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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

Blook review on the four-volumes edited by Robert Haig of Successful Partnering

Posted on August 26, 2009
Actually 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, 2009
I 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, 2009
The 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...

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Analyze ROI periodically during technology projects

Posted on August 25, 2009
An 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, 2009
Back 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
Two 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, 2009
During 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, 2009
When 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
Yesterday (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, 2009
More 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, 2009
An 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, 2009
This 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
In-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, 2009
Several 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, 2009
Visitors 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
It 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...

Innovators face low odds of success, but legal departments need to keep trying new ideas

Posted on August 17, 2009
In 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, 2009
Since 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,...

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