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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

Network definition and its application to law departments and their operations

Posted on January 03, 2011
?A network is a set of interconnected people or things that can communicate with each other, share information and achieve results that would not be possible if the network did not exist.? Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood, Superconnect: Harnessing the....

November 2010: the ten most interesting posts according to the one who wrote them

Posted on January 03, 2011
Abolish engagement letters (aka retention letters) from law departments (Nov. 1, 2010). Abolish the template letter with its standard recitation of expectations and obligations, all of which should be covered by outside counsel guidelines. Kudos for full allocation at JPMorgan...

Chinese national policy to obtain swarms of patents and the distortion of metrics

Posted on January 03, 2011
An earlier post delved into patent filings as benchmarkable numbers that can lose reliability (See my post of Nov. 22, 2010: degradation of inflated patent metrics.). If a general counsel wants to compare performances, all comes undone if the basis...

Part L (fifty) of a collection of embedded metaposts

Posted on January 03, 2011
1. Accounting II (See my post of Dec. 27, 2010: more accounting references with 10 references.). 2. Definitions (See my post of July 19, 2009: 11 more definitions with 11 references.). 3. Definitions 8 (See my post of Dec. 6,...

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US Supreme Court: in-house counsel should be located near the ?nerve center?

Posted on December 31, 2010
This lawyer manqu� rarely gets to cite Supreme Court decisions so when I read in Corp. Counsel, Almanac 2010 at 13, about a February decision, I seized the opportunity. The Court clarified a conflict among the federal circuits as to...

Relative rankings of countries and industries by key benchmark metrics, and the possible correlation to participation rates in the General Counsel Metrics survey

Posted on December 31, 2010
Previous posts a month ago explained my ranking of eight countries and 20 industries by ?legal intensity.? The ranking accumulated the relative standing of each country?s or industry?s median for four key metrics of staffing and spending (See my post...

To what degree do general counsel hoard their management innovations and not share them with others, especially competitors?

Posted on December 31, 2010
Very little, I believe. Others disagree with me. In her discussion of offshore legal outsourcing, Cassandra Burke Robertson, A Collaborative Model of Offshore Legal Outsourcing, Case Western School of Law Working Paper 2010-35 (Nov. 2010) at 14, discusses the lack...

We need a historiography of law department management

Posted on December 31, 2010
So controversial has writing history become, so clotted with attacks on objectivity of historians in the past, that a special discipline has arisen ? historiography. Historiographers situate historians and their writings in their governing milieu, where limits on their tools...

The strengths of ?weak ties? from a network perspective

Posted on December 31, 2010
Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood, Superconnect: Harnessing the power of networks and the strength of weak links (Norton 2010) emphasizes the potential power if we reach out to of our so-called ?weak connections.? Weak connections describe our acquaintances as compared...

We should court concepts from the law that help us understand management of legal departments

Posted on December 31, 2010
All this time writing mostly for lawyers, being a lawyer myself, trying to improve management for lawyers, it struck me as ironic that I haven?t drawn on fundamental concepts from the law that might help explain what general counsel deal...

Innovation ought to be matched by steady, incremental refinements

Posted on December 31, 2010
Gaston Bilder contributed a thoughtful comment on my post about claimed innovations that in fact assemble and build on many component parts (See my post of Dec. 28, 2010: using as an illustration DuPont?s convergence.). Gaston wrote, in part: ?The...

Two more data points and references for the effort to estimate the number of legal departments

Posted on December 31, 2010
This year, with my burrowing into benchmark metrics for law departments, I have unearthed a number of clues to the total number of law departments around the world (See my post of Feb. 8, 2010: UK had approximately 130,000 lawyers;...

Individual workspaces (offices) and all that they convey

Posted on December 30, 2010
Many in-house counsel spend more hours in their office than they do anywhere else awake. How they fill, design, and maintain their little plot tells much about them. Those individual ? or mandated ? features of an office, such as...

Cheaper, faster, leaner and smarter ? that?s all GCs wanted from their firms in 2008

Posted on December 30, 2010
At the Consero 2010 Corporate Counsel Forum, one panel put up a slide with data from the ACC Chief Legal Officer Survey in 2008. The slide showed a dozen outcomes desired by legal departments, which participants in the survey ranked...

Legal departments viewed as reducing transaction costs or increasing resource benefits: two theories of economists

Posted on December 22, 2010
The Economist, Dec. 18, 2010 at 134, contrasts the transaction-cost view of the business world with the resource-based view. Management theorists who champion the resource-based view ?argue that activities are conducted within firms not only because markets fail, but also...

Seven claimed to be the optimal size of a decision-making group

Posted on December 22, 2010
The three authors of Decide & Deliver: 5 Steps to Breakthrough Performance in Your Organization got some publicity in the Harvard Bus. Rev., Jan./Feb. 2010 at 26. The squib implies that, in a different context, the Seven Samurai hit upon...

Column on descriptions of dispersion for sets of numbers: beyond averages, medians, and trimmed means

Posted on December 22, 2010
Morrison on Metrics, my column published on Dec. 20, 2010, covers a set of descriptive metrics that are less frequently developed in benchmark reports: inter-quartile ranges, modes, and ranges. To many general counsel this topic may bring back uncomfortable memories...

Still time to join 810 law departments in the final benchmark report from General Counsel Metrics

Posted on December 21, 2010
The final release of the General Counsel Metrics global benchmark survey will have more than 810 participants. The 105 or so new participants since the last release report a total of 1,920 lawyers, 260 paralegals, and 450 other staff. Inside...

Predictive coding as a tool to reduce the costs of e-discovery review

Posted on December 21, 2010
Here is a guest post from Equivio, an e-discovery software provider, which I have edited and shortened. ?The eDiscovery Institute has released its Judges Guide to Cost-Effective E-Discovery http://www.ediscoveryinstitute.org/JudgesGuide/ detailing strategies for better managing e-discovery costs...

Wide gap between two benchmark surveys on total law department costs per lawyer

Posted on December 21, 2010
ALM Legal Intelligence obtained 2009 data from 116 law departments. Findings from that survey appear in Corp. Counsel, Dec. 2010 at 85, including total law department fees/expenses (inside and outside) per lawyer. Each of five columns represents a group of...

How can ?don?t answer your own e-mail? possibly help a general counsel be more productive?

Posted on December 21, 2010
The header?s question is rhetorical, I believe, even though it is one of five ?business killers? seriously proposed by an article in Fortune, Dec. 6, 2010 at 71. The author tells about a CEO who ?asked his assistant to take...

The four Killer B?s that drive litigation costs, according to a fifth B, Baer

Posted on December 21, 2010
Qwest Communications? General Counsel, an independent thinker for sure, will have none of this alternative fee arrangement stuff. He pours scorn on them in Corp. Counsel, Dec. 2010 at 68, particularly for the complex cases that make up the bulk...

Even if the Little Prince disparages metrics, some recent milestones of this blog

Posted on December 21, 2010
In The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint Exupery, the narrator remarks that ?Grownups love figures.? He urges readers to show forbearance (at 16-17) because ?But certainly, for us who understand life, figures are a matter of indifference.? Not to...

A fixed fee with a firm to handle core agreements of a company (Bell Canada)

Posted on December 19, 2010
I have thought that commercial contracts embody the most important legal skills of a department. A core competency, to put it differently, surrounds the preparation, review, negotiation, and interpretation of contracts for the sale of a company?s goods and services...

Infographics, an advanced next technique to convey metrics effectively to general counsel and others

Posted on December 19, 2010
Infographics specialists focus on how to present information visually and effectively. The images used, the headlines written, the fonts chosen and arrangements designed, these combine with narrative to help people absorb what is most compelling about a set of numbers...

Software called a differential evolution optimizer might determine the optimal weightings of benchmarks

Posted on December 19, 2010
Wired, Jan. 2011 at 92, describes a stock trader who identified seven key factors, such as revenue and earnings growth, most predictive of a stock?s performance. He then used a publicly available program from UC Berkeley called the differential evolution...

In network terminology, large law departments and large law firms considered together constitute a ?small world?

Posted on December 19, 2010
Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood, Superconnect: Harnessing the power of networks and the strength of weak links (Norton 2010) frequently refers to certain kinds of networks as ?small worlds.? Nothing to do with planetary size, the term describes a collection...

The longest-running survey of law department benchmarks: Thomson Hildbebrandt BakerRobbins

Posted on December 19, 2010
One venerable source for benchmarks about the in-house legal community started years ago at PriceWaterhouseCoopers and made its way about six years back to what is now Thomson Reuters HildebrandtBakerRobbins. I have commented on results from that series, including particularly...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #142: posts longa, morsels breva

Posted on December 17, 2010
Real morsels! Another law department diversity cookbook. Among the efforts by Shell?s law department to encourage diversity, according to Assistant General Counsel John Esquivel in Diversity & the Bar, Nov./Dec. at 16, are a recipe book and ?learning lunches? (See...

Trend by size in total legal spending by 181 huge companies: all Fortune 500 or larger

Posted on December 16, 2010
Data from the General Counsel Metrics (GCM) global benchmark survey, with more than 700 law departments and still collecting data, gives a much more nuanced view of total legal spending. The 63 participating companies with 2009 revenue of at least...

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