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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

A menagerie of terms for legal specialists in-house

Posted on May 07, 2008
I am aware of at least six terms for legal specialties within law departments (See my post of May 5, 2008: 30 references to specialists.). (1) Some general counsel refer to core competencies (See my posts of June 4, 2007:...

A hat trick of ways to cull out law firms in an RFP process

Posted on May 07, 2008
Counsel to Counsel, May 28 at 19, describes portions of the process Union Pacific Railroad?s environmental group went through to slash the number of outside counsel it uses. David Young, the railroad company?s general solicitor, started by writing approximately 80...

Tell me your particular interest and I?ll send you posts from this blog on that topic

Posted on May 05, 2008
Consider yourself challenged. Email me and ask me to assemble from the 3,220 posts on this blog a set that pertains to a reasonably-narrow topic. The topic needs to be less broad than any of my categories, but otherwise I...

Collected thoughts and posts on in-house lawyers who are specialists

Posted on May 05, 2008
Much can be said about lawyers in companies who concentrate on an area of law. Legal specialists are the lawyer?s lawyer for the commercial lawyers who spot legal issues and handle a wide array of needs for a business unit...

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Should the law department run a company?s anti-counterfeiting activities?

Posted on May 05, 2008
A piece in Counsel to Counsel, May 28 at 10, showcases the efforts of the computer manufacturer Lenovo to combat worldwide counterfeiting of its products. "As the company's legal representative, inside counsel must ensure that processes are in place to...

An article about Rees Morrison?s favorite blog and what it offers him and others

Posted on May 05, 2008
Sarah Eaton recently published an article about me and my blog. The article is available on the website of Lumen Legal. Eaton captures most of the reasons why I put so much time and energy into this feuilleton of blogs....

Layoff repercussions and a possible boomerang from career-development offerings

Posted on May 05, 2008
An item in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, May 2008 at 30, summarizes research on the consequences to retention rates of layoffs. Not surprisingly, layoffs often prompt demoralized survivors to leave. Even worse, I suspect, the better employees who...

When to allow external counsel to work directly with internal clients

Posted on May 05, 2008
In the course of describing the relationship between NEC Corp. of America and Duane Morris, a firm chosen through a drastic convergence process (See my post of May 5, 2008: from 130 to 5 firms), an article mentions that one...

An extreme reduction of external counsel, done with RFPs

Posted on May 05, 2008
The North American subsidiary of Japan?s NEC Corporation ?whittled its list of law firms from 130 to five? and did so through a competitive process initiated with a Request for Proposal. Counsel to Counsel, May 28 at 4, offers no...

Eleven methods to represent quantitative data for the eye, with data visualization

Posted on May 03, 2008
A stunning chart, available at Visual Literacy colorfully and usefully displays a ?periodic table of visualization methods.? The chart shows 86 methods, clustered like an atomic element chart, for data, information, concepts, strategy, metaphor and compound methods (See my posts...

Consolidated references to in-house discovery teams

Posted on May 03, 2008
As reported in InsideCounsel, May 2008 at 18, Oracle?s law department has created an in-house virtual team headed by an e-discovery director. The ranks of legal departments with such teams swell every day (See my posts of Oct.1, 2005: Laura...

Monthly breakfasts where the general counsel invites some members of the law department

Posted on May 03, 2008
If you read his column in InsideCounsel, May 2008 at 8, you learn that the very busy general counsel of Microsoft, Brad Smith, has ?breakfast once a month with a dozen people from across our department.? It sounds like he...

?Does it make sense for a legal department to have an external blog??

Posted on May 03, 2008
Brad Smith, a columnist for InsideCounsel who in his spare time helps out Microsoft as its general counsel, asks this question in InsideCounsel, May 2008 at 8. He notes that in his company more than 1,500 employees maintain blogs [how...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #70 ? additions to earlier posts

Posted on May 03, 2008
Snapple facts about general counsel. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was an attorney in Monsanto?s corporate-law department in the 1970s, according to a blog site. Legal projects sent to offshore service providers. According to a K&L Gates? ad in Inside...

Thoughts about effective billing rates in relation to fully-loaded internal costs

Posted on May 03, 2008
In short order you can figure out the effective billing rate of your three or four go-to law firms (See my posts of June 13, 2006: comparison of blended and effective rates; and June 30, 2007: whether discounts save money.)....

High participation rates in a massive employee-satisfaction poll

Posted on May 02, 2008
The lawyers of Microsoft have the opportunity each year to respond to a survey of all the company?s employees. According to Microsoft?s general counsel, Brad Smith, writing in InsideCounsel, May 2008 at 8, ?more than 80 percent of the legal...

Sound mind in a sound body ? even moderate exercise improves cognitive performance

Posted on May 02, 2008
I am very impressed by John Medina, Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Pear Press, 2008). Medina recently spoke at a client of mine, I relished his presentation, and his engaging style is...

Esq-harmony anyone? Computerized matchmaking between law firms and law departments

Posted on May 02, 2008
We all know about how online sites match people according to various algorithms, and how software matches pre-meds to medical schools as well as new doctors to hospital-residency programs. The mathematician who created the original matching algorithm, University of California...

Difficulties US law departments have when they seek a law firm in India

Posted on May 02, 2008
?Indian firms are not allowed to have more the 20 partners, cannot advertise their services via websites, and cannot even give someone a business card unless it has been specifically requested.? This quote comes from a recent article in the...

Easy steps a law department can take to reduce energy consumption

Posted on April 27, 2008
An article in Legal Tech. News, April 2008 at 36, lists many easy things any legal team in a company can do to protect the environment. Six of the actions are possible for every law department. (1) Remove your name...

Law departments of Chinese companies

Posted on April 27, 2008
An article in IP Law & Bus., April 2008 at 31, states that the legal department of Haier has grown from four people in 1998 to more than 40 lawyers and patent agents. That?s a sizeable in-house legal team in...

If the matter is big, forget alternative fee arrangements

Posted on April 27, 2008
Many observers believe that general counsel, when they retain a law firm for a high profile matter, pay little or no heed to the potential cost. In relation to the risks involved (to companies and to careers), a few hundred...

Management observations from an award-winning litigation-hold dashboard

Posted on April 27, 2008
Kraft Foods Global won the 2008 Legal Technology News award for the most innovative in-house use of technology. As described in Legal Tech. News, March 2008 at 31, a senior litigation lawyer teamed up with a director of records management...

Read this slowly -- speed-reading is a myth

Posted on April 27, 2008
?The motor response of the retina, and the time it takes the image of a word to travel from the macula to the visual cortex for processing, limits the eye to about 500 words a minute.? Worse, most people top...

Deputy general counsel -- no less than three of them in one small department!

Posted on April 27, 2008
I just heard of a law department with less than a dozen lawyers that has three Deputy General Counsel. Talk about title inflation! The Deputy General Counsel title should be used sparingly (See my post of Nov. 20, 2007: typical...

Profits from law departments through patent licenses and enforcement

Posted on April 27, 2008
According to a K&L Gates ad in Inside Counsel, Feb. 2008 at 90, the law department of American Express has ?worked hard at ?the generation of revenue, typically through [patent] license fees.? Those Amex lawyers may have worked hard, but...

The controversy rages on about whether in-house lawyers should append ?Esq.?

Posted on April 23, 2008
The lid is off this Pandora?s Box (See my post of March 13, 2008: use of Esq. by lawyer not in the law department.). The mailbag of the columnist who tackled this knotty issue bulged with advice. "Many readers wrote...

Law departments will be able to view videos of lawyers they might retain

Posted on April 23, 2008
Among the many ways that corporate managers of outside counsel decide which lawyer to retain, the in-person interview is probably the most effective (See my post of Nov. 24, 2007: coaches on how to interview; Feb. 8, 2006: a good...

When you scream at someone, minds all around shut down

Posted on April 23, 2008
"The mere thought of being on the receiving end of verbal abuse hurts people's ability to perform complex tasks requiring creativity, flexibility, and memory recall? announces research reported in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, March 2008 at 21. One...

The economic and environmental costs of filing cabinets

Posted on April 23, 2008
Managers of law departments overlook the total costs of filing cabinets. ?If the average four-drawer cabinet holds about 20,000 pages, that equates to 360,000 additional pieces of paper." [I am not clear just what that sentence says; perhaps 20,000 documents...

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