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In-House Counsel

Law Department Management

Comments on every aspect of how best to manage a law department, including how to manage outside counsel. Topics of interest to general counsel and other in-house lawyers who manage legal functions.
By Rees Morrison

Post Frequency: 39.5/day

Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 11:12:47

Well on the way to the milestone of 1,000 law departments in a benchmark survey

Posted on April 01, 2011
My benchmark survey, General Counsel Metrics? second year, through yesterday had obtained 190 participants. It is well on its way to breach the 1,000 participant milestone. Interestingly, of the law departments in so far, just under half did not participate...

Not a good mission to ?try and do as much legal work as possible in-house?

Posted on April 01, 2011
A law department I recently read about boasted this strategy explicitly, which set me to wondering about its advisability. My conclusion: a bad idea. Extended very far this logic would push a general counsel to in-source as much as possible...

Not too hard for law department administrators to keep up with law department technology

Posted on April 01, 2011
One of the questions asked by the Third Annual Law Department Operations Survey was for respondents to ?rank the top three challenges of managing law department operations.? Coming in near the bottom, 7th out of 10, was ?Stay abreast of...

Are in-house counsel the bait for conference promoters?

Posted on April 01, 2011
An upcoming conference on Social Media Law charges widely different amounts for different classes of attendees. In-house counsel pay $695 for the one-day conference. Law firms attendees pay much more, $1,295, but not as much as the wretched of the...

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A starter post on document meta-tags, taxonomies and ontologies ? pretty exciting, huh?

Posted on April 01, 2011
For large collections of documents, law departments can improve on indices and search tools. If the documents have meta-tags, which capture their higher-level attributes, it is easier to find related documents, manage them such as under retention policies, connect them...

Some connections between knowledge and power regarding law departments

Posted on April 01, 2011
Power and knowledge accumulate together and feed each other. The more a lawyer knows about the law and the company the lawyer represents, the more influence that lawyer wields. The deeper the experience of a law firm partner, the more...

Another potential assignment for a general counsel: run the quality functions

Posted on March 31, 2011
The general counsel of Winn-Dixie Stores, Timothy Williams, has responsibility ?for management of all legal, governance, risk and compliance, and quality systems functions.? The final responsibility ? quality systems functions ? stands out. I have written amply about the wide...

?Only two essential problems in managing a law department?

Posted on March 31, 2011
?There are, in essence, only two problems in organizations: how to divide things up, thereby ensuring that the right people do the most appropriate work; and how to integrate the tasks of diverse individuals, functions and teams to ensure that...

High-level managers of other lawyers have to learn to forsake complexity for simplicity

Posted on March 31, 2011
Most lawyers start their careers being trained to miss nothing, look at everything, and be very wide-ranging. They wallow in complexity, for that rack up lots of billable hours, and become quite enamored with creating and dealing with complications. Once...

Recent data on the chain of command for law department operation heads

Posted on March 31, 2011
The Third Annual Law Department Operations Survey asked its respondents to check off to whom do they report. The report that resulted, at 14, states that 44.1 percent report directly to the general counsel as compared to 37 percent in...

Can a law department estimate the cost of litigation-related time by employees outside the department?

Posted on March 31, 2011
A piece entitled Ten ?In-house Secrets For Reducing Your Company?s Legal Costs? appeared on Jan. 8, 2010 on the WikiCFO site. The author is, I believe, a lawyer with the Phillips Law Group. I don?t think much of the article,...

Wondering about dramatic data on litigation costs in relation to profits

Posted on March 31, 2011
A recent report entitled Litigation Cost Survey of Major Companies, presented at the Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth (Northwestern Univ. School of Law, May 10-11, 2010), presents time series data on litigation costs for 37 Fortune 200...

Extreme Value Theory may have something to offer managers of law departments

Posted on March 30, 2011
An extreme value distribution is a curve that does for abnormal values what the normal, Gaussian bell curve does for run-of-the-mill values. A theory to predict extreme events first appeared in 1928, gained its first real traction 20 years later,...

Everyone thinks the U.S. is the most litigious, but some data suggests we rank in the middle

Posted on March 30, 2011
My friend Jeff Hodge, Executive Director ? Corporate at doeLEGAL, wrote a fascinating blog post about law suits per person in major countries. He cites research in Christian Wollschlager, Exploring Global Landscapes of Litigation (Nomos 1998) and testimony before the...

The style of a question robs its answers of much meaning (plans for matter management systems)

Posted on March 30, 2011
People who conduct surveys ? I raise my hand high ? should be wary when they throw stones at other surveys? methodologies. Even at risk, I will continue to chide others on how they word questions and expect rocks through...

Might I propose the first inductees into the Hall of Fame of Law Department GCs for Management?

Posted on March 30, 2011
Here are some of my candidates, in alphabetical order. I welcome other nominations of general counsel of this stature who deserve extraordinary recognition for their managerial contributions. Bob Banks, one-time GC of Xerox and a founding father of what is...

The ideal of ?philosophical management? for general counsel

Posted on March 30, 2011
Hugh Trevor-Roper?s book, History and the Enlightenment (Yale Univ. 2010) collects essays by the distinguished British historian. Trevor-Roper saw in the Enlightenment historians a seminal perspective, which is broadly called ?philosophical history.? It rejects the mere accumulation of detail and...

The biggest challenge law department administrators see is to bring about change

Posted on March 30, 2011
One of the questions on the Third Annual Law Department Operations Survey asked respondents to ?rank the top three challenges of managing law department operations.? Where three points went to a first place choice, two points to second, and one...

My InsideCounsel column on changes in benchmarks by the same companies over two years

Posted on March 30, 2011
Looking at how some metrics varied from last year to this year, based on participants in both the 2010 and 2011 General Counsel Metrics global benchmark survey, I found it hard to reach momentous conclusions. On the whole, the year-over-year...

Four observations about dysfunctional teams that likely apply to lawyer teams

Posted on March 29, 2011
Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, Clever: Leading your smartest, most creative people (Harv. Bus. 2009) at 77, state that ?high-IQ individuals frequently performed badly when they were put together in a team. In competitive situations, [the researcher cited] found that...

Reactionary-conservative-middle of the road-liberal-radical: political labels to describe views on outside counsel management

Posted on March 29, 2011
Beliefs of general counsel regarding how best to relate to outside law firms vary enormously. Those ideologies, I submit somewhat puckishly, could be characterized with the well-known spectrum of political ideologies. Let me sketch my sense of the matchups...

Part LII of a collection of embedded

Posted on March 29, 2011
Part LII of a collection of embedded metaposts, perhaps a florilegium! Florilegium: a collection of short literary pieces. Please enjoy my metapost florilegium! 1. Awards to law departments (See my post of Feb. 21, 2011: honors bestowed on law departments...

Toast to posts on Anheuser-Busch, InBev, and the merger

Posted on March 28, 2011
Once my recent post was written about metrics of Anheuser-Busch InBev, I thirsted for more on that legal department and its management practices. Mostly due to the columns Sabine Chalmers, the combined company?s top lawyer, has written, there were ample...

An example of why industry benchmarks provide by far the most useful insights

Posted on March 28, 2011
To appreciate industry-level benchmarks, compare a few metrics for the law departments of Google and Anheuser-Busch InBev that appear in Practical Law?s February and March 2011 issues (both at page 80). For Kent Walker of Google, more than 230 lawyers...

Much work on this blog concerning lawyer workloads

Posted on March 28, 2011
Everything influences a law department?s workload, from clients to cases, from resources to roles, structure to software, time tracking to training (See my post of May 19, 2009: descriptive metrics for legal department workloads; and May 26, 2007: productivity metrics...

My Of Counsel article on new-style benchmarks, which three are most important, and a law firm perspective

Posted on March 28, 2011
The latest issue of Of Counsel, March 2011 at 11, describes my innovative approach to law department benchmarks. (To take part, click on the icon upper right.) It also explains the three most important benchmarks, and how law firms can...

Government regulations permeate the workload of a law department

Posted on March 28, 2011
A large portion of what in-house lawyers cope with, unravel, interpret and apply circles around regulations promulgated by the federal government. The Economist, March 19, 2011 at 5 says that ?Some 1,000 pages of federal regulations were added each year...

Law departments may enjoy some budget relief if European patent costs drop dramatically

Posted on March 27, 2011
The Economist, March 19, 2011 at 69, writes that the European Union has taken a long step toward the creation of a single European patent. If approved by the European Parliament, the new regime would dispense with separate validation in...

Cost of regulations as a way to convey the value of a law department

Posted on March 27, 2011
Federal regulations ?already fill 150,000 pages of fine-print text and cost Americans $1.7 trillion a year.? This claim, controversial at the least regarding the cost, appears in Met. Corp. Counsel, March 2011 at 5, from Thomas Donohue, President and CEO...

A view and some estimates on market concentration of spend in the US legal industry

Posted on March 27, 2011
Mark Harris of Axiom remarked at the recent Georgetown Law Center conference that the Fortune 200 control 85 percent of the $100 billion legal market in the United States. The 200 largest US law firms, he then added, have revenue...

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