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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

17 ways to develop as a professional other than on-the-job and formal CLE

Posted on January 26, 2011
Alternatives for self-education range widely. As I thought back over what I have seen or read about during my consulting career, I came up with the following 17: Brown bag lunches and informal methods (See my post of May 1,...

Data from 2008 on discovery costs in litigation and some important metrics

Posted on January 26, 2011
Navigant Consulting and the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform asked the Fortune 1000 general counsel to provide data on their lawsuit load, costs and discovery. Of that group, 48 responded. Nearly two-thirds of them reported that they managed 100...

Notes on knowledge management in the Legal and Public Affairs Department of Symantec

Posted on January 26, 2011
Symantec, the $6 billion software company, employs in its Legal and Public Affairs (LPA) Department approximately 150 worldwide, about half of which are attorneys. According to the ?European Briefings? supplement to ACC Docket, Dec. 2010 at 11, in 2006 the...

Three areas of research that may improve conceptual search and in-house knowledge recovery

Posted on January 26, 2011
As software improves our ability to search documents for ideas and concepts, instead of only for text strings, in-house lawyers will not only cope with discovery requests more effectively but will also more effectively be able to find useful material...

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CEOs may increasingly ask for wide-ranging evaluations of general counsel

Posted on January 24, 2011
A piece in Forbes, May 24, 2010 at 46, suggests that psychological testing of candidates for executive positions has become much more common. ?Today, two thirds of 517 businesses surveyed ? say they evaluate executives using a suite of behavioral,...

Personalize the intranet site each client sees so that they learn and can handle more on their own

Posted on January 24, 2011
Once before I mentioned software that changes what appears online depending on the person at the keyboard (See my post of March 27, 2005: AI on intranets for clients.), and recently I read again about software that can do this....

Prodigious effort by an in-house attorney devoted to ITAR, EAR, FTR, Customs, HTSUS, and OFAC regulations

Posted on January 24, 2011
James E. Bartlett III, Senior Counsel--Export/Import at Northrop Grumman, compiles and edits the GC Ex/Im Daily Update. He writes in an introductory email that more than 3,000 people receive his update ?every business day of every change to the ITAR,...

A method to group contracts by complexity and thus perhaps to illuminate departmental effectiveness and value delivered

Posted on January 24, 2011
Broad categorizations of contracts may be a method to improve how we assess productivity and quality among corporate counsel. In PricewaterhouseCoopers? View, Issue 12 at 47, the author discusses ?contractual alliances,? ?outsourcing,? ?distribution agreements,? ?virtual joint ventures,? along with four...

In Morgan Stanley?s law department, at least seven initiatives to increase diversity

Posted on January 24, 2011
Morgan Stanley?s legal department promotes diversity in many ways. According to Sutherland Asbill & Brennan?s Partnering Perspectives, Winter 2010 at 17, the department (1) runs a summer intern program for first-year law students, (2) assists youth from underserved communities, (3)...

Software that helps in-house patent lawyers practice more productively

Posted on January 23, 2011
Various genre of specialized software help patent lawyers, agents and support staff handle their work. I collected what I could find from my previous posts and organized them in four categories. Patent databases (See my post of May 1, 2005:...

A funder of UK commercial litigation

Posted on January 23, 2011
Ben Hawkins offers the following description on LinkedIn.of his company: ?Commercial Litigation Funding Limited [CLFL] specialises in the funding of large commercial legal cases. Via its Jersey based Protected Cell Company LitFUNDING PCC, we agree to fund the litigation costs...

No, the measure of a law department is not the degree to which it drives corporate profits

Posted on January 23, 2011
?The fundamental goal for legal departments today is to validate the legal budget as a business enabler driving greater profits.? That pugnacious start of a recent article contains more theater than reality. I strongly disagree with its premise. General counsel...

Several opportunities for in-house lawyers to learn more about e-discovery

Posted on January 23, 2011
Here is a guest post by Sarah Brown, host of Exterro?s blog, E-Discovery 360. ?Ralph Losey, a partner at Jackson Lewis and an authority on e-discovery has created the Online Electronic Discovery Law program. Its 61 modules cover the topic...

Is the total number of law departments in the United States materially changing?

Posted on January 21, 2011
Mergers and bankruptcies reduce the number of law departments; breakups of companies and spinoffs of major operations create law departments. The NY Times, Jan. 19, 2011 at B 5, discusses the tale of conglomerates, tracking stock and tax-free spinoffs...

Does your pay matter to you and do you want to compare yours to others? A chorus of ?Yes!?, so here is another online salary site

Posted on January 21, 2011
My two recent posts on salary data from online sources drew tremendous responses as judge by click thoughts (See my post of Jan. 13, 2011: MySalary.com; and Jan. 18, 2011: Robert Half International.). Just maybe what in-house lawyers earn has...

Building on 813 participants last year, the GC Metrics benchmark survey reopens for 2010 data! Submit yours now and enjoy early-bird benefits!

Posted on January 19, 2011
Last year 813 law departments benefited from the largest benchmark survey ever done. This year?s survey will add hundreds more as it offers the same easy submission, zero cost, bi-monthly releases, clear charts and tables, as well as comparative data...

Clarify patterns and formulas from data with the spreadsheet function of trend lines

Posted on January 19, 2011
Trend lines on scatter-grams let data analysts not only see patterns better but also know the formula that describes the best-fit line. With such a formula, An example would be a scatter-plot that shows the rise in bonuses as a...

Learning by doing teaches far more than CLE, CPE and autodidactic professional development

Posted on January 19, 2011
In-house attorneys learn and gain proficiency when they handle real matters start to finish. Here is how the point is put in Practical Law, Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 at 86: ?the best way to develop in-house lawyers is to ensure they...

In-house counsel should not become evaluators of the performance of the executives they advise

Posted on January 19, 2011
One notion in a recent article suggests that inside lawyers, working closely with managers throughout the company, can provide significant value as evaluators of their performance. Jason Mark Anderman writes that ?in-house lawyers often know which low-performing managers are incorrectly...

The deepest Procurement threat to law departments: replacement by outside counsel

Posted on January 19, 2011
A recent article discusses the tensions between procurement (aka sourcing or purchasing) and legal. The sharpest sting comes at the end: most fundamentally Procurement threatens by ?openly considering whether to maintain internal lawyers if an outside firm can do better...

Under SOX, prison possible if an in-house lawyer deliberately misleads a government regulatory agency

Posted on January 18, 2011
Thanks to Christian Liipfert for this strong warning in favor of good training, good supervision, good information governance, and good ethical compliance. ?In late 2010, Lauren Stevens, formerly an Associate General Counsel with GlaxoSmithKline, was indicted in Federal Court in...

Online salary calculator from Robert Half for in-house lawyers

Posted on January 18, 2011
Having just written about Salary.com?s data online (See my post of Jan. 13, 2011: base salary for Associate General Counsel at $199,361.). I poked around on the Robert Half Salary Calculator. To try to get a comparable figure, I selected...

An article by me about three differences on benchmarks between countries

Posted on January 18, 2011
When I tied together three international observations -- compensation differences around the world in law departments, differences in the number of paralegals and fundamental spending metrics -- it seemed appropriate to reach an international audience...

You, as an in-house lawyer, are responsible for your own professional development

Posted on January 18, 2011
Along with the theme of learn by doing, a recent conference session on professional development stressed personal accountability: you know what you need and you have to push to satisfy your needs (See my post of July 22, 2009: professional...

Ninth set of blogs that have referred readers to LawDepartmentManagementBlog

Posted on January 18, 2011
Another in my series of thanks and gratitude (See my post of Nov. 15, 2009: history of this series; Jan. 4, 2010: seventh set; and May 28, 2010: eighth set.). I very much appreciate all those who let their readers...

ValueNotes survey of the Indian LPO market

Posted on January 18, 2011
A report available from ValueNotes, veteran analyst of the Indian LPO market, summarizes the dynamism and size of that market. ?The India revenues from legal services offshoring are slated to ? reach $640 million by end 2010. ? The number...

One and two level reviews done online in Microsoft?s law department

Posted on January 18, 2011
Microsoft?s Department of Legal and Corporate Affairs uses an online tool to let its hundreds of members give feedback on their manager and their manager?s manager. A manager two levels above is referred to as a ?skip-level manager.? Only large...

Data that suggests compliance spending should be about half of total legal spending

Posted on January 17, 2011
Daniel Lucien Buehr of Schindler Management spoke about compliance in November at ACC Europe?s 17th Annual Conference. Someone who reported on his session wrote the following: ?After conducting extensive benchmarking, Buehr maintained that any company must be spending at least...

According to Robert Half International, 10 questions you should ask when you interview a lawyer

Posted on January 17, 2011
These suggestions come from the website of Robert Half International (See my post of May 22, 2009: hiring interviews for lawyers with 6 references.). If and when you ever get a chance to hire an attorney again, these questions should...

Eight perspectives and collections of posts on reporting lines

Posted on January 14, 2011
The most important characteristic of any position is the person it reports to. As befits that crucial status, this blog has accumulated at least 94 posts on reporting lines. In turn these created eight metaposts. Some have to do with...

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