, 2009The head of litigation at a pharmaceutical company, facing scores of lawsuits, asked on a LinkedIn forum about software that would allow his firms to enter their litigation data. ?I need several outside firms to input/upload confidential data [about lawsuits]...
Hyperpost on software applications for legal departments
Posted on July 08, 2009Most of the metaposts on Law Department Management Blog look at specific categories of software, including the following seven: 1. Contract management (See my post of Nov. 22, 2008: contract management software with 11 references.). 2. Decision trees (See my...
Pros and cons of an in-house lawyer responsible for relations with a primary law firm
Posted on July 08, 2009Dialectics appeal to me; the push and pull of opposing views exists all the time on any practice worth a discussion. So in that spirit let me present both sides of the decision to charge a lawyer in a legal...
Be decisive, general counsel!
Posted on July 07, 2009This blunt advice, as important as it is difficult, comes from Peter Beshar, the General Counsel of Marsh & McClennan, writing in E. Leigh Dance, Bright Ideas: Insights from Legal Luminaries Worldwide (Mill City Press 2009) at 5. Beshar?s essay...
Don?t print this blog post about saving money and the environment when printing!
Posted on July 07, 2009About $600 per year is the estimated cost of paper and ink for a typical employee printing 10,000 pages (6 cents per page). That figure comes from an article in the NY Times, July 5, 2009 at BU3, about GreenPrint,...
Posts on General Electric?s legal function
Posted on July 07, 2009As part of a series on posts here about specific companies, General Electric deserved a festschrift for its 35 posts. Many of the GC posts boast of costs and savings (See my post of Jan. 14, 2007: document management and...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #108 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on July 07, 2009Take notice of good counsel on the other side. ?Some [legal departments] track their expenditures per matter based on the identity/quality of opposing counsel to determine the best advocate against a thorny opponent or to hire that opposing lawyer away...
Brood over these benefits of coffee
Posted on July 07, 2009Coffee jump starts many of us, but slightly more important than that, longitudinal studies ?show that drinking coffee cuts the risky of dying early from a heart attack or stroke,? writes the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, June 2009 at...
Improve after-action programs by linking lessons learned to matter management
Posted on July 07, 2009In the legal department of FMC Technologies, the lawyer responsible for a matter may not close it until he or she completes the ?Lessons Learned? section. This method to encourage lawyers to record post mortem insights is more than a...
Estimates of 60 percent spent on litigation by US legal departments may be too high
Posted on July 07, 2009The Annual Report & Accounts of Juridica Investments Ltd., a publicly-traded company that finances litigation, cites data from the American Lawyer survey in 2008 of the 200 largest law firms in the US. The group of firms earned aggregate revenues...
Eight differences between ?cost? and ?value?
Posted on July 05, 2009A quote in a recent article in the European Lawyer pointed out a perceived shift in discourse recently from ?value? to ?cost.? General counsel used to speak about value; now, more bare knuckled, they demand lower costs. Whether or not...
The four-part legal ?Value Chain? put forward by Global Leaders in Law
Posted on July 05, 2009Four stages to describe the contributions of internal and external counsel make up the heart of a recent report: the legal value chain. The Executive Summary for ?Leading the Way to Value in Legal Services,? a 35-page thought piece from...
Global Leaders in Law report on value in legal services ? clients set value
Posted on July 04, 2009?Value from external advisers can be dependent on the quality of instruction from General Counsel.? I agree with this quote from the Executive Summary for ?Leading the Way to Value in Legal Services,? a recent report issued by Global Leaders...
Connecting the dotted lines: lawyers who report to someone on a secondary basis
Posted on July 04, 2009Previously I collected my posts on direct reports, decentralized reporting, and reporting lines other than decentralized (See my post of May 29, 2009: direct reports to the general counsel with 12 references; Aug. 5, 2008: decentralized reporting with 7 references;...
An article about how to loosen the grip of Incumbent law firms
Posted on July 04, 2009My most recent article, published in the National Law Journal last month, summarizes why incumbent firms have such a strong hold on the legal departments they represent. That is common sense. More originally, the article offers ten ways to combat...
MSI Global Alliance, a law firm network, and an Argentinian legal department that uses them
Posted on July 04, 2009I learned about another network of law firms, MSI Global Alliance, so I wrote to Giles Brake and asked him for an example of a legal department that uses a member firm. Brake obliged: ?Our Buenos Aires law firm member...
Shared and free database of law firm diversity data
Posted on July 04, 2009?About 280 firms are invited to complete the Vault/MCCA Diversity Survey, and results go into a database that is accessible at no cost to corporate counsel.? This resource of information about law firm diversity, described in Inside Counsel, June 2009...
Seven suggestions for sourcing and procurement to get legal on-board
Posted on July 04, 2009If I were the head of strategic sourcing for a company, and I wanted to try to endear myself to the legal department, here are some tactics I would consider (See my post of March 1, 2008: procurement with 17...
Three reasons not usually given for dropping firms from a preferred list, especially confidentiality breach
Posted on July 04, 2009A survey in 2008 of in-house counsel in Central and Eastern Europe, conducted by the Forbes Institute with Martindale-Hubble International, asked respondents to rank 13 reasons for ?removing a law firm from a preferred provider list.? That is not the...
Modest value ascribed to ?chemistry? between firm lawyer and department lawyer
Posted on July 04, 2009A 2008 survey of in-house counsel in Central and Eastern Europe, conducted by the Forbes Institute with Martindale-Hubble International, has some data about the relatively low importance of interpersonal chemistry. ?Personal relationship with lawyers/chemistry? ranked 10th out of 12 in...
Pros and cons of hiring lawyers to reduce fees paid to outside counsel
Posted on July 04, 2009The downside of hiring specialists to supplant outside counsel are several. When you add a lawyer skilled in an area of law you risk (1) that the specialist work might dry up, (2) the compensation paid will upset internal equity,...
Strange data from law firms regarding drops in ?demand? for legal services in late 2008
Posted on July 04, 2009?Overall demand for legal services dropped sharply in the fourth quarter of 2008, causing a further decline in law firm productivity. Firms participating in Hildebrandt?s Peer Monitor® reported Q4 negative demand growth of -6.6 percent, compared to Q4 2007, and...
Why the FMC Litigation Value Challenge might not have attracted more major participants
Posted on July 01, 2009After a journalist, Amy Miller, called me to ask about Jeff Carr?s Litigation Value Challenge (See my post of May 13, 2009: process announced at SuperConference.) I wondered why the turnout was not greater among large firms. Several reasons occurred....
A set of professional shortcomings in law departments
Posted on July 01, 2009For a retreat that I facilitated, the lawyers of the department suggested several dysfunctional situations that they wanted to improve. All of them evidence failures of teamwork or collegiality. (See my post of April 5, 2009: teamwork and collaboration internally...
Additional requirements imposed before inside counsel can hire outside counsel
Posted on July 01, 2009An article in the European Lawyer, April 2009 at 18, quotes Sandra Mulrain of Georgia-Pacific, now owned by Koch Industries. Referring to changes brought about by the bad economy, she explained a tougher attitude in legal department regarding retentions of...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #108 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on July 01, 2009F-statistic analyses. The F-statistic tests the equality of the means in a group of figures, which is used sometimes to separate sets of figures into categories, as mentioned in Laura Empson, ed., Managing The Modern Law Firm: New Challenges New...
A blog on litigation hold notices, and some of my recent posts on them
Posted on July 01, 2009A new blog dedicated to legal holds cited one of my posts, so I wanted to thank them and list their blog. The site is by a New York attorney, John Jablonski. Second, I found that I have accumulated four...
Patchwork-quilt management ideas for general counsel allow no blanket generalizations
Posted on July 01, 2009Johan Åhr?s article about Primo Levi in the J. of the Historical Soc., Vol. 9, June 2009 at 161, discusses historicism and broad statements. Historicism is ?a theory that events are determined or influenced by conditions and inherent processes beyond...
A compendium of 30 posts about management initiatives by Microsoft?s law and government affairs department
Posted on June 30, 2009Having collected posts on several other legal departments whose management efforts have been well-publicized, I decided to tally them for Microsoft. Setting aside any references on Law Department Management Blog to the software licensed by Microsoft, I found 30 references...
In-house or inhouse, or which end of the egg do you break?
Posted on June 30, 2009The War of ?Legal? Department vs. ?Law? Department! The brawl over ?Associate? vs ?Assistant? General Counsel!! The vicious struggle between backers of general counsel (plural) and general counsels. The endless and cruel conflicts over word choices that go to the...
Free Metaposts Pluses (MP2), which you can request by sending me an email
Posted on June 29, 2009Of the more than 300 metaposts I have compiled, 40-50 related pairs of them I have combined into what I refer to as Metapost Pluses. Each Metapost Plus has more than 10 posts, organized logically, and with several recommendations at...
According to survey, six greatest challenges to making better use of productivity metrics
Posted on June 29, 2009A recent survey of senior in-house attorneys asked them to select the obstacles they face to making effective use of productivity metrics. The survey, by LexisNexis CounselLink entitled ?Effects of the Current Economic Downturn on U.S. Law Departments? 2009 at...
Productivity and, ironically, what enhances it: sleep and caffeine
Posted on June 29, 2009I woke up this morning thinking of ?To sleep, perchance to dream of law department management effectiveness.? Later, I hunted through my archives to find my posts on slumber (See my post of May 2, 2008: sleep enhances memory; Nov....
A calculation of value added by a law department
Posted on June 29, 2009A large legal department has claimed savings of tens of millions in a year by an interesting calculation. The calculation starts with the total hours billed to clients by the department?s timekeepers (both lawyers and paralegals). [Yes, the department makes...
Law department software that helps manage fees paid ? not necessarily lagging usage
Posted on June 28, 2009Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, June 2009 at 11 (Marcus Linden) concludes that ?lawyers are slow adopters of management technologies, with the greatest number of respondents still employing manual systems and paper invoices (40.8 percent).? The survey of 191 in-house...
Data analytics for departments of law -- sensitivity analysis compared to multivariate regression
Posted on June 28, 2009I wrote about the article by Bill Turner of Womble Carlyle on Monte Carlo simulations, and emailed him with some questions (See my post of June 26, 2009: Monte Carlo and sensitivity analysis.). One was about law departments that have...
Three comments on survey data about ?metrics favored by managers?
Posted on June 28, 2009Almost 200 senior in-house lawyers responded to a survey question that asked them to identify which ?tracking metrics? they currently use. The survey data is courtesy of LexisNexis CounselLink study, entitled ?Effects of the Current Economic Downturn on U...
Four applications for tracking and managing matters, in one law department
Posted on June 28, 2009?As a large company, we use three systems for tracking and managing matters. There is a [commercial] legal software system, a Lotus-based system, and a homegrown system. We also overlay the use of Excel for tracking spending by division, by...
Two domestic firms for every foreign firm retained?
Posted on June 28, 2009The same survey that stimulated my ruminations on the meaning of ?foreign law firm? (See my post of June 26, 2009: the term ?foreign law firm?.) offers more data on those firms. According to Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, June...
Five key sourcing tactics to help the legal department lower external legal costs
Posted on June 26, 2009Asked to pick five techniques that a procurement group should advocate the legal group to follow, here are my choices. I am assuming a legal department of approximately 10 lawyers or more, which would likely mean a minimum of $5...
Perplexities that surround the term ?foreign law firm? and some data
Posted on June 26, 2009From a recent survey of 191 in-house legal managers based in the U.S., we learn that ?nearly three-fourths (73.1 percent) supervise one or more foreign firms.? This factoid from Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, June 2009 at 11 (by Marcus...
Data over time on the number of Fortune 250 companies with legal departments of 60+ attorneys
Posted on June 26, 2009A fascinating chart about Fortune 250 law departments appears in a chapter of Laura Empson, ed., Managing The Modern Law Firm: New Challenges New Perspectives (Oxford Univ. Press 2007) at 92 (by Brian Uzzi, Ryon Lancaster and Shannon Dunlap). From...
How much do general counsel push their law firms to open offices, form practice groups, merge, etc.?
Posted on June 26, 2009It is common to read that law firms have merged, opened an office, or started a specialty area because of ?client demand.? For sure, some general counsel may have urged a partner to do something to match the changing needs...
A neglected but high priority to nurture and support your high-potential staff
Posted on June 26, 2009According to Hewitt Associates, ?under-recognition of high potentials is one of the single biggest issues companies face.? This claim, an overstatement by a firm that consults on talent management, nevertheless makes a good point. talent mgt., June 2009 at 17,...
Six minus two observations about Six Sigma and law departments
Posted on June 26, 2009A recent piece in the Daily Report, June 12, 2009 by Katheryn Hayes Tucker, provides four items that add to our understanding of Six Sigma principles deployed in corporate legal departments (See my post of Feb. 13, 2008: Six Sigma...
Monte Carlo Simulations well explained, and the ability to do a sensitivity analysis
Posted on June 26, 2009A clear explanation of the statistical model, known as the Monte Carlo simulation appears in Womble Carlyle?s FocusExtra, 2Q2009 at 1, by Bill Turner. The newsletter explains the technique in the context of estimating the cost of a lawsuit through...
Discounts that rise with volume suggest holdback percentages might also increase
Posted on June 26, 2009I have suggested a de facto ladder of discounts for increasing volumes of fees (See my post of Aug. 8, 2006: tiered discounts from hourly rates.). A corollary of that technique would be for law departments to hold back increasing...
13 more blogs or sites that have directed visitors to LawDepartmentManagementBlog
Posted on June 26, 2009Some 14 referral sources are mentioned and thanked in a previous post (See my post of June 17, 2009: 14 referral sources in two days). Since then I have been collecting additional ones, and I also am grateful to them....
Some history about efforts by legal departments to encourage use of diversity lawyers in firms
Posted on June 24, 2009This blog has covered the Call to Action of Rick Palmore (See my post of March 26, 2006: Palmore letter.). A chapter in Laura Empson, ed., Managing The Modern Law Firm: New Challenges New Perspectives (Oxford Univ. Press 2007) at...
For patent services, the bigger the firm the higher the hourly rate
Posted on June 24, 2009?According to the American Intellectual Property Law Association?s 2007 Report of the Economic Survey, the average billing rates for intellectual property attorneys at firms of greater than one hundred attorneys was more than 27% higher, on average, than at firms...
Does any company limit a lawyer leaving to a firm that got lots of work from the department?
Posted on June 24, 2009I do not know if the problem I describe hereafter exists, but the risk of a perception of impropriety exists. A senior lawyer in a department directs substantial sums to a law firm in the year before the lawyer retires...
What if a law department gave each attorney an allowance to pay for support?
Posted on June 24, 2009Think for a moment. If you were general counsel and you opened a budget account for each of your lawyers with $20,000 and you told them they could pay an administrative assistant $30 an hour. Assuming three lawyers for every...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #107 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on June 24, 2009Rapid growth of Starbuck?s legal department. Corp. Bd. Mbr., Vol. 12, 2nd Quarter 2009 at 46, says that after Paula Boggs became the general counsel of Starbucks in 2002, she ?tripled the size of the legal department to 147 attorneys.?...
The Hogan Personality Inventory, and speculation on its applicability to in-house attorneys
Posted on June 24, 2009As described on the website of Hogan Assessments, ?The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) is a measure of normal personality and is used to predict job performance. The HPI was the first inventory of normal personality based on the Five-Factor Model...
The money illusion and the culprit: your ventromedial prefrontal cortex
Posted on June 24, 2009People process the effects of inflation poorly, which gives rise to what economists call the ?money illusion.? According to Scientific Am., Vol. 301, July 2009 at 78, as our brains have evolved we are not able to process effectively the...
This skeptical blogger, the null hypothesis, and proof of management effectiveness
Posted on June 24, 2009?I conclude that I?m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe but because I want to know.? The quote, with the italics, is from Michael Shermer, the columnist in Scientific Am., Vol. 301, July 2009 at 33....
The future: Automate billing and generate detailed information when law firms telephone you
Posted on June 24, 2009I foresee tighter controls on law firms billing for telephone calls. Let me sketch a future state. A law department might mandate that all calls to it go through a ?routing number.? Anyone with access to that number will call...
Law firms that experiment on clients, a move much worse than cross-selling
Posted on June 24, 2009A chapter in a recent book about law firm management discusses how firms develop new practices. In Laura Empson, ed., Managing The Modern Law Firm: New Challenges New Perspectives (Oxford Univ. Press 2007) at 77 (Heidi Gardner, Timothy Morris and...
Within corporations, misguided attitudes by lawyers that ?lawyers are different?
Posted on June 23, 2009Some general counsel and the lawyers on their team believe in ?lawyer exceptionalism.? They haughtily maintain that they are exceptions to the rules that apply to others in the corporation. Wrong, for the most part. Here are some comments. ?Finance...
Older, wiser, and after 4,500 posts, time to rethink my 12 substantive categories
Posted on June 23, 2009With 4,500 posts under my belt, I looked back over the distribution of posts by the dozen substantive categories I use. Outside Counsel Mgt. (976) Talent Mgt. (602) Mgt. Tools and Initiatives (566) Productivity (428) Controlling Legal Costs (428) Metrics...
Mixed findings on whether diverse work groups function more effectively
Posted on June 23, 2009One argument for having a demographically diverse slate of members on a team is that diversity produces innovation and creativity. A chapter in a recent book, however, by a strong proponent of diversity, not only doesn?t support the argument with...
Part XXXIV of a collection of embedded metaposts
Posted on June 19, 2009Ten more embedded metaposts (See my post of June 7, 2009: Part XXXIII), each embellished with the number of its back references. 1. Law departments of Asia (See my post of June 13, 2009: Asian law departments with 12 references.)....
How much fee detail should law firms be asked to divulge if they work on a fixed fee?
Posted on June 18, 2009My position has been that a general counsel has the right, even though the firm is working against a fee set in advance, to request records of timekeepers, hours, and rates (See my post of Sept. 13, 2006: still need...
The interplay between Legal and Finance
Posted on June 18, 2009Dealings between lawyers and the finance function within a company cover many topics (See my post of Dec. 7, 2005: interactions of Legal and Finance; Nov. 23, 2008: RACI roles for Finance; Sept. 14, 2005: lawyer-client privilege and information sent....
General counsel resoundingly feel they should be considered the chief ethics officer
Posted on June 18, 2009Some 240 general counsel responded to a survey conducted by FTI Consulting, the results of which are in Corp. Bd. Mbr., Vol. 12, 2nd Quarter 2009 at 51. One question on the poll was ?Should the general counsel be considered...
Blog information legal departments have available from the AmLaw 200
Posted on June 18, 2009The champion of legal blogging, Kevin O?Keefe, published a wonderfuly informative post on June 16, 2009 about the number of blogs maintained by the US?s largest firms, the AmLaw 200. Having just written about one firm that monitors blogs and...
A dramatic case study of how blog posts can reach law firms, immediately and broadly
Posted on June 18, 2009General counsel out there, think of blog posts as a way to spread your gospel! I volunteer to publicize the specific messages of any general counsel. Even more, if you mention specific firms, either with praise or with scorn, those...
When lawyers are in the minority in a law and compliance department
Posted on June 18, 2009Bill Casazza, the general counsel of Aetna, ?oversees the work of about 300 people. Seventy are lawyers,? according to Corp. Bd. Mbr., Vol. 12, 2nd Quarter 2009 at 47. Since the ratio of lawyers to non-lawyers in most US law...
Profound and provocative offshore move announced today by Rio Tinto?s legal department
Posted on June 18, 2009Richard Susskind, a visionary of legal transformation, alerted me to his article in The Times. I quote his opening paragraphs: ?In a ground-breaking move, Rio Tinto is announcing today that it is outsourcing its legal work to India ? triggering...
Operational and financial risks outrank legal risks, re general counsel and directors
Posted on June 17, 2009Some 240 general counsel responded to a survey conducted by FTI Consulting, the results of which are in Corp. Bd. Mbr., Vol. 12, 2nd Quarter 2009 at 50. When asked what area of risk their company most needs to work...
Some data estimates about the size of the Indian LPO market [by guest author Robert Unterberger, Esq.]
Posted on June 17, 2009Bob Unterberger sent me this item. As part of a discussion among members of Linkedin's Legal Process Outsourcing Group, Pangea3 co-ceo Sanjay Kamlani observes: "Several years ago, Forrester Research had predicted about 35,000 lawyer jobs shifting offshore by 2010 and...
240 general counsel rank the best national firms for corporate law: size matters
Posted on June 17, 2009Corp. Bd. Mbr., Vol. 12, 2nd Quarter 2009 at 38, announces the results when 240 general counsel ranked ?the best national law firms? for corporate legal work. As I studied the list, it seems clear that size of firm correlates...
Another silver-tongued platitude, but how in the world do you implement it?
Posted on June 17, 2009Having just railed at ?win-win? fee arrangements, I might as well lash out at another empty slogan. This one slithers out of a profile in Corp. Bd. Mbr., Vol. 12, 2nd Quarter 2009 at 46, where a general counsel touts...
Decision analysis and estimating litigation costs: Paper Chace
Posted on June 17, 2009From Ron Friedman?s post about Juridica and other groups that invest in lawsuits, I read a comment by Jacob Ruytenbeek, host of the blog Paper Chace. Ruytenbeek offers another choice in the world of decision-tree software and services. It?s but...
14 blog sites that complement and compliment this one
Posted on June 17, 2009Many of my 400-500 visitors a day come from a search on Google, bing or other engines (See my post of Feb. 11, 2007: ?About 65 percent of my readers look at a post that came up on a search...
Comments from a profile on a general counsel advising on public policy and running a major business unit
Posted on June 16, 2009A profile of Bristol-Myers Squibb?s former general counsel, John McGoldrick, makes two points that deserve comment. They are in Corp. Bd. Mbr., Vol. 12, 2nd Quarter 2009 at 44. ?Great general counsel come in a variety of flavors. Some are...
?Win-win? is a ?lose-lose?platitude for assessing deals with law firms about firms
Posted on June 16, 2009Gary Ruff, general counsel of Tenet Healthcare, makes some comments in Corp. Bd. Mbr., Vol. 12, 2nd Quarter 2009 at 42, about the new attitude of law firms in response to the economic doldrums. Ruff says that ?They?re willing to...
Is it the right of a Board of Directors to evaluate and replace a general counsel?
Posted on June 16, 2009An article in Corp. Bd. Mbr., Vol. 12, 2nd Quarter 2009 at 38, suggests that Boards of Directors should assess the legal talent of the general counsel and replace that top lawyer if that is necessary. A partner at a...
Hits on this blog from Twitter are a steady stream
Posted on June 16, 2009Blog posts, the short-and-to the point way I write most of them, compress information significantly. In two or three paragraphs ? my self-imposed limit ? it is admittedly hard to do justice to complex topics, such as Poisson distributions, post-modernism,...
The sibling, information technology (IT), and its interactions with law
Posted on June 16, 2009Like other corporate staff groups, IT supports the legal group and is supported by them, such as with contracts issues (See my post of Nov. 23, 2008: IT licensing contracts; and May 22, 2009: adherence by legal to corporate IT...
If offshoring raises fears of security breaches, consider US commonwealths and territories [by guest author Robert Unterberger, Esq.]
Posted on June 15, 2009Law Department Management Blog is pleased to welcome a new guest author. Robert M. Unterberger, a litigator for more than 20 years, has more recently been CEO, Head of Legal Solutions and Consultant to U.S., U.K., Canadian and Indian-based start-up,....
Poisson distributions, such as to model client demands and responsiveness
Posted on June 15, 2009Queuing theory and its models often assume that the rates of arrival of work and delivery of service can be described by a Poisson distribution (See my post of Jan. 20, 2006: one of many kinds of distributions of numbers;...
Work breakdown structure (WBS), a tool of project management for legal departments
Posted on June 15, 2009Your legal department has to ramp up to accomplish a large acquisition. Because large projects such as this involve many activities, your lawyers need some way to determine what will need to be done so that they can manage time,...
One out of five seventh-year US lawyers work in-house, and most are very satisfied with career
Posted on June 15, 2009Data recently appeared about corporate counsel in a large, longitudinal study by a team at the American Bar Foundation (ABF). The study, cited in Researching the Law, Vol. 20, Spring 2009 at 1, started with surveys in 2002of a representative...
A daring idea regarding a periodic alternative to hourly billing ? department decides payment periodically
Posted on June 14, 2009Put this in your pipe and smoke it. Let?s assume a law firm is handling several matters at the same time for a law department. Let?s assume they agree that periodically, perhaps every fifth month, the firm describes for each...
References on this blog to Human Resources (HR) departments
Posted on June 14, 2009A staff function, sometimes pervasively involved with a general counsel for its services and often crucially dependent on legal support, is Human Resources (See my post Jan. 23, 2006: training HR staff about legal issues; and May 10, 2006: most...
Corporate Legal Exchange run by the Corporate Executive Board
Posted on June 14, 2009This online site, founded by the Corporate Executive Board in 2007, is ?Designed for organizations with annual revenue less than $1 billion.? It is managed by the team that operates the General Counsel Roundtable and ?serves legal executives and their...
Resurrection of online auctions for legal services?
Posted on June 14, 2009Maybe the rumors of the death of online auctions for outside counsel are premature. It has been reported that Dell, at least its European legal function, is conducting a review of its external counsel "by purely electronic means according to...
Queuing theory and what it might say about how quickly law departments turn around work
Posted on June 14, 2009Queuing theory is a mathematical approach to the analysis of waiting times, particularly where requests for service arrive randomly. The terms and techniques of this discipline could help general counsel. This post draws on William J. Stevenson, Operations Management (McGraw-Hill,...
Who is responsible for compliance? [By guest author Jeff Kaplan]
Posted on June 14, 2009Jeff Kaplan: In many companies, the answer is either the general counsel or chief compliance officer. But a better answer ? because it is more consistent with governmental expectations and best practices ? is all of a company?s senior managers....
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #106 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on June 14, 2009Imagine! An image on this stodgy blog. Inspired by What About Clients, I inserted an image into a recent blog post. Invoking the Three Tenors of opera fame, I found a picture of them online, figured out how to save...
A definition and short discussion of ?incumbent firms?
Posted on June 14, 2009My article just came out in the National Law Journal, June 12, 2009, on incumbent law firms. I defined them as firms that (i) have represented you for several years (ii) in multiple matters (iii) for significant fees. I think...
In-house salary overview for Japan
Posted on June 13, 2009Survey data collected by Optia Partners, summarized in Asian Legal Bus., Vol. 7, May 2009, gives compensation data from nearly 500 English-speaking lawyers (bengoshi) employed in corporate legal functions in Japan. The brief article does not explain whether the amounts...
Has Samsung elevated the role of Asian general counsel?
Posted on June 13, 2009?The role of in-house lawyers has generally been less pronounced in large Asian corporations than their American and European counterparts. Relatively few companies have full fledged General Counsel, with the top legal role frequently filled by a vice president or...
Eleven reasons why in-house lawyers value online legal professional networks
Posted on June 13, 2009A survey conducted a year ago on behalf of LexisNexis, hosts of Connected, gathered responses from more than 449 in-house attorneys (See my post of Oct. 12, 2008: background details on the poll; and June 9, 2009: some questions about...
More collective actions by law departments
Posted on June 10, 2009Joint efforts by a number of legal departments for their collective good have shown up frequently on this blog. As early as four years ago I collected several instances (See my post of Oct. 14, 2005: collective activities by law...
Bias against consultants, but what are partners in law firms except specialized consultants?
Posted on June 10, 2009Many people consult to legal departments; partners at law firms consult to legal departments. Why such different attitudes by general counsel toward the two roles? A consultant, experienced with other legal departments and their management efforts, objective in assessments, creative...
If fixed-fee deals were more public, general counsel could put a value on their departments
Posted on June 10, 2009To the degree that law departments and law firms were to publicize their fixed fees for handling broad ranges of matters, such as ?$500,000 a year for all employment-related adversarial relations,? in-house counsel will be better able to quantify their...
Ovations for the ?Three Tenors? of current law-department stardom
Posted on June 09, 2009Who are the Pavarotti, Carreras and Domingo currently singing the leading roles as law department managers and innovators? Tom Sager of DuPont, Mark Chandler of Cisco, and Jeff Carr of FMC Technologies are center stage and the tenor of their...
An inquiry into data about participation of lawyers on online social networks
Posted on June 09, 2009?[B]ased on our research, we know 60 percent of legal professionals already use online social networks regularly,? according to an article in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, May 2009 at 72. I was dubious so I wrote one of the...
National Grid?s use of SharePoint and other legal software
Posted on June 09, 2009After my recent post (See my post of June 1, 2009: SharePoint as an option for legal departments.), Adam Davidson of National Grid, a UK company, wrote me. ?The in-house team I work in has been using SharePoint for document...
Sonnets from the Portuguese, or, more prosaically, about this blog and blogster in Portuguese
Posted on June 09, 2009For all my readers in Brazil and Portugal, a little background: Um consultor bem informado para advogados escreve no blog LawDepartmentManagementBlog.com. Há mais de 4,000 arquivos (à partir do primeiro de Fevereiro, 2009) divididos entre 13 categorias...
Further thoughts on shared evaluations of law firms
Posted on June 09, 2009?If just a handful of legal departments within the Fortune 500 were to agree to use a publicly available law-firm evaluation system, it would be a tremendous resource that would benefit everyone who hires outside counsel.? Jeff Carr, the hyperactive....
The abundant management initiatives of Jeff Carr, general counsel of FMC Technologies
Posted on June 07, 2009Jeff Carr?s eight-lawyer department at $4.6 billion FMC Technologies punches far above its weight when it comes to innovative and publicized management efforts. Consistently he not only comes up with progressive ideas but also publicize them (See my post of...
August DuPont, as in proud DuPont, for its management initiatives
Posted on June 07, 2009DuPont ? big, big legal budget, and big on operational improvements, is the company most written about on this blog. Averaging a bit more than a half dozen posts each year, the ideas, innovation, and ink of Tom Sager?s team...
The ten posts on this blog that have attracted the most views from feeds ? hard to figure
Posted on June 07, 2009These ten posts got the most views and clicks (the numbers in parenthesis) since January 16, 2007, when I first signed up for FeedBurner. What seems odd is that all of the posts are from March through May of this...
Part XXXIII of a collection of embedded metaposts
Posted on June 07, 2009Ten more embedded metaposts (See my post of May 22, 2009: Part XXXII), each draped with the number of its back references. 1. Audits of legal departments (See my post of June 4, 2009: internal audits of law departments with...
Three useful comments regarding translation services
Posted on June 05, 2009An article in Asian Counsel, Vol. 17, May 2009 at 23, by TranslateMedia?s Rupert Evans offers good advice regarding transation services. Rupert@translatemedia.com Look to see whether a translation agency is a member of the ATA (the American Translators Association) or...
Delay, the deepest frustration of benchmark projects
Posted on June 05, 2009The challenge when a legal group commissions a custom benchmarking project is not creating the questions, finding comparable law departments, confirming the accuracy of the metrics, or analyzing the results. Rather, it is the weeks and weeks needed to persuade...
Budgets of chief legal offices and currency fluctuations
Posted on June 05, 2009If the outside counsel budget is your responsibility, currency fluctuations can hurt or help you. If your budget is denominated in dollars, for example, when the greenback falls, your fees paid to Euro-based firms climb. At least US firms negate...
A patent portal and list of 20 patent search tools
Posted on June 04, 2009I had not realized that so many search tools are available for those who want to find patents. If you want to find out more about them, Intellogist can make your research and decision process easier. Intellogist is a free...
Is the incidence of internal audits of legal departments rising?
Posted on June 04, 2009?It?s a fact of life that more law departments are being subjected to audits by internal auditing functions, particularly reviews of law department spending and budgets.? This assertion, proclaimed with no quantitative support, comes from an excellent article on e-billing...
Esteem your teams with temerity as they teem with tremendous challenges (four of them)
Posted on June 04, 2009Large size limits team effectiveness. An article previously discussed (See my post of May 29, 2009: do general counsel matter.) cites research that ?performance problems increase exponentially as team size increases.? The ideal team consists of approximately six people...
Two questions about secondments ? familiarity and conflicts
Posted on June 04, 2009From a panel I moderated at the SuperConference, two thoughtful questions arose. How important is it that the law department have worked extensively with the law firm that provides a seconded lawyer? The consensus view of the panelists was that...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #105 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on June 04, 2009Regional patent applications. ?With 28,000 cases under management, Canon Europe's patent department files approximately 200 applications on behalf of Canon Inc every year, in addition to European filings from other group company offices around the world...
Legal departments and ?expense audits?
Posted on June 04, 2009A brief comment in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, May 2009 at 18, set me to thinking about audits of disbursements. A long article on e-billing cites Idearc (formerly Verizon Information Services) for its adoption of an online system for...
Four essential concerns of project managers
Posted on June 04, 2009The blog Legal Project Management, by the Managing Director (Asia) at Global Colleague, cites an article by Sanjay Bandhari, head of e-discovery at Ernst & Young. Bandhari?s article discusses the benefits of applying project management skills to electronic discovery...
Outhouse GCs and a blog for companies that have not yet hired an in-house lawyer
Posted on June 04, 2009At different sizes and times, founders and executives of companies conclude that they need an employee lawyer. Before that point, they hire law firms as they see fit, sometimes relying on one particular firm as their outside general counsel. Daniel...
Three points beyond the overview post on SharePoint
Posted on June 03, 2009SharePoint must have a huge following, since the post I wrote a few days back attracted many readers (See my post of June 1, 2009: SharePoint as an option for legal departments.). Yet the post was quite generic. What is...
Information collected by registered agents could go directly to your matter management system
Posted on June 01, 2009A long article in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, May 2009 at 47, mentions (at 50) that matter management systems can absorb data electronically from service-of-process (SOP) agents. Registered agents, as they are also called, enter information about complaints, subpoenas...
Microsoft SharePoint as an option for legal departments
Posted on June 01, 2009Law departments ought to consider Microsoft?s SharePoint for some of their automation needs, according to an article by a consulting firm in ACC Docket, Vol. 27, May 2009 at 18. The article describes it as having the potential to serve...
Law firms ?need to grasp that they sell ideas, not time?
Posted on June 01, 2009Advertising agencies are being pushed to adopt value billing instead of hourly billing, according to The Economist, May 16, 2009 at 72. Coca-Cola has started a ?value-based? compensation system for its advertisers. Under the new system, Coke guarantees to cover...
Reverse brainstorming stimulates creativity
Posted on June 01, 2009One problem with brainstorming is that it forces the process of creating new ideas. ?Here we are, it?s 9:30 AM, so get wild!? Few minds do breakthrough somersaults on demand (See my post of Feb. 20, 2007: sleep on it...
Nice remarks about me by other bloggers (aka, this blogger has no shame)
Posted on June 01, 2009Dan Hull, on his What About Clients, flattered me today: ?At his well-regarded Law Department Management, Rees Morrison, by far one of the smarter, sager and more experienced lawyer-consultants out there, just asked "Does a General Counsel Make All That...
Online networks for in-house lawyers get most of their management comments from non-practitioners
Posted on June 01, 2009Having hosted for more than a year discussion groups on LinkedIn about law department management and on Legal OnRamp about legal department operations, I can attest that very few in-house attorneys either start topics or comment on topics. Most of...
?Goodbye, accrual world? ? sorry, but US legal departments have to report incurred but unpaid legal fees
Posted on June 01, 2009Some metrics are available that tell us how frequently legal departments collect accrual data from their law firms. Not an accountant, my working definition of accruals are legal costs incurred but not paid by a fiscal-period cutoff date (See my...
Does a general counsel make all that much difference?
Posted on May 29, 2009The title of an article in the Atlantic, Vol. 303, June 2009 at 54, provocatively asks, ?Do CEO?s matter?? A groundbreaking study published 47 years ago found that ?Industry effects,? such as the amount of available capital and the industry?s...
UTC references and its global spread plus governance software
Posted on May 29, 2009Several posts here have mentioned United Technologies? legal department (See my post of Dec. 8, 2005: lessons learned from alternative billing; Dec. 19, 2005: difficulty proving savings from discounts; Jan. 6, 2006: captive offshore facility; and Aug...
Two more ways to increase energy efficiency in a legal department, and startling facts
Posted on May 29, 2009Accustomed behaviors waste electricity; changed behaviors can save it. For three examples of what is easy to change, I commend Joe Howie?s article in Legal Tech. News, May 2009 at 40. The first tool is the Smart Strip Power Strip,...
A tip of the hat to Serengeti for its contributions to management information
Posted on May 29, 2009I relish surveys and analyzing their methodology and findings (See my post of March 2, 2008: surveys of law departments with 72 references.). The most prolific survey for law department management data from this blogger?s perspective is certainly that of...
Bill reductions need to be legitimate for a general counsel to claim savings
Posted on May 29, 2009From the 2008 ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey, published in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, May 2009 at 9, comes this finding: ?[C]ounsel most frequently reduce bills for what they perceive as time not well spent for the following reasons...
?Direct reports?: those whose primary evaluator is the general counsel
Posted on May 29, 2009No posts have defined this term but some posts have commented generally on those who report to the chief legal officer through no intermediate person (See my post of June 7, 2006: number of reports to general counsel; Dec. 9,...
Try a double blind evaluation of law firm proposals
Posted on May 29, 2009For your next competitive bid, ask the firms to submit two proposals. The second one should be blinded, the name of the firm and all information identifying the firm being concealed. I hear you muttering, ?You are crazy, Rees!? But...
Four ways to look at concentration regarding a department?s use of law firms
Posted on May 29, 2009The percentage of a department?s fees paid to its top law firms is one common way to describe law firm concentration. For example, 75 percent of a department?s fees went to 10 percent of its firms (See my post of...
To manage a legal department is to wrestle with ?wicked problems?
Posted on May 28, 2009The Rotman Mag., Winter 2009 is devoted to ?wicked problems.? One article (at 19) sets out six characteristics of wicked problems, all of which together suggest that for managers of sizeable internal legal functions wicked problems abound. ?You don't understand...
Auctions: pick the best bidder but for one dollar more than the second best bid
Posted on May 28, 2009Wired, June 2009 at 110, describes Google?s auction method, one which could apply to legal departments when they put work out to bid for a fixed fee. The winner of a competitive bid would be selected to do the work...
The h-index and a potential application to legal departments? retention of law firms
Posted on May 28, 2009A physicist, Jorge Hirsch, devised a formula to determine the quality of scientific papers published by a scientist. ?The h-index is the number n of a researcher?s papers that have been cited by other papers at least n times. High...
?Don?t benchmark competitors? (?)
Posted on May 24, 2009That is the headline of one of the six ?don?ts? of working-capital management, as laid out in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, May 2009 at 67. Working capital is not the same as legal spending and staffing, I agree,...
Twelve problems with broad, commercial benchmark surveys of law department metrics
Posted on May 24, 2009From the standpoint of a typical general counsel, the benchmark surveys you can buy leave several scars and irritations. 1. Sometimes subsidiaries submit responses, which skews the results. 2. Many questions on the survey may not matter to you. 3....
Challenges faced by moderators of panels
Posted on May 24, 2009A previous post offers 13 techniques to improve your performance if you moderate a panel (See my post of May 22, 2009: moderator methodology.). As I kept thinking about the topic, images popped into my head of moderator headaches. So,...
Term sheets for clients should be a key part of contracting processes
Posted on May 24, 2009One of the panels at the SuperConference stressed the importance of term sheets for clients. Term sheets help clients think through what they ought to nail down regarding a transaction. Their spadework saves lawyers? time and saves the lawyers from...
The claimed value to general counsel of predictable legal expenses on matters
Posted on May 24, 2009For years people have told me that general counsel strongly value predictability of legal fees, even if that means higher fees. I have doubted that statement. I doubt it because the total amount spent during a year on outside firms...
Firms call them beauty contests, law department managers call them interviews
Posted on May 24, 2009Among the many ways managers decide which firm or lawyer to retain, the in-person interview is probably the most effective. As with interviews of prospective hires, many techniques help those managers do a better job (See my post of Nov....
A framework for models of law department operations
Posted on May 24, 2009A model simplifies reality so that the analyst can grapple with the fundamentals of a system (See my post of July 14, 2006: narratives, theories and models; and May 21, 2009 #3: three kinds of formal models.). Some primitive verbal...
Some reasons why legal groups have to adhere to corporate IT standards ? from long ago
Posted on May 22, 2009?One of the considerations involved in managing the automation of a corporate law department is the obligation to follow corporate standards. This becomes important in order to allow for support staff mobility [RWM: so that IT support and administrative staff...
13 ground rules for moderators of effective panels at retreats
Posted on May 22, 2009Some legal departments invite to their retreats two or three clients or two or three law firm partners to take part on a panel discussion. Usually, someone moderates the panel. These suggestions for those moderators come from my experience on...
Cross-pollination with two specialized blogs ? procurement/sourcing and legal technology
Posted on May 22, 2009I am honored to have become a guest author on Jason Busch?s Spend Matters, a leading blog in the area of strategic sourcing, purchasing and procurement. My forays into those who buy goods and services for companies will also appear...
Part XXXII of a collection of embedded metaposts
Posted on May 22, 2009Ten more embedded metaposts (See my post of May 8, 2009: Part XXXI.), each adorned with the number of back references. 1. Chargeable hours inside (See my post of May 21, 2009: internal chargeable hours with 12 references.). 2. Contingency...
A striking recommendation regarding who interviews attorneys for a position in the department
Posted on May 22, 2009Not that much hiring is going on, but for the straggling few departments that have an opportunity to add someone, consider this recommendation about interviews: ?It?s more important to choose the right assessors than to focus on the assessment technique...
A possible benchmark metric: total lawyer hours worked per billion of revenue
Posted on May 22, 2009We talk of inside lawyers per billion of revenue but it would be more insightful to convert that metric to lawyer hours worked and to add outside counsel hours, thus producing total lawyer hours per billion. (See my post of...
To boost knowledge transfer, ask lawyers to tell stories, and give cash to the good ones
Posted on May 21, 2009Rather than ask lawyers and paralegals to crank out deadly-dull postmortems, suggest that they write ?human stories that people can connect with.? This idea comes from the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, May 2009 at 23 and the experience of...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #104 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on May 21, 2009100 online resources on offshoring. A Canadian collaborative law blog, Slaw touches on LPO often, especially in this article: ?LPO Provides a Positive Boost for Economy in Recession.? http://www.slaw.ca/about-slaw/ This blog, not listed by me previously (See my post of...
Wolfram|Alpha, a harbringer for benchmarks, computes answers to questions from databases
Posted on May 21, 2009A fascinating article in the NY Times, May 11, 2009 at B7, describes an online service that computes the answers to questions by drawing on collections of data the company has amassed. Some 100 employees in Wolfram Research have gathered,...
Conditional fee arrangements in England
Posted on May 21, 2009Legal Strat. Rev., Spring 2009 at 26, says ?The closest thing to a contingency fee in England is a conditional fee arrangement or ?no-win, no fee? deal. Solicitors are then allowed a 100% uplift on their hourly rate if they...
Nestlé has reduced legal spend to 0.12% of net proceeds of sale, and other steps
Posted on May 21, 2009Hans Peter Frick has been group general counsel at Nestlé for 17 years. An article by him in Legal Strat. Rev., Spring 2009 at 18, offers four tasty morsels. Trust the work of your external counsel. He writes that "we...
More about litigation investment and financing
Posted on May 21, 2009An article in Fortune, May 11, 2009 at 20, adds some details to what I wrote about previously on funding of litigation by third parties (See my post of April 11, 2009: litigation financing; Jan. 6, 2009: law suit financing...
Law and compliance overlap and need role clarification according to 2005 EY study
Posted on May 21, 2009In 2005, Ernst & Young obtained surveys from 95 companies, mostly from the Fortune 1000 and highly regulated industries. One question asked on the survey, as laid out in a report in November 2005 at 9, was ?Does Compliance overlap...
Compare the cost of internal and external lawyers on the basis of equivalent experience
Posted on May 21, 2009The cost-per-hour gap between internal and external lawyers normally bandied about appears large, at 40-50 percent, but the comparison tends to be partner-heavy on the outside and less-veteran on the inside. About half the bill of most law firms for....
Courtesy of Doug Cornelius, 15 more compliance-related blogs
Posted on May 21, 2009The all-seeing Doug Cornelius, host of the excellent blog Compliance Building, saw my recent post about 16 compliance-related blogs (See my post of May 20, 2009: corporate governance, ethics and CSR.). Much more versed than I in this area, he...
A suggested revision to the estimate that in-house attorneys work 1,850 chargeable hours a year
Posted on May 21, 2009A common presumption is that in-house US lawyers put in an average 1,850 chargeable hours per year. These hours the corporate client would pay for if the corporate lawyer were with a law firm. Testing this presumption, we need to...
A department with a plethora of diversity and a remarkable leanness
Posted on May 20, 2009Matthew W. Geekie, general counsel of Graybar Electric Co., is the only male in a law department of 13 people. The other three lawyers and the remaining nine staff are all female. Moreover, Graybar's net sales for 2008, as a...
16 blogs on compliance, corporate social responsibility, or corporate governance
Posted on May 20, 2009Of possible use for general counsel and other in-house professionals, many blogs concentrate on compliance-related topics, which includes ethics, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and corporate governance (See my post of Oct. 7, 2008: ethics with 29 references; June 11, 2008:...
Selectively require e-billed invoices if cost and effort outweigh benefit
Posted on May 20, 2009Wyeth?s corporate legal department employs some 350 law firms, including 90 that submit invoices through the legal department?s e-billing system. My point is that about a quarter of the firms used (90 out of 350 or so) probably accounts for...
Audit trails as a feature of matter management systems
Posted on May 20, 2009A solid matter management system, and I include e-billing systems in that general category, should be able to tell you who changed what information and when. Such an ?audit trail? is important if you need to see when a user...
Estimates of non-chargeable time of in-house lawyers: 5-10 percent?
Posted on May 20, 2009If the lawyers of a law department track their time, what constitutes ?chargeable time? has some degree of subjectivity (See my post of May 16, 2006: ?Count time as ?chargeable? when you are working on any project for or requested...
A ranking of cost cutting methods, crude but worth a mention
Posted on May 19, 2009Legal Project Management ran a poll, which garnered 36 responses since April 27, 2009. The online survey asked, ?Which cost cutting method do you feel provides the most effective outcome?? a) Renegotiating fees (33%): This sounds to me like rate...
Ask your law firms to introduce their clients who can improve your company?s business
Posted on May 19, 2009Sainsbury?s general counsel Nick Grant has challenged the eleven firms on his legal panel to compete against each other in a novel way. He asked the firms introduce their other clients to Grant so they can pitch a new product...
A 2005 study of corporate regulatory compliance practices, including reporting lines
Posted on May 19, 2009In 2005, Ernst & Young obtained surveys from 95 companies, mostly from the Fortune 1000 and highly regulated industries. To the question, ?Where does Compliance report?,? 52 percent of the respondents said to the General Counsel. The November 2005 report,...
A client can choose to pay by the hour or pay one of several fixed fees
Posted on May 19, 2009Legal OnRamp had an interesting piece by Jim Hassett (CEO of LegalBizDev). On April 15, 2009, Hassett moderated a panel discussion on alternative fees at large firms. Rob Fields from Womble Carlyle (a US firm of more than 500 lawyers)...
Survey highlights gap between law departments and their firms on offshoring
Posted on May 19, 2009PrinceOMC, a UK-based management consultancy providing sourcing consulting to professional services companies, polled over 100 in-house counsel at FTSE100/DJIA30 businesses and leaders in UK and US law firms. According to the press release of PrinceOMC ?The impact of the downturn...
Descriptive metrics and dashboards
Posted on May 19, 2009Dashboards are reporting tools that present visually in one place several key metrics and at a glance give a sense of the department?s performance against a goal. Legal department managers ought to think in terms of dashboards as that thinking...
Descriptive metrics for legal department workloads
Posted on May 19, 2009What this blog defines as ?descriptive metrics? are numbers that describe some aspect of the quality and quantity of work handled by a law department (See my post of Feb. 19, 2009: supervisory responsibility; Feb. 26, 2009: start of a...
Some figures I wish we knew about incoming and outgoing general counsel
Posted on May 15, 2009For eleven years, Booz & Company has analyzed data about CEO succession at major companies. For the world?s 2,500 largest public companies, they researched whether there was a ?succession event? in 2008 and if so all kinds of information about...
The need for a consensual model to assess the ?maturity? of law department management practices
Posted on May 15, 2009?The ethics and compliance community suffers, in my view, from the absence of a standard, adopted framework for what an integrated, effective compliance program looks like." These are the words of Jack Holleran, a principle at Ernst & Young, from...
A clear explanation of a chief compliance officer?s mandate
Posted on May 15, 2009Jack Holleran, a principle at Ernst & Young, succinctly states the responsibilities of a chief compliance officer (CCO). Holleran, writing in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, May 2009 at 8, notes that the ?chief compliance officer does not own any...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #101 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on May 15, 2009Time management training. Two speakers on a panel at the SuperConference www.insidecounsel.com/superconference said that they had arranged time management training for every member of their department (See my post of Feb. 16, 2006: solo lawyers in-house must particularly attend to...
A collection of posts preserved, reviewed and produced on litigation support
Posted on May 15, 2009An earlier post mentioned the variety of litigation-support software a law department might need if it handles significant amounts of discovery within its walls (See my post of May 15, 2009: nine packages at one law department.). This blog has...
If you handle electronic discovery in your legal team, you might need a small library of software
Posted on May 15, 2009Gary Weiner, a consulting lawyer with Liquid Litigation Management, brings to the attention of readers two recent studies (Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, April 2009 at 42). One is George J. Socha, "Bringing e-Discovery in-house: risks and rewards" (Feb...
The law of diminishing returns interpreted in the context of legal departments
Posted on May 15, 2009Beyond the single instance noted so far here about the economist?s darling, diminishing returns (See my post of Dec. 21, 2005: additional patents obtained by a company.), many other circumstances in law departments evidence this central concept of economics (See...
Consider taking part in an unusual un-RFP for law firms interested in representing FMC Technologies
Posted on May 13, 2009Jeff Carr, the General Counsel of FMC Technologies, announced at the SuperConference that he wants to hear from law firms that would like to participate in the FMC Law Litigation Value Challenge. In his email to me afterwards, he wrote...
A major program of the 3M legal department to train leaders and business-savvy lawyers
Posted on May 13, 2009Marschall Smith, the General Counsel of 3M, described at the SuperConference one of his department?s significant investments in leadership development. He explained that every six months 15-20 of his 165 lawyers spend one week off campus at a program called...
US patent litigation racks up more than just legal fees
Posted on May 13, 2009A recent paper estimates the total cost of patent litigation to alleged infringers. Paraphrased from the abstract, the researchers analyzed stock market event studies around the date of patent lawsuit filings for US public firms from 1984-99 (See my post...
Eleven committees, Toastmasters and board training for in-house staff of Exelon?s law department
Posted on May 13, 2009Sylvia Bateman, an Associate General Counsel at Exelon, took a few minutes at the SuperConference to describe some of the professional development opportunities her legal department makes available. Batemen said, ?We provide training if lawyers want to sit on a...
The lay of the land: seven ?maps? for managers of corporate legal departments
Posted on May 13, 2009For those who manage corporate attorneys, the term ?map? has many applications (See my post of Jan. 1, 2008: the cartography of legal department operations; May 6, 2008: website for graphical explorations, including tree maps; and March 1, 2009: cartograms...
A historian?s skills applied to legal department management
Posted on May 13, 2009Professional historians would bring to bear a number of concepts to their view of legal departments. Below are several that they would apply. Causality ? does circumstance A lead to circumstance B (See my post of Jan. 25, 2008: causality...
No benefit from contingency arrangement if your company has the cash to pay the firm
Posted on May 12, 2009Marschall Smith, the General Counsel of 3M, explained his company?s policy about plaintiff?s contingency fees. Speaking at the SuperConference, Smith said, ?We don?t favor contingency arrangements if we are the plaintiff because 3M has the cash to pay the firm...
A way to bring evaluations of lawyers into line with each other
Posted on May 12, 2009At a panel during the Ninth Annual SuperConference, a lawyer from Exelon told the audience how that large law department makes sure managers each use a similar approach and grading style. The twenty managers of lawyers, those who evaluate lawyers...
How Ford Motor Credit laid off lawyers provides some lessons for others
Posted on May 12, 2009A senior attorney with Ford Motor Credit spoke on a panel at the SuperConference. She laid out several aspects of the reduction in force recently endured by her law department. Muzette Hill Stallings said that management told the department about...
A strengthened performance management system at H-P
Posted on May 12, 2009A former Morgan, Lewis & Bockius partner, Michael Holston, now the General Counsel of Hewlett-Packard, says he has had one goal for HP's legal department: to make it the "best legal and government affairs department in the world." Zusha Elinson...
Specialist lawyers see their legal domain in everything; the sniglet ?experteyes?
Posted on May 10, 2009We need a sniglet (a made up word for a common situation) for the idea that specialist lawyers can usually find one of their arcane issues tucked into any set of facts. A knowledgeable tax lawyer can find subtle tax...
Audits of the legal condition in a country
Posted on May 10, 2009During interviews in a consulting project, I heard about ?legal audits? conducted at a US company that brings in roughly 50 percent of its revenue from overseas, Every year or two a team of senior lawyers visits a country where...
When the journalist calls, mix and match buzz words to embellish your legal department
Posted on May 10, 2009Inspired by Elliott Hurwitt in Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, May 2009 at 102, who spoofed PR releases by technology vendors, here is my similar approach for general counsel who want to praise their group. When words fail you, don?t fail...
Search not just your department?s knowledge base but also your key law
Posted on May 10, 2009HSBC Holdings, the huge, global bank, has something like 650 in-house lawyers (See my post of March 17, 2006: HSBC?s decentralized reporting.). In addition to its other management initiatives chronicled on this blog (See my post of April 13, 2008:...
Neck and neck in terms of law department users among the leading e-billing systems
Posted on May 08, 2009Three disparate pieces of information came together for me and point to a highly competitive, and relatively balanced, market for high-end e-billing/matter management systems. Three companies, in alphabetical order below, dominate this market and I comment on the number of...
An idea for a retreat that builds knowledge of how clients see the world
Posted on May 08, 2009You may want to try this to encourage your lawyers to learn more about the business they support (See my post of May 7, 2009: learn as much as you can about your company?s business.). At a retreat, Karen Wishart,...
Four structural changes resonant with the importance of in-house business acumen
Posted on May 08, 2009Attendees at a session of the SuperConference learned what inside lawyers need to know about the business of the company they support. For all but a few specialist lawyers, deep knowledge of how the business makes money, how accountants and...
Part XXXI of a collection of embedded metaposts
Posted on May 08, 2009It is with the greatest honor and humility that I hereby present for your delectation the most current embedded metaposts (See my post of April 27, 2009: Part XXX.), each of which bijou unveils the number of references cited within....
Respect your clients ? don?t patronize them ? and expect the same from your law firm partners
Posted on May 07, 2009You build strong trust and respect with your clients if you never make them feel dumb. They may do something or ask something that seems so basic to you, but never make them feel silly. That alienates them; it patronizes...
Repeat after me: ?Know how your business and industry operates, in detail!?
Posted on May 07, 2009A session at the most recent SuperConference concerned what inside lawyers need to know about the business of the company they support. Marti Wronski, General Counsel of the Milwaukee Brewers, made the interesting point that ambitious lawyers shouldn?t ?wish for...
The useful information you gain about your lawsuit if you negotiate an alternative fee arrangement
Posted on May 06, 2009The terms that a law firm agrees to, such as to accept a 25 percent holdback in return for 10 percent of the difference between a $10 million settlement and a $50 million settlement, tells you what the firm thinks...
Four observations regarding management of outside counsel costs
Posted on May 06, 2009Four points occurred to me as I listened to Karen Klein, General Counsel, Kayak.com, during the recent Ninth Annual SuperConference www.insidecounsel.com/superconference. The first point was her observation that law firms should measure revenue on a per-employee basis, as does her...
What is the difference between a department?s ?budget? and its ?forecasts??
Posted on May 06, 2009OK, not the most momentous topic, but as I listened to Karen Klein, General Counsel, Kayak.com at the recent Ninth Annual SuperConference, she kept referring to the two terms, and showed them repeatedly on her slides. A budget estimates what...
The accumulation of spend data in legal departments will, over time, reduce costs
Posted on May 06, 2009One long-term trend may escape notice: legal departments are steadily stocking more and better data about what it costs outside counsel to handle matters. As David Grumbine, Senior Counsel, Dispute Resolution Group, of Whirlpool Corporation, put it on a panel...
Does the monthly rate of expenditures on cases rise faster the longer the case lasts?
Posted on May 06, 2009At the Ninth Annual SuperConference www.insidecounsel.com/superconference, David Grumbine, Senior Counsel, Dispute Resolution Group, of Whirlpool Corporation spoke about best practices for working with outside counsel. He stated: ?Work expands the longer a case is open and the more money it...
Another application caught in the web of 2.0: online prediction markets for law departments
Posted on May 06, 2009Another Web 2.0 application that might be tried by an internal legal team can be added to the nine already identified (See my post of Feb. 1, 2009: 9 applications; and March 16, 2008: Web 2.0 applications.). The tenth is...
When the meter is ticking, inside counsel don?t speak to their outside counsel as readily
Posted on May 06, 2009At the Ninth Annual SuperConference, David Grumbine, Senior Counsel, Dispute Resolution Group, of Whirlpool Corporation spoke. ?A world without billable hours is our mantra,? Grumbine announced, so he and his 30-person defense team pursue fixed fees whenever they can (See...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #100 ? a centennial of additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on May 04, 2009The fate of a general counsel and his blog. With the purchase of Sun Microsystems by Oracle, will General Counsel Michael Dillon?s blog fall silent (See my post of Dec. 16, 2008: 13 corporate law department blogs.)? Non-compete restrictions on...
?Four basic conditions are necessary before employees will change their behavior?
Posted on May 04, 2009If you are a general counsel and want your lawyers to change some accustomed practice, such as the engrained choice of hourly billing or the disinclination to use a matter management system, what techniques serve you best? From the McKinsey...
The long and winding road: an in-house lawyer?s career path
Posted on May 04, 2009The thrust of several posts is that in-house career path is an oxymoron (See my post of March 28, 2006: ostensible reasons not to go in-house; June 24, 2007: the intractable problem of career paths; April 12, 2006: among least...
A long-term relationship between client and law firm ? more than 100 years
Posted on May 04, 2009Recently, when Chalco boosted its stake in the Rio Tinto Group, Rio Tinto turned to that Australian firm of Allens Arthur Robinson in the firm?s capacity as legal advisors. As reported in Asian Legal Bus., Vol. 7, April 2009 at...
The $5 million threshold, ?at which level general counsel start wanting software to assist?
Posted on May 04, 2009A speaker at a recent conference told the attendees that ?at about $5 million in spend on outside counsel, law departments start wanting some technology, like matter management and e-billing.? To be sure, the speaker was hardly disinterested, being an...
Some titles at the top in the UK vary greatly from US titles
Posted on May 03, 2009The Advisory Panel of the CLO Programme includes nine top lawyers. Those lawyers have titles that are not run-of-the mill titles for their US counterparts (the titles I reflexively use in posts, such as general counsel and chief legal officer)....
Legal departments (or corporations) accounted for about seven percent of recent Patent Bar registrants
Posted on May 03, 2009PatentBuddy.com maintains a database of employment statistics for registrants to the U.S. Patent Bar. For the six-month period ending March 30, 2008, the company identified about 1,000 new patent agent/attorney registrations. Among those, 69 (6.8%) were ?affiliated with corporations...
Whether law department lawyers compete with outside lawyers
Posted on May 03, 2009A phrase from a treatise furrowed my brow: ?Although in-house legal departments are in competition with law firms, legal departments still remain the primary purchasers of outside legal services, and their purchasing options have improved dramatically...
Hourly billing rates of law firms and some ramifications
Posted on May 03, 2009Hourly billing rates of outside counsel cover this blog like spring pollen, as they settle everywhere you look, increase dramatically once a year, and cause some general counsel to suffer allergic reactions. References to rates being plentiful, it took a...
A radical proposal ? divert bill-review time to firm-direction time
Posted on May 03, 2009Don?t even whisper the following thought to your law firms! What if a general counsel were to abolish review of most invoices and re-direct the time thereby saved into approvals of weekly business plans by law, real-time calls and input,...
My article: three major benefits for departments that use offshore talent and three major concerns
Posted on May 03, 2009Some of my thoughts on offshoring legal services are assembled in a recent article, published in Legal Strat. Rev., Spring 2009, at 19. Click here for a PDF Download 09-03 Rees Morrison Offshoring Pros and Cons Legal Strategy Review. I...
Not what you hear: high satisfaction with their firms? ability to understand clients? business needs
Posted on May 03, 2009Magazines and conferences relish headlines about dissatisfaction by general counsel with their law firms, but a recent survey by Robert Half Legal of 150 attorneys ?among the largest corporations in the United States and Canada? undermines those complaints...
A kindling of posts on the fees of law firms and their ?burn rate?
Posted on May 03, 2009We who contemplate management of outside counsel focus hugely on total amounts paid, overlooking the importance and insights of the regularity of spending during a matter?s life. How much a department spends each month on a matter I define as...
?They Haven?t Blown Me Away? (Bruce Heintz)
Posted on April 30, 2009? ?so, there?s got to be better firms than them out there,? assessed the GC, based on the recent performance of one of the company?s primary law firms. The last six years have been a sellers? market, evidenced by law...
?We Can Normally Get an Answer from Other Firms with Just One Phone Call? (Bruce Heintz)
Posted on April 30, 2009? ? as opposed to [our primary law firm?s] approach of having a meeting with six people just to debate the issue,? contended the General Counsel. While this General Counsel is facetiously overstating the situation (or, maybe not), how can...
Data on billing rates of partners, and an extrapolated guestimate for 2009
Posted on April 30, 2009Quite a few posts here tell something about typical charge-out rates of outside counsel (See my post of April 8, 2005: compare billing rates of your key firms to peer firms; Sept. 5, 2005: European law departments at about $220...
Most disfavored by law firms, yet most-favored nation agreements are sought by law departments
Posted on April 30, 2009For once I side with law firms: most-favored-nation agreements (MFNs) are unfair, ineffective, meaningless, and unenforceable. Otherwise, they make sense. My entreaty on most-favored nation agreements seeks multilateral disarmament. Do away with them! General counsel should not ask for and...
Hopeful, but the ACC Covenant with Counsel is not all that game-changing
Posted on April 29, 2009Of the 33 covenants, 21 of them are ho-hum, sporadically rolled out, always paid lip service to, and modestly adhered to in most law department-law firm relationships. Guidelines for outside counsel (and perhaps some engagement letters from law firms) state...
For comparable lawyers, fluctuations of billing rates across different cities?
Posted on April 29, 2009Do some law firms charge different rates in different cities for partners who have the same levels of experience? I have heard that some law firms have offered to implement a cap on the rates of their higher-end partners (See...
Swine flu pandemic and law departments
Posted on April 29, 2009Look, give me a break! I am trying hard to be topical. A survey conducted by OfficeTeam asked 522 office workers how frequently they go into work when they are feeling sick. ?Very frequently? was the response of 45 percent...
Which influences most in the selection process, the firm or the lawyer?
Posted on April 29, 2009Firm managers try to grapple clients to the entire firm: ?BigCorp is a client of BigFirm!? Firm partners strive to become the trusted advisor of a person: ?LitAGC turns to me for BigMatters and Small!? General counsel come down on...
Whither the role of Boards in general counsel selection, pay and evaluation
Posted on April 28, 2009"I see an increasing desire on the part of boards to participate in the hiring of a general counsel. I think that the board needs to be more and more involved. This is in keeping with the recommendation of the...
A merger followed by a decimation of the acquired company?s law department
Posted on April 28, 2009What will happen to Sun's hefty legal department, which listed 170 lawyers in 2006 after Oracle acquires it? Consider the axe orgy after Oracle?s acquisition of BEA in April 2008. Of the 20 or so lawyers and eight legal staffers...
Do general counsel care if law firms are Six Sigma belted, ISO registered or PMI credentialed?
Posted on April 28, 2009Two years ago, David Munn reported that the law firm Morgan Lewis had adopted Six Sigma in its mortgage loan practice. A detailed presentation on Morgan Lewis? methodology can be found on Garrett Worley?s blog. Separately, while doing some research...
Project management discipline useful inside law departments
Posted on April 28, 2009Law Practice, Vol. 35, April/May 2009 at 45, refers to Diderico van Eyl, intellectual property counsel for SABIC Innovative Plastics, who uses project management techniques to improve legal work flow. As background, van Eyl mentions the Project Management Institute, which...
True, useful, and generalizeable ? but not all three at once when we comment on legal department management
Posted on April 28, 2009My brother earned his PhD from Harvard Business School, where his professors often emphasized that business research could be ?true, useful, or generalizeable,? but rarely all three at once. I feel the same about my blog posts and much that...
Maps galore in the patent world
Posted on April 28, 2009A presentation at a recent conference, by Andre Marais of Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner, explained five maps regarding patents ? visual depictions of information ? that his firm can prepare for clients. The examples shown in the presentation appear to...
Pick a firm to help you dig into your data mining efforts
Posted on April 28, 2009A general counsel might agree to provide to a primary law firm the department?s historical data on some class of matters. The only data redacted would be the name of the law firm that handled the matter (and any identifying...
TWOG ? merger of Twitter and blog
Posted on April 28, 2009This blog had a recent visitor who read the following Tweet and clicked the URL. ?As the economy shrinks, so do paychecks of in-house counsel, if they are still employed: http://snipr.com/gec5f?. This lead from Twitter was added by @exterro. Note...
How to flourish with a brainstorming session: eleven suggestions
Posted on April 27, 2009Two previous posts outlined five suggestions for how best to conduct brainstorming sessions (See my post of Oct. 30, 2006: rules, facilitator, preparation; and Nov. 25, 2006: private ideas before and mull afterwards.): 1. Have rules, such as an agenda...
If guidelines become tomes, gathering dust ?
Posted on April 27, 2009After my admiring post on Cisco?s extensive guidelines for patents (See my post of April 22, 2009: Cisco?s 70-page guidelines for patent prep.), Jim Dunning, who blogs at GeoTrupe, commented with a more cynical ? probably realistic -- spin. ?My...
Exegesis on the Covenant with Counsel (Part III)
Posted on April 27, 2009My previous comments about the ACC Covenant with Counsel addressed those eight commitments that are symmetric (See my post of April 25, 2009: reciprocal undertakings in the Covenant.) and six unilateral commitments that ought to be bilateral (See my post...
Part XXX of a collection of embedded metaposts
Posted on April 27, 2009Here are the latest embedded metaposts (See my post of April 16, 2009: Part XXIX.), each of which shows the number of references cited within them. 1. Incumbent law firms (See my post of April 16, 2009: incumbent firms with...
Video conferencing, beyond cost control to other benefits
Posted on April 27, 2009Janine Dascenzo, an Associate General Counsel at GE who is deeply involved in operations, mentions in a profile that ?we have been able to cut travel considerably by using our new video conferencing system, called TelePresence, from Cisco Systems.? That?s...
Ten suggestions for break-out groups at a large meeting or retreat
Posted on April 25, 2009If you have a large meeting, perhaps a Town Hall or an off-site gathering, it may be useful to break the plenary group into smaller groups. The smaller groups can push the discussion ahead and then report back to the...
Digressions on the new general counsel of Schneider Electric
Posted on April 25, 2009In March, Paris-based Schneider Electric SA, a 25-billion-Euro global energy management company, appointed Peter Wexler, an American, to serve as its chief legal officer. A profile of Wexler allows several observations on the challenges he faces or faced...
Management concerns of general counsel that apply much less to other staff units
Posted on April 25, 2009Law departments stick out for a number of reasons when compared to other corporate support groups, such as IT, HR, finance, and facilities. Eight of them occur to me, of which the first four listed below are uniquely in the...
Asymmetric commitments in ACC?s Value Challenge?s Covenant with Counsel
Posted on April 25, 2009Among the 16 commitments by clients and 17 by law firms in the Covenant with Counsel, part of the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) Value Challenge, are eight paired commitments, both sides agreeing to related undertakings (See my post of...
Reciprocal commitments in the ACC Value Challenge?s Covenant with Counsel
Posted on April 25, 2009The Covenant with Counsel, issued as part of the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) Value Challenge, sets forth 16 commitments by clients and 17 by outside counsel. Eight of them fit together as pairs, as golden rules for relationships, as...
Operationally, no distinction between policies, procedures, processes, and practices
Posted on April 25, 2009Semantically, we can define and differentiate these four terms but operationally, in day to day usage, these terms blur. Here is my attempt to distinguish the terms, with the terms laid out in diminishing order of formality. Policies lay out...
Successful lawyers and the self-serving attribution bias
Posted on April 24, 2009The self-serving attribution bias blinkers most of us, as commonly ?individuals see themselves as fully responsible for their successes yet blame external sources for their failures.? Thus, as explained in the Academy of Mgt. Perspectives, Vol. 23, Feb...
A nine-box grid used to evaluate in-house counsel
Posted on April 24, 2009At a global financial firm, the tool used to evaluate the lawyers has three rows for performance and three columns for potential, a nine-box grid. As to performance, the manager assesses a lawyer as high, medium or low; as to...
?What?s in it for me?? and the uphill fight to get unidirectional information reporting
Posted on April 24, 2009In-house lawyers dislike one-way information flows. That is the reason why timely data entry into matter management systems often goes AWOL; lawyers charged with plugging in data perceive that the data only goes one way, up, and returns no benefit...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #99 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on April 24, 2009Honored to be on a list of top ten legal blogs. James Dunning, a former UK general counsel, selected Law Department Management for his recent list of top ten legal blogs, calling it ?a detailed and frequently updated blog from...
Median total pay of S&P 500 CEO compared to median cash pay of general counsel
Posted on April 24, 2009According to an article in Academy of Mgt. Perspectives, Vol. 23, Feb. 2009 at 18, median CEO pay in 2006 at S&P 500 companies was just over $8 million. That figure is the ?sum of the salary, bonus, stock awards,...
Is it true that in-house lawyers dislike change more than their clients dislike change?
Posted on April 24, 2009?Lawyers, as a group, have a higher aversion to change than business people.? This adamant quote comes from Janet Langford Kelly, Susan Sneider and Kelly Fox, ?The Relationship Between the Legal Department and the Corporation,? in Successful Partnering Between Inside...
Cisco?s guidelines, 70 pages of them, for patent preparation and prosecution
Posted on April 22, 2009Striving to codify its best practices for ?prep and prosc,? willing to take time to train lawyers and scrutinize processes, setting the stage for offshoring some of its work, Cisco?s patent group maintains what must be a sophisticated and complete...
The consolations of philosophy
Posted on April 22, 2009The subject of knowledge, the most important asset of an in-house lawyer, ultimately reduces to philosophical ruminations. Ruminations on my part have sometimes resulted in posts on this blog. A few draw on ideas from individual philosophers (See my post...
Update on my poll regarding percentages reduced after review of invoices from law firms
Posted on April 22, 2009Having launched my first blog poll in late February (See my post of Feb. 26, 2009: Vizu poll on overall percentage reduction in bills reviewed in past six months.), having summarized the results a week later (See my post of...
The study of the mind ? psychology ? and the mental state of in-house lawyers
Posted on April 22, 2009Almost three years ago I pulled together several terms from psychology that are relevant to the operations of legal departments (See my post of July 21, 2006: psychology and several of its concepts, all blended into this post.). Thereafter, repression...
LSAT scores as potential drivers of performance and metrics
Posted on April 22, 2009If law departments disclosed the average LSAT score of their lawyers (the standardized test everyone takes who applies to a US law school), might that metric predict some key benchmarks? For example, might lawyers per billion of revenue decline as...
?Some People Here Perceive the Partner as Wily?
Posted on April 22, 2009? ? that is, he works our organization and the personalities to his own advantage to get more business for his Firm. So, at times, people are suspicious of his motives,? noted the GC. Law firm partners are under tremendous...
Zero-based staffing decisions by general counsel
Posted on April 22, 2009Janet Langford Kelly, Susan Sneider and Kelly Fox, ?The Relationship Between the Legal Department and the Corporation,? in Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (Robert Haig, Ed.) Vol. 1, Chapter 16 at 16-19. ?A tool that works for the...
Legal-department management memology ? Part III, concepts
Posted on April 22, 2009Management concepts are broad ideas I chose and ranked ten of them in one post (See my post of Feb. 1, 2009: ten most important concepts: client, decisions, information flow, objectivity, productivity, quality, risk, structure, talent, and value) and then...
?The Partner Is Too Doctrinaire?
Posted on April 22, 2009? ? instead of thinking like a businessman. He tends to be very technical and focus more on the minute aspects of the matter rather than the bigger picture of what is the right strategy for us,? observed the Associate...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #98 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes
Posted on April 20, 2009A course in law school, ?Practicing Law In-House.? Profiled in ACC Docket, Vol. 27, April 2009 at 94, David Benck, general counsel for Hibbett Sports , teaches a course at Samford University?s Cumberland School of Law. His course ?teaches aspiring...
As the economy shrinks, so do paychecks of in-house counsel, if they are still employed
Posted on April 20, 2009At Silicon Valley Bank, the legal department's 10 attorneys did not receive merit salary increases this year. Leslie A. Gordon, GC California Mag., April 16, 2009, noted this reverberation from the economic slump. Many other law departments have experienced such...
Productivity metrics on dictation compared to typing
Posted on April 20, 2009?The average computer user types at 33 words per minute, 19 words per minute for composition tasks. The average person speaks at a rate of 150 words per minute for standard conversation, although trained dictators can speak significantly faster.? We....
Strategies for the transfer of knowledge by in-house attorneys who retire
Posted on April 20, 2009For inside counsel, nothing is certain but death, taxes and retirement ? and general counsel certainly know that many of their lawyers will retire from the department some day (See my post of Dec. 19, 2005: ?contented? attorneys in-house face...
Google Trends and what (little) my first look reveals about law department management
Posted on April 20, 2009Having read about Google Trends, I reflexively researched several key terms for this blog. Searchers with Google have had a steady propensity to look during the last several years for ?legal department;? searches for ?law department? have been tailing off...
Fill-in-a-gap lawyers for legal departments
Posted on April 20, 2009For some matters, Yahoo is now bypassing conventional law firms altogether in favor of outfits such as Paragon Legal or Axiom Legal, which rent out senior lawyers to handle short-term projects. Yahoo has used such temporary attorneys to handle legal....
One-half the billing rates for partners in major, non-rim US cities (aka regional firms)
Posted on April 20, 2009The cost advantages of sending work to so-called regional law firms can be startling. The ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey found that the average hourly rates (after discounts) paid by the ACC members for work performed by partners/associates handling litigation...
Status report on embedded metaposts on this blog
Posted on April 18, 2009Your humble scribe aspires to no less than a multi-year effort to collect and intelligently comment on as much about management of legal departments as possible. The online corpus, now nearly 4,300 posts, offers visitors much to read and ponder....
?Making the legal department?s functions more transparent by quantifying what the lawyers do and reporting it?
Posted on April 18, 2009General counsel want to show clients the value produced by the legal team, but often haven?t a persuasive way to convey that. The new general counsel of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Christopher Dewees, wants the efforts of his dozen or...
Lawyers in merged law departments (Bank of America and Merrill Lynch) must reapply for jobs
Posted on April 18, 2009The merged legal department of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, with a combined team of around 700, is in the midst of slimming down. According to Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, April 2009 at 66, last December the legal staff...
Very low number of law firms instructed by the FTSE 100
Posted on April 18, 2009Legal Week Intelligence collected data from 317 UK companies, including 54 from the FTSE 100. ?The average number of law firms used by the FTSE companies increased from eight to nine since 2003.? This surprising finding comes from Corp. Counsel,...
EMC?s law department: rapid growth, metrics, and GC?s responsibilities
Posted on April 18, 2009Let?s tease some thoughts out of unprepossessing facts from an article by Paul Dacier, the general counsel of EMC Corporation, that appears in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, April 2009, at 7. He scatters some figures throughout his piece and...
Legal-department management memology ? Part II (96 words defined on this blog)
Posted on April 18, 2009Language structures the way we think and experience the world; the atom of thinking and expressing is the word, so I have steadfastly defined many of the management words used by general counsel (See my post of Dec. 11, 2006:...
Confusing data on the number of law firms typically retained by law departments
Posted on April 18, 2009Surveys report widely different figures for the number of law firms retained by large US law departments. A low-end metric comes from the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, April 2009 at 18, and the ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey. That survey...
A tool to assess and encourage diversity in sexual orientation among law firms
Posted on April 16, 2009Your law department can get data that rates your primary law firms with regard to their policies and practices pertinent to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) employees. The Human Rights Campaign administers the annual Corporate Equality Index (CEI), which...
Hendiadys, rhetorical trope of the day for law department management
Posted on April 16, 2009Any blogger who uses hendiadys (a rhetorical figure in which a complex idea is expressed by two words connected by a copulative conjunction) is a blogger after my heart and soul (1). Willem Wiggers, on his blog WeAgree, started a...
In-house managers of firms should focus on cost, not ?relationship?; three issues
Posted on April 16, 2009Some law departments assign to each of their primary law firms a senior lawyer, one who should strive for better ways of working between department and firm, better connections across multiple users of the firm, fresh initiatives, pursuit of quality....
Thoughts about favoring non-incumbents in RFP procedures
Posted on April 16, 2009The law firms that have represented you for a while have a big edge over other law firms if you conduct a competitive bid that pits them against each other. The incumbent firms know more about your business, your matters,...
Maybe law departments should abandon formal evaluations of law firms
Posted on April 16, 2009Perhaps formal evaluations of outside counsel are lemons not worth the squeeze, lots of work, hard to do, a sour taste afterwards. After all, a lawyer who does not like the performance of a firm can stop giving it work....
Part XXIX of a collection of embedded metaposts
Posted on April 16, 2009Here are my latest embedded metaposts (See my post of April 5, 2009: Part XXVIII.), each of which shows the number of references cited within them. 1. Approval authorization of invoices (See my post of April 13, 2009: signing off...
Quantify every RFP response question, even if it is only ranking them against each other
Posted on April 16, 2009Not to be a zealot about the value of scoring RFP responses, I still advocate as part of the review that evaluators convert responses to comparative scores. If an evaluator reads all of the answers to the same question, one...
What do you mean, your law department doesn?t retain a public relations firm?
Posted on April 15, 2009Some legal departments seem to get into the klieg lights of favorable publicity more than others, perhaps because they have on retainer their own PR firm (See my post of Jan. 30, 2008: publicity by law departments with 12 references;...
Three reasons why legal departments are better positioned to negotiate arrangements with suppliers
Posted on April 15, 2009Highlighting a point made in a General Counsel Roundtable report, I commend their view that general counsel have several advantages over law firms when their departments choose suppliers and negotiate contracts directly with them. Law departments enjoy stronger market power...
The upcoming singularity -- when in-house costs equal outside billing rates
Posted on April 15, 2009We are edging toward a singularity, a major inflection point caused by three trends: (1) law departments shed junior lawyers, calculate fully the hourly costs of the remaining senior lawyers, and find the costs are north of $250 an hour;...
Assign cases to categories and manage the categories differently
Posted on April 15, 2009One technique general counsel should consider is to segment cases into broad tracks according to their risk and match each track to a set of management activities. Cases in the low oversight track ? the majority of cases, which pose...
A six-item form to evaluate law firm performance (FMC Technologies)
Posted on April 15, 2009Try having your responsible in-house lawyers rate the performance of your major law firms, using a scale of 1 (Unacceptable), 2 (Mediocre), 3 (Good), 4 (Very Good) and 5 (Excellent) on six attributes. These come from FMC Technologies and you...
For an RFP process, streamline agreement to your contract by attaching a form to the second round
Posted on April 15, 2009Once your law department has selected a firm though a competitive bidding process, there still remains the chore of executing an agreement with the firm. The good news, however, is that the agreement should not take long to finish because...
If you charge back outside counsel fees to clients, do clients then meddle with your management?
Posted on April 15, 2009Some general counsel reject the suggestion that they charge back to clients the outside counsel payments made on their behalf. One reason for such reluctance is a fear that clients will then believe they have a right to say which...
Some training of lawyers who later join companies does not play well inside
Posted on April 15, 2009Law school and law firm culture inculcate three orientations that pull at cross-purposes to what consummate in-house attorneys need to do. These three values, as quoted, come from a General Counsel Roundtable publication. ?Excessive focus on quality.? This may serve...
Modest choice of the most innovative in-house use of technology
Posted on April 13, 2009Law Technology News honored Vulcan Materials with its 2008 ?Most Innovative Use of Technology by an In-House Legal Department.? Vulcan Materials, an S&P 500 company with revenues above $3 billion, is the nation's largest producer of construction aggregates...
CAGR of e-billing implementation and some thoughts on interpretation of the data
Posted on April 13, 2009According to surveys by the General Counsel Roundtable among its member legal departments, ?use of electronic billing technology? rose from 2001 (25%) to 2006 (41%). Therefore, during the five years, the adoption of e-billing posted a cumulative annual growth rate...
Keep multiple approvals of law firm invoices to a minimum
Posted on April 13, 2009Authorization levels when lawyers review outside counsel bills are typically set by the financial department, not by the law department. I suppose a general counsel could lower the level, but that makes little sense. The invoice approval level should mean...
Three comments on special fee arrangements touted by a law firm?s brochure
Posted on April 13, 2009Excerpt from Kirkland & Ellis? brochure, ?Partnering with Clients Through Legal Risk Sharing,? appeared on a slide at a recent webinar. "In certain matters, we have taken part of our fee in equity or stock" (See my post of Jan....
Sixty percent of every HCA lawyer?s bonus is tied to reductions of legal fees
Posted on April 13, 2009Among the National Law Journal?s ?20 most influential general counsel in America? stands Robert Waterman, the general counsel of HCA Inc. (See my post of April 6, 2009: some observations on the list of 20 general counsel.). The short squib...
Assertion that some law departments prepare ?strategy documents? regarding outside counsel usage
Posted on April 13, 2009Jon Bellis of Thomson?s Hildebrandt group, holding forth during a recent webinar, claimed that ?A relatively small number of law departments have a written strategy for retaining, using and managing outside counsel ("OC")(as opposed to an OC policy or billing...
Stability over three years of number of matters involving law firms in the US and number of US firms
Posted on April 13, 2009Survey data from 2006 through 2008 shows that during those three years the number of matters handled by law firms and the number of firms used in the United States has remained relatively stable, at medians of about 350 matters...
Oddly small gap between US and worldwide total legal spending per lawyer
Posted on April 13, 2009According to a recent survey, total legal spending per lawyer varies little between the median US figure and the worldwide figure. The two, presented by Jon Bellis during a webinar, showed United States lawyers at $1,056,351 per lawyer and worldwide....
Distribution of spending on outside counsel by 10 areas of law
Posted on April 11, 2009At the 5th Annual IP Counsel Forum, the COO of LexisNexis Examen presented data from a Martindale-Hubbell study on how corporate counsel distribute legal work to law firms. The pie chart had ten slices, each with a percentage. For example,...
Four cost-cutting measures from two law departments
Posted on April 11, 2009These ideas are not new, but I like being able to cite specific law departments and their actions. An April 6, 2009 posting by the ABA Journal reports that PetSmart is asking its law firms to discount their hourly fees...
Unbundle ? use specialists firms for tasks outside counsel have traditionally done
Posted on April 11, 2009I define unbundling as law departments removing from law firms tasks commonly handled by them and instead retaining specialists to handle the tasks. Examples abound on this blog (See my post of May 14, 2005: photocopying; Jan. 28, 2007: medical/nurse...
Litigation financed by hedge funds ? the risks it poses to in-house budgets
Posted on April 11, 2009According to the ABA Journal on April 9th, a hedge fund based in the United Kingdom has just raised $47 million that may now be invested in commercial litigation cases in the United States. ?Juridica Investments Limited helps fund only...
First of all, say economists, let?s outsource all the lawyers!
Posted on April 09, 2009In February 2004, Prof. Clayton Christenson of the Harvard Business School and Scott Anthony, a partner at Innosight published a white paper entitled ?eLawforum: Transforming Legal Services.? On page 4 of a reprint of that article,a sentence casually throws law...
Billing rates understandably increase as lawyer?s specialization increases
Posted on April 09, 2009In-house attorneys gnash their teeth at partner rates that near the $1,000 mark, but those rates at least partially reflect specialization. As they become more experienced, specialists can more it readily recognize patterns and apply familiar tools so they are...
A fixed-fee arrangement, for environmental litigation, and some of advantages and worries
Posted on April 09, 2009In 2004, after eight rounds of a competitive bid run by eLawForum, Unocal chose Howrey to handle its entire environmental caseload through 2009 on a fixed fee. Litigation 2005 spells out the details of this arrangement. At the time, the...
Collected thoughts on law firms and the quality of their work
Posted on April 09, 2009Many people have had trouble defining ?quality,? and I won?t join that struggle. Even so, in-house lawyers value quality legal work by law firms (See my post of Oct. 16, 2006: survey data about quality as an attribute of law...
A fixed fee to handle 450 labor, employment and ERISA cases over five years
Posted on April 09, 2009A white paper entitled ?eLawforum: Transforming Legal Services,? published in February 2004 at 11, describes a large-scale competitive bid. The unnamed Fortune 500 company packaged its labor, employment and ERISA litigation over a projected five-year period...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #98 ? additions to earlier posts or brief comments
Posted on April 09, 2009Morphology. The basic idea is that if you understand the underlying parts of a system (the system?s sub-functions), you will better understand the entire system. Law departments are systems, but it is not clear what are their morphological components (See...
A study and software that estimate the costs of e-discovery
Posted on April 09, 2009A presenter at a recent conference, David McCann, the President and CEO of DataconEED, described a major study his company has done of more than 200 lawsuits and the electronic discovery they unleashed. The study extracted some 15 key factors...
Responsibility for contract management and the size of contract portfolios
Posted on April 08, 2009More often than any other function, the corporate legal department manages contracts once they are executed. The following findings that elaborate on that statement come from Exari, which compiled data from more than 100 corporate respondents at the ACC Annual...
Wide differences between law departments in the percentage of contracts they review
Posted on April 08, 2009A report by Exari, ?Corporate Counsel Contracts Survey Report,?compiles data from more than 100 corporate respondents at the ACC Annual Meeting and LegalTech New York in February 2009. Three quarters of the respondents were from Fortune 1000 law departments...
Before important changes in your department, steer to a pilot program
Posted on April 08, 2009Piloting is the practice of testing an innovation in real, yet controlled conditions to improve it and fix bugs (See my post of Feb. 20, 2006: get more value from pilot programs.). All kinds of program changes by law departments...
Internal collaboration on some projects can be bad for your law department
Posted on April 08, 2009To paraphrase a recent article, a general counsel should not ask, ?How can I get people to collaborate more?? The general counsel should ask, ?Will collaboration on this project create or destroy value?? The article, in the Harv. Bus. Rev.,...
A tell-all exposè of this blogger, including a meandering career and bold vision for this blog
Posted on April 08, 2009Steve Taylor spoke with me several weeks ago and the profile he wrote came out in Of Counsel, April 2009, at 14. The six-page tell-all is Download Of Counsel Rees Morrison profile . Possibly off interest in a non-tabloid vein...
Cost per internal lawyer hour and the ratio of support staff
Posted on April 08, 2009If a group of law departments have similar ratios of lawyers to non-lawyers, then a comparison of fully-loaded internal cost per lawyer hour gets at something comparable and meaningful. Otherwise, if the data comes from law departments that have significantly...
Productivity, quality, and risk (PQR) ? the three horsemen of every general counsel
Posted on April 08, 2009What is the goal of management in a law department? To improve productivity, to increase the quality of legal advice, or to reduce legal risk? Clearly, we need operational definitions of these slithery PQR terms and some way to measure...
Codes of Business Conduct and what in-house counsel can accept as gifts or business entertainment
Posted on April 08, 2009Many Codes of Business Conduct lay out ground rules that limit what employees, including lawyers, can accept from outside business contacts, such as law firm partners or vendors wooing them for business (See my post of Nov. 5, 2007: law-firm...
We need a common definition for ?regional law firms? as compared to ?rim biggies?
Posted on April 08, 2009To share thoughts about regional law firms, we need a definition, and one part is the negative definition that they are not large, national law firms (See my post of Dec. 27, 2008: definition of ?small? law department; and Dec....
Brainwriting 6-3-5 as an alternative to established brainstorming
Posted on April 06, 2009Brainwriting 6-3-5 alters classic brainstorming in ways that encourage equal participation from all team members by having them write their ideas rather than say them. The technique is described in David Silverstein, Philip Samuel, and Neil DeCarlo, The Innovator?s Toolkit:...
Notes on the ?Twenty most influential general counsel in America?
Posted on April 06, 2009In its April Fool?s Day issue, the National Law Journal announced the ?20 most influential general counsel in America.? No doubt every one of them is a distinguished lawyer and person. For sure every one of the general counsel on...
How to train clients so that the company benefits the most ? 18 more choices
Posted on April 06, 2009Three times I have commented on how to train internal clients and I mentioned 11 different techniques (See my post of July 14, 2005: lecture, lecture discussion, film, small group discussion, case studies, role playing, practical exercises, and unstructured exercises;...
Service tickets as a way to gather feedback from members of the law department
Posted on April 06, 2009An article describes a practice at HCL Technologies, an Indian IT services company, whereby the company collects immediate comments by employees. As portrayed by MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Winter 2009 at 46, employees can fill out ?service tickets?...
Conduct a ?role-sizing? to match responsibilities to titles and compensation levels
Posted on April 06, 2009A law department of nearly 100 lawyers that I have worked with introduced an interesting concept to me: ?role sizing.? Since I know nothing more than that fact, let me speculate what role sizing entails. To role size might be...
In-house fox guarding the firm henhouse ? unrealistic to expect invoices to be slashed
Posted on April 06, 2009Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse! How can a general counsel realistically expect the lawyer who is ostensibly managing the staffing and services provided by law firm to review the invoices of that firm and materially reduce them? If...
Part XXVIII of a collection of embedded metaposts
Posted on April 05, 2009Here are the latest embedded metaposts (See my post of March 19, 2009: Part XXVII.), each of which shows the number of references cited within them. 1. Collaboration and teamwork (See my post of April 5, 2009: teamwork and collaboration...
Six search methods to retrieve documents from knowledge bases
Posted on April 05, 2009A recent article describes six ?search technologies,? each of which can help a law department?s members find useful material stored on drives, intranets, or databases. The ABA J., Vol. 95, April 2009 at 43, focuses on litigation support rather than...
Disadvantages of picking a core team at a law firm to work on matters
Posted on April 05, 2009As no good deed goes unpunished, so no good idea goes uncriticized (See my post of March 23, 2009: pros and cons of various practices, with 13 references and two metaposts.). Although I like the idea of a law department...
Parameters for a fixed-fee retainer paid to a law firm for occasional short calls
Posted on April 05, 2009Many law departments would like to have an arrangement with a law firm whereby in-house lawyers or clients can telephone with a quick question and yet not worry about racking up fees. The solution is a retainer agreement whereby the...
Higher discounts for lower-value work?
Posted on April 05, 2009A co-panelist recently mentioned as a cost-control method the practice of requesting higher discounts for work that the law department deems to be of less value. There may be a kernel of a useful idea in that practice, but I...
Some of the intellectually deepest ideas from this blog (res mensan)
Posted on April 05, 2009A portion of the 4,200 posts on this blog are cerebral. For example, the ones I picked for this collection touch on deep and deeply significant ideas. Perhaps the most intellectually significant idea dealt with by this blog is neuroscience...
Most important concepts for general counsel as managers: the next ten
Posted on April 05, 2009The ten most important management concepts chief legal officers should understand were unveiled earlier (See my post of Feb. 1, 2009: ten most important concepts: client, risk, quality, productivity, talent and then structure, information flow, decisions, value and objectivity)...
?What have we stopped doing this quarter that we did last quarter??
Posted on April 05, 2009A general counsel on a recent panel said that he wants an answer to this question from his team every quarter. He does not want to hear about matters that ended; he wants to hear about low-value activities that are...
Sometimes in-house lawyers need to back away from the table
Posted on April 05, 2009Lawyers for corporations always want a ?seat at the table.? But sometimes, if the truth be told, it is a good idea not to be at the table. For example, if a business manager brings along an in-house lawyer to...
For a general counsel, four pros and four cons of cross selling by law firms
Posted on April 02, 2009Cross selling is when a partner at a firm you use introduces you to another partner there who has a skill or knowledge base the introducer hopes is advantageous to you. This common practice has good points and bad points....
Clients undeservedly blame lawyers when deals crater
Posted on April 02, 2009An article in The Bus. Lawyer, Vol, 64, Feb. 2009 at 309, makes the point that lawyers often take the blame for a deal collapsing when in fact business executives sidestepped tough issues that eventually came to light through the...
Pros and cons of specifying the format in a Request for Proposal
Posted on April 02, 2009When they seek competitive bids, many law departments tell firms very precisely how the firms should present their proposal (See my post of March 30, 2008: RFP with 22 references.). Most specify the content they want and don?t want as...
HSBC Japan?s general counsel on secondment, strap line, GCs new to company and panels
Posted on April 02, 2009The general counsel of HSBC Japan features in a profile in Asian-Counsel, e-edition March 2009 at 38. Michael Hancock, while practicing at Lovells and before joining HSBC, took a six-month secondment with Standard Chartered Bank. A few years later he...
Workshops with key firms to improve how they and your department can work better together [
Posted on April 01, 2009Ann Page and Richard Trapp, Managing External Legal Resources (ICSA 2007) at 43, describe how Carillion?s legal department holds ?improvement workshops ? joint workshops with network firms concentrating on improving specific aspects of the way we work together? (italics in...
My first anniversary as an independent consultant to law departments ? join me as I blow out the candle!
Posted on April 01, 2009My shingle went up as a solo consultant to general counsel one year ago today, a deeply satisfying year. This blog, too, has benefited because I feel free to write about any topic and in whatever form I believe. I...
Benchmark reports should calculate weighted averages, correctly
Posted on April 01, 2009Most surveys report average figures, such as the average billing rate of outside counsel or the average number of lawyers per billion of revenue. Most reports calculate their averages by adding each participant?s figure and dividing by the number of....
Adjusted for inflation, median damages in patent litigation have held steady for 12 years
Posted on April 01, 2009This blog has many posts about patent litigation and the costs of patent litigation (See my post of Oct. 2, 2008: costs of patent litigation, with 13 references.) so it surprised me that ?The annual median damages award since 1995...
A gating process before a lawyer can assign work to a law firm
Posted on April 01, 2009If an inside lawyer cannot call a partner to instruct the firm without first getting permission from a superior, that is a gating process. Without having to obtain approval, the first lawyer might not have thought much about the cost;...
A post mortem technique that asks for one suggestion from a client for how to improve
Posted on March 31, 2009Have you considered ?single-point post-transaction? reviews? "At the end of each transaction ask individual business colleagues within your organization for one improvement suggestion. This should be one improvement you and your external lawyers can make to continue to improve the...
RFP processes apply much more broadly than just to commodity legal services
Posted on March 31, 2009Previous posts have disagreed with the ideas of Bo Yancey, Director of Professional Services at Redwood Analytics, on March 9, 2009, about RFPs. Here is my third disagreement with Yancey. ?In the end, firms and clients are best served working...
Rees Morrison?s Morsels #96 ? additions to earlier posts
Posted on March 31, 2009Nice folks shouldn?t be expected to finish last. ?People tend to see warmth and competence as inversely related.? As explained in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, Feb. 2009 at 24, being nice doesn?t mean being incompetent. Nor, of course,...
Your law firms will try to dissuade you from an RFP process that threatens them
Posted on March 31, 2009?The best way to deal with RFP?s is to avoid them altogether, and the stronger and deeper the relationship with a client, the better chance a firm has of doing just that. Redwood Analytics has conducted research that indicates, not...
A prevalent view from law firms: ?RFP?s are A Necessary Evil?
Posted on March 31, 2009Law firm partners widely dislike RFPs, unless they by getting one they have an opportunity to secure work from a new client. If firms only see RFPs as bludgeons to shrink their margins, as the following quote asserts, they would...
Six of the most common inadequacies of general counsel as people managers
Posted on March 31, 2009Grant general counsel legal knowledge and judgment. Grant them the ability to manage up and across their peers. What about managing down? Even if a general counsel avoids managerial ineptitude, some shortcomings in leading members of a law department are...
Managerially inept general counsel and other managers: nine additional posts
Posted on March 31, 2009As we blame parents for many misdeeds and misfortunes of their children, so too we blame managers for many shortcomings and grievances of their employees. General counsel, in loco parentis, face similar complaints, most deservedly if they themselves behave badly...
Social networking for in-house lawyers ? a series of posts on various blogs
Posted on March 31, 2009This post is part of a series sponsored by Martindale-Hubbell Connected. Please see tomorrow?s post on Sean Doherty?s blog, and all the subsequent posts in the series. A couple of recommendations I would make for lawyers who are new to...
In-house lawyers and use of ?client? compared to ?business partner? (and ?customer?)
Posted on March 31, 2009Most in-house lawyers, I would wager, refer to fellow employees who seek their legal advice as ?clients.? Others, a much smaller number, vociferously reject that term. They perceive themselves as working together with fellow employees on a team and disavow...
A homegrown Access database for information management
Posted on March 29, 2009Nelda Young, the Contracts and Litigation Manager at Celerity, Inc., recently posted a comment on my LinkedIn group, Law Department Management. It deserves wider circulation. ?I've created a true "tool" for my Legal Department. It is a customized Microsoft Access...
Law departments do not want the law firms they rely on to run at a loss
Posted on March 29, 2009Amidst the prevailing frenzy of cost cutting, it is worth emphasizing that general counsel do not want to pinch pennies so much that their spousal firms ? the few they are married to -- refuse to take on more work....
Four techniques from one company regarding management of intellectual property
Posted on March 29, 2009A company I consulted to is steeped in intellectual property (IP) and four of its practices regarding those assets struck me as worthy of note. 1. The company runs three ?IP Review Boards? ? one for each business line, because...
An administrative task, not a legal task: annual certifications of directors
Posted on March 29, 2009Publicly-traded companies must collect from each of their board members and ?named executive officers? (the top five by compensation as well as the CEO and CFO) a signed certificate regarding their possible conflicts of interest. The form is based on...
Five steps toward more reality in internal budgets
Posted on March 29, 2009One of the most pernicious problems about budgeting is that people feel pressure to inflate what they ask for because they expect the person who reviews the rollup of budgets to deflate them. This is the problem of budget padding....
Some basic steps with priority setting to become more efficient
Posted on March 29, 2009A friend sent me some ideas Steve Prokesch posted on April 21, 2008 for the Harvard Business Review site. I have slightly edited them. Compare your calendar with your priorities. Label the purpose of every regular or recurring activity on...
An ideascape for legal department managers ? Beware the Ideas of March! (Part I)
Posted on March 29, 2009Landscapes set out plants; hardscapes array stonework; so an ?ideascape? describes how we organize our mental verbal resources. An ideascape for general counsel is one of my blog ambitions. This blog can help to organize and refine how managers of...
A breakdown of outside counsel usage by practice area
Posted on March 27, 2009A presenter at a recent conference on intellectual property showed a slide that sourced research by Martindale Hubbell. The pie chart on the slide had 10 slices, one for each of nine practice areas and ?other.? Litigation 37% IP 11%...
Pattern recognition and emotional tagging: two ways the brain can trip up
Posted on March 27, 2009Depressing as it may be, I keep finding examples of how homo sapiens has less sapiens than we might hope. In the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, Feb. 2009 at 62, the authors trot out two more cerebral slip-ups (See...
Cons dominate pros when companies consider awarding inventors a residual share of income
Posted on March 27, 2009At first glance, it seems fair to reward inventors who are granted a patent a share of the later income from that patent. But at a recent conference, the panelists rejected that incentive. The administrative difficulties of tracking and apportioning....
Nine myths held by some in-house lawyers about their management of law firms
Posted on March 27, 2009Caution: a sharp-elbow post! The following assumptions, cherished beliefs in fact, addle the minds of quite a few in-house lawyers. I tried to list them according to their perniciousness, but that is too hard to do. Furthermore, the more informative....
Growth of the patent secondary market complicates life for in-house patent counsel
Posted on March 27, 2009Work has become more complicated for patent lawyers as organizations have combined to create ways to buy and sell patents. What a recent conference presentation referred to as the ?secondary market? can be thought of as ?offensive buyers,? ?defensive buyers,?...
Will we see legal departments turn to offshore decision analysis?
Posted on March 26, 2009Increased outsourcing of ?decision analysis? is one of the breakthrough ideas for 2009 in Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, Feb. 2009 at 38. The authors predict that third-party providers will ?structure decision alternatives, analyze data, and recommend or even take...
Will associate layoffs reduce the use of offshore legal service providers?
Posted on March 26, 2009P.J. Thomas of Corplo Legal Outsourcing wrote me with an interesting point about layoffs of associates as a possible threat to the legal offshoring industry. ?There is a school of thought in the offshore industry in India which believes that...
The heart of client darkness: how hard it is to map client use of the law department
Posted on March 26, 2009Managers of legal departments lack a descriptive metric for the degree to which in-house lawyers are relied on by clients. For example, no general counsel can say anything like ?30 percent of the VPs and above last year turned to...
Over the past 20 years, ten breakthrough developments in law department management
Posted on March 26, 2009While on vacation, and musing over my 20-year career consulting to general counsel, I nominate these ten management changes as the most significant. For the sake of the hot-stove league, I have ranked them in declining order of importance. Go...
Issues of concern for Asian and Middle Eastern departments when they deal with external counsel
Posted on March 26, 2009In the summer of 2008, Asian-Counsel surveyed law departments in Asia and the Middle East. One question asked in the http://www.pbpress.com/index.php?page=index&block=article&id=INIV3VX-OSHVGLZ-KFQMJNG-U49E8GJ survey was ?Which issues have you found to be of concern when dealing with outside counsel?? I est