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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

A calculation of value added by a law department

Posted on June 29, 2009
A 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, 2009
Met. 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, 2009
I 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, 2009
Almost 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...

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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, 2009
The 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, 2009
Asked 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, 2009
From 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
It 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, 2009
According 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
I 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, 2009
Some 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, 2009
This 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, 2009
I 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, 2009
Think 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, 2009
Rapid 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, 2009
As 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, 2009
People 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, 2009
I 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
Some 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, 2009
With 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, 2009
One 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, 2009
Ten 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, 2009
My 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...

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