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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

Be decisive, general counsel!

Posted on July 07, 2009
This 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, 2009
About $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, 2009
As 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, 2009
Take 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...

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Brood over these benefits of coffee

Posted on July 07, 2009
Coffee 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
Four 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, 2009
Previously 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, 2009
My 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, 2009
I 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, 2009
If 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
After 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, 2009
For 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, 2009
An 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, 2009
F-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, 2009
A 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, 2009
Johan �hr?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, 2009
Having 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
Of 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
I 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....

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