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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

The interplay between Legal and Finance

Posted on June 18, 2009
Dealings 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, 2009
Some 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
General 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...

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When lawyers are in the minority in a law and compliance department

Posted on June 18, 2009
Bill 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, 2009
Richard 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, 2009
Some 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, 2009
Bob 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, 2009
Corp. 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, 2009
Having 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, 2009
From 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, 2009
Many 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
Gary 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, 2009
An 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, 2009
Blog 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, 2009
Like 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, 2009
Law 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, 2009
Queuing 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, 2009
Your 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, 2009
Data 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, 2009
Put 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, 2009
A 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, 2009
This 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, 2009
Maybe 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, 2009
Queuing 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, 2009
Jeff 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, 2009
Imagine! 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, 2009
My 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, 2009
Survey 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...

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