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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

Conditional fee arrangements in England

Posted on May 21, 2009
Legal Strat. Rev., Spring 2009 at 26, says ?The closest thing to a contingency fee in England is a conditional fee arrangement or ?no-win, no fee? deal. Solicitors are then allowed a 100% uplift on their hourly rate if they...

Nestlé has reduced legal spend to 0.12% of net proceeds of sale, and other steps

Posted on May 21, 2009
Hans Peter Frick has been group general counsel at Nestlé for 17 years. An article by him in Legal Strat. Rev., Spring 2009 at 18, offers four tasty morsels. Trust the work of your external counsel. He writes that "we...

More about litigation investment and financing

Posted on May 21, 2009
An article in Fortune, May 11, 2009 at 20, adds some details to what I wrote about previously on funding of litigation by third parties (See my post of April 11, 2009: litigation financing; Jan. 6, 2009: law suit financing...

Law and compliance overlap and need role clarification according to 2005 EY study

Posted on May 21, 2009
In 2005, Ernst & Young obtained surveys from 95 companies, mostly from the Fortune 1000 and highly regulated industries. One question asked on the survey, as laid out in a report in November 2005 at 9, was ?Does Compliance overlap...

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Compare the cost of internal and external lawyers on the basis of equivalent experience

Posted on May 21, 2009
The cost-per-hour gap between internal and external lawyers normally bandied about appears large, at 40-50 percent, but the comparison tends to be partner-heavy on the outside and less-veteran on the inside. About half the bill of most law firms for....

Courtesy of Doug Cornelius, 15 more compliance-related blogs

Posted on May 21, 2009
The all-seeing Doug Cornelius, host of the excellent blog Compliance Building, saw my recent post about 16 compliance-related blogs (See my post of May 20, 2009: corporate governance, ethics and CSR.). Much more versed than I in this area, he...

A suggested revision to the estimate that in-house attorneys work 1,850 chargeable hours a year

Posted on May 21, 2009
A common presumption is that in-house US lawyers put in an average 1,850 chargeable hours per year. These hours the corporate client would pay for if the corporate lawyer were with a law firm. Testing this presumption, we need to...

A department with a plethora of diversity and a remarkable leanness

Posted on May 20, 2009
Matthew W. Geekie, general counsel of Graybar Electric Co., is the only male in a law department of 13 people. The other three lawyers and the remaining nine staff are all female. Moreover, Graybar's net sales for 2008, as a...

16 blogs on compliance, corporate social responsibility, or corporate governance

Posted on May 20, 2009
Of possible use for general counsel and other in-house professionals, many blogs concentrate on compliance-related topics, which includes ethics, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and corporate governance (See my post of Oct. 7, 2008: ethics with 29 references; June 11, 2008:...

Selectively require e-billed invoices if cost and effort outweigh benefit

Posted on May 20, 2009
Wyeth?s corporate legal department employs some 350 law firms, including 90 that submit invoices through the legal department?s e-billing system. My point is that about a quarter of the firms used (90 out of 350 or so) probably accounts for...

Audit trails as a feature of matter management systems

Posted on May 20, 2009
A solid matter management system, and I include e-billing systems in that general category, should be able to tell you who changed what information and when. Such an ?audit trail? is important if you need to see when a user...

Estimates of non-chargeable time of in-house lawyers: 5-10 percent?

Posted on May 20, 2009
If the lawyers of a law department track their time, what constitutes ?chargeable time? has some degree of subjectivity (See my post of May 16, 2006: ?Count time as ?chargeable? when you are working on any project for or requested...

A ranking of cost cutting methods, crude but worth a mention

Posted on May 19, 2009
Legal Project Management ran a poll, which garnered 36 responses since April 27, 2009. The online survey asked, ?Which cost cutting method do you feel provides the most effective outcome?? a) Renegotiating fees (33%): This sounds to me like rate...

Ask your law firms to introduce their clients who can improve your company?s business

Posted on May 19, 2009
Sainsbury?s general counsel Nick Grant has challenged the eleven firms on his legal panel to compete against each other in a novel way. He asked the firms introduce their other clients to Grant so they can pitch a new product...

A 2005 study of corporate regulatory compliance practices, including reporting lines

Posted on May 19, 2009
In 2005, Ernst & Young obtained surveys from 95 companies, mostly from the Fortune 1000 and highly regulated industries. To the question, ?Where does Compliance report?,? 52 percent of the respondents said to the General Counsel. The November 2005 report,...

A client can choose to pay by the hour or pay one of several fixed fees

Posted on May 19, 2009
Legal OnRamp had an interesting piece by Jim Hassett (CEO of LegalBizDev). On April 15, 2009, Hassett moderated a panel discussion on alternative fees at large firms. Rob Fields from Womble Carlyle (a US firm of more than 500 lawyers)...

Survey highlights gap between law departments and their firms on offshoring

Posted on May 19, 2009
PrinceOMC, a UK-based management consultancy providing sourcing consulting to professional services companies, polled over 100 in-house counsel at FTSE100/DJIA30 businesses and leaders in UK and US law firms. According to the press release of PrinceOMC ?The impact of the downturn...

Descriptive metrics and dashboards

Posted on May 19, 2009
Dashboards are reporting tools that present visually in one place several key metrics and at a glance give a sense of the department?s performance against a goal. Legal department managers ought to think in terms of dashboards as that thinking...

Descriptive metrics for legal department workloads

Posted on May 19, 2009
What this blog defines as ?descriptive metrics? are numbers that describe some aspect of the quality and quantity of work handled by a law department (See my post of Feb. 19, 2009: supervisory responsibility; Feb. 26, 2009: start of a...

Some figures I wish we knew about incoming and outgoing general counsel

Posted on May 15, 2009
For eleven years, Booz & Company has analyzed data about CEO succession at major companies. For the world?s 2,500 largest public companies, they researched whether there was a ?succession event? in 2008 and if so all kinds of information about...

The need for a consensual model to assess the ?maturity? of law department management practices

Posted on May 15, 2009
?The ethics and compliance community suffers, in my view, from the absence of a standard, adopted framework for what an integrated, effective compliance program looks like." These are the words of Jack Holleran, a principle at Ernst & Young, from...

A clear explanation of a chief compliance officer?s mandate

Posted on May 15, 2009
Jack Holleran, a principle at Ernst & Young, succinctly states the responsibilities of a chief compliance officer (CCO). Holleran, writing in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, May 2009 at 8, notes that the ?chief compliance officer does not own any...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #101 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes

Posted on May 15, 2009
Time management training. Two speakers on a panel at the SuperConference www.insidecounsel.com/superconference said that they had arranged time management training for every member of their department (See my post of Feb. 16, 2006: solo lawyers in-house must particularly attend to...

A collection of posts preserved, reviewed and produced on litigation support

Posted on May 15, 2009
An earlier post mentioned the variety of litigation-support software a law department might need if it handles significant amounts of discovery within its walls (See my post of May 15, 2009: nine packages at one law department.). This blog has...

If you handle electronic discovery in your legal team, you might need a small library of software

Posted on May 15, 2009
Gary Weiner, a consulting lawyer with Liquid Litigation Management, brings to the attention of readers two recent studies (Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, April 2009 at 42). One is George J. Socha, "Bringing e-Discovery in-house: risks and rewards" (Feb...

The law of diminishing returns interpreted in the context of legal departments

Posted on May 15, 2009
Beyond the single instance noted so far here about the economist?s darling, diminishing returns (See my post of Dec. 21, 2005: additional patents obtained by a company.), many other circumstances in law departments evidence this central concept of economics (See...

Consider taking part in an unusual un-RFP for law firms interested in representing FMC Technologies

Posted on May 13, 2009
Jeff Carr, the General Counsel of FMC Technologies, announced at the SuperConference that he wants to hear from law firms that would like to participate in the FMC Law Litigation Value Challenge. In his email to me afterwards, he wrote...

A major program of the 3M legal department to train leaders and business-savvy lawyers

Posted on May 13, 2009
Marschall Smith, the General Counsel of 3M, described at the SuperConference one of his department?s significant investments in leadership development. He explained that every six months 15-20 of his 165 lawyers spend one week off campus at a program called...

US patent litigation racks up more than just legal fees

Posted on May 13, 2009
A recent paper estimates the total cost of patent litigation to alleged infringers. Paraphrased from the abstract, the researchers analyzed stock market event studies around the date of patent lawsuit filings for US public firms from 1984-99 (See my post...

Eleven committees, Toastmasters and board training for in-house staff of Exelon?s law department

Posted on May 13, 2009
Sylvia Bateman, an Associate General Counsel at Exelon, took a few minutes at the SuperConference to describe some of the professional development opportunities her legal department makes available. Batemen said, ?We provide training if lawyers want to sit on a...

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