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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

Nine tips for dealing with change

Posted on November 21, 2008
A publication from an insurance company offers some suggestions for how to deal with change, which I have paraphrased. 1. Get the facts about what is changing, what is not changing, and why. Rumors and speculation distort the actual changes...

?Most CEOs have never hired a general counsel.?

Posted on November 21, 2008
The quote comes from Catherine Nathan, a partner at Spencer Stuart who places senior in-house lawyers. She makes the point in Diversity & The Bar, Vol. 10, May/June 2008 at 32, that CEOs have much more experience hiring CFOs, COOs...

?Most CEOs have never hired a general counsel.?

Performance in relation to budget should determine whether one of a panel of firms gets more work

Posted on November 21, 2008
If you have several firms that handle similar kinds of matters, use their performance against budget to allocate work in the future. The performance of each firm against their original budgets on matters should influence the likelihood of their being...

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Converge if you don?t increase your average firm size and you get volume discounts

Posted on November 21, 2008
For years I supported convergence, but my enthusiasm has waned lately. Inevitably, larger firms remain after a pruning and they charge higher billing rates (See my post of Jan. 3, 2007: increased rates with firm size.). In addition, with electronic...

Deconstruction of a definition of value-based payments to law firms

Posted on November 21, 2008
In its campaign to change the basis on which corporate counsel pay law firms, the Association of Corporate Counsel has seized on the lodestar of ?value.? ACC defines value as a law firm ?returning a desired outcome in a matter...

Seven team building activities for retreats

Posted on November 19, 2008
Retreats (aka conferences and offsites) often start with a get-to-know-others activity (See my post of Sept. 25, 2008: ice breakers at law department meetings.). Later on, many meeting planners want a dose of team building. Here are some examples from...

Law department activities as priorities, programs, projects and practices ? Part IV, practices

Posted on November 19, 2008
Practices are the fourth and most common level of activities in my schema (See my post of Nov. 19, 2008: priorities; Nov. 19, 2008: programs; and Nov. 19, 2008: practices.). Practices are people?s accustomed ways of working and working together....

Law department activities as priorities, programs, projects and practices ? Part III, projects

Posted on November 19, 2008
Projects are a third level of activities in law departments, defined primarily by their being one-off significant activities (See my post of Nov. 19, 2008: priorities; and Nov. 19, 2008: programs.). Project examples of projects include relocation of the law...

Law department activities as priorities, programs, projects and practices ? Part II, programs

Posted on November 19, 2008
Having introduced priorities (See my post of Nov. 19, 2008: priorities.), here I turn to programs. Programs are a law department?s repeated sets of activities that have defined objectives and similar steps done time after time. Programs, therefore, include evaluations...

Law department activities as priorities, programs, projects and practices ? Part I

Posted on November 19, 2008
This series of four looks at the management activities in law departments at four levels: priorities, programs, projects, and practices. Each post defines a level, gives examples, and touches on some observations about the level. Let?s start with priorities...

In-house lawyers view legal fees like insured employees view medical costs ? third party coverage

Posted on November 19, 2008
Do rank-and-file lawyers in corporations have much enthusiasm for cutting the cost of outside counsel? I doubt it. I doubt it because they want the best lawyers they can find to help them succeed in their careers and lighten their...

Two notes from a study of Fortune 1000 women general counsel

Posted on November 17, 2008
A study of women who lead the legal teams at 92 companies on the Fortune 1000 list presents the data in every imaginable way. Two points from the Diversity & The Bar, July/Aug. 2008 at 30, particularly caught my eye:...

Law Department Management Blog dreams beyond search algorithms

Posted on November 17, 2008
Wired?s Business Trends 2008 describes four online services that use people in addition to algorithms to filter the Internet?s wealth of information: Brijit, Mahalo, ChaCha, and Squidoo. What this blawgster tries to do, with Internet material as well as hardcopy...

Thank goodness benchmark metrics are not as capricious as governance ratings!

Posted on November 17, 2008
Fortune, Vol. 158, July 7, 2008 at 18, cites a study that compares the reliability of corporate-governance ratings (See my post of Aug. 17, 2008: corporate governance with 18 references.). A table shows the scores four firms ? Audit Integrity,...

Even more about back references on this blog and the evolving framework

Posted on November 17, 2008
Since way back on Feb. 20, 2005, when this blog was delivered into the electronic world, there have been almost 3,700 posts. Of that mass, fully 35 percent of them have cited no earlier post, a practice I call back...

Mandala visions and their graphical representation

Posted on November 17, 2008
Visualize a circle in the middle of a PowerPoint slide that has multiple arrows pointing inward to it. The circle might be a desired future state for a law department. Each arrow and text box it comes from represents a...

In the legal industry, neither buyers nor sellers are fungible, except at the 30,000 foot level

Posted on November 17, 2008
It is simply not true that senior lawyers in corporations view the law firms that vie for their work as interchangeable. At least for the work those lawyers understand well, as buyers they do not at all perceive the firms...

Procrastination as the pile on the desk rises higher and higher

Posted on November 17, 2008
?By all accounts, procrastination is common, and rising (for reasons that are not yet clear).? This according to Richard B. McKenzie, Why Popcorn Costs so Much at the Movies (Copernicus Books 2008) at 217. ?In 1978, the percentage of Americans...

Risk aversion quantified: the gain needs to be twice the amount a risk of being lost

Posted on November 17, 2008
As explained by Richard B. McKenzie, Why Popcorn Costs so Much at the Movies (Copernicus Books 2008) at 212, people discount their feelings associated with potential gains (or magnify the bad feelings about potential losses). Lawyer, most being people too,...

Thoughts on references by general counsel on partners and vendors

Posted on November 17, 2008
A previous post wonders whether some general counsel, called as a reference for work done by a partner at a law firm, give less glowing reviews than are deserved, because they do not want their access to that partner to...

Four recent conferences ? and a call for papers, so to speak

Posted on November 16, 2008
If a reader attended one of the following four conferences and would be willing to share with me any of the conference proceedings on management topics, I will be glad to post about the ideas they contain. Or let me...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #83 ? additions to earlier posts

Posted on November 16, 2008
Probabilities vs statistics. Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard?s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (Pantheon Books 2008) at 122, explains the distinction between probability and statistics. ?The former [probability] concerns predictions based on fixed probabilities; the latter [statistics] concerns the inference...

Some data on back references on this blog during nine months of 2008 ? exciting, yes?

Posted on November 16, 2008
Since Feb. 12, 2008, I have published on Law Department Management 580 posts. Of them, 91 (16%) refer to no earlier post. However, the bulk of the posts during that nine-month period ? 519 of them ? point to prior...

Staffing options to consider before you establish your first lawyer overseas

Posted on November 16, 2008
It is a significant decision for law department General Counsel to locate for the first time a lawyer in an overseas office (See my post of Nov. 16, 2008: five key questions to ask.). Before taking that decision, there are...

Five questions to ask regarding whether to staff your first international lawyer

Posted on November 16, 2008
A client asked me recently to help them think through the decision whether or not to base a lawyer outside of the United States. As we talked, we identified five questions that the general counsel should answer What do clients...

Contra Heineman, do some CEOs mistrust high-powered law departments?

Posted on November 16, 2008
Ben Heineman, writing in Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, Nov. 2008 at 92, asks ?Are the CEOs in large and medium-size international companies ? willing to invest in in-house legal departments?? He views global, specialized and sophisticated legal departments with high-quality...

Articles published during 2008 by Rees Morrison, your bloggerly host

Posted on November 16, 2008
So far this year I have published nine articles, of which five concern relations between law departments and the law firms they retain: ?When Interventions Go Too Far? [interventions in law firm operations] (NY Law Journal, Feb. 28, 2008) ?The...

Three points from UBS: reports to former GC, an interim trio, and ?partners? yet no longer reporting to clients

Posted on November 16, 2008
A short profile in Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, Nov. 2008 at 61, about Markus Diethelm, the new general counsel of UBS, contains three nuggets. The first is that the predecessor of Diethelm, most recently the legal head of Swiss Re,...

Your primary goal when political views clash in a law department is to elect silence

Posted on November 16, 2008
The presidential election campaign concluded, I can return to blogging. Thank goodness, because I threw myself into it the past couple of months and left little time to write. What do you do if your boss supports the candidate or...

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