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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

?Process? disparages the level of services that can be provided by LPO companies

Posted on December 16, 2010
The website of SDD Global sharply criticizes the ?P? in LPO. The services provided by companies in that sector go beyond assembly-line repetition. Dare I say to the practice of law? I quote extensively because the point is well made...

Three notes on e-mail practices and attorney-client privilege

Posted on December 16, 2010
Tips on e-mail productivity abound on this blog, yet in-house lawyers may not think of those techniques as they bear on the attorney-client privilege. A speaker at the Georgia Corporate Counsel Institute mentioned that wanton copying by clients of a....

Pruned patents may create work in-house to license them for exploitation

Posted on December 16, 2010
Acacia Research Corporation licenses large corporate patent portfolios and makes money by negotiated licenses or litigated settlements. An article in Corp. Counsel, Dec. 2010 at 59, describes some of the publicly traded company?s deals, such as with the Japanese software...

Seven articles published by me during 2010 and references to posts about them

Posted on December 16, 2010
My last update on articles published by me was back in February (See my post of Feb. 4, 2010: seven articles published in 2009). Since then, the never-resting pen has written seven more. Click on the link if you would...

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Data from 13 years ago compared to data from the 700+ law departments in General Counsel Metrics? global benchmarks

Posted on December 15, 2010
Historical benchmark figures catch my eye, and so did an Of Counsel, Feb. 17, 1997 at 2, article. It cites the 1997 Law Department Functions and Expenditures Survey, co-published by ACC?s predecessor and Altman Weil Pensa. Since then, ACC has...

A future of specialized tribunals for transnational legal disputes?

Posted on December 15, 2010
World-wide, the notional amount of outstanding derivatives contracts stands at $450 trillion. Awesome, and as the world knows some awfully complicated lawsuits can ensue when counterparties wrangle. To sort out those tussles, many of which pull in disputants from different...

Core competencies of law departments covered by my most recent article

Posted on December 15, 2010
Management, of a legal department or of any function, comes down to decisions about priorities. One of those decisions for general counsel ought to concern what the lawyers should do particularly well ? the core competencies of the department ?...

A critic assails the insightfulness of the Myers Briggs personality instrument

Posted on December 15, 2010
The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) has a wide following in corporate America. Many law departments have their members complete the instrument and purportedly make good use of personality preferences depicted on four dichotomies, such as extroversion-introversion...

6,000 posts on Law Department Management! What hath blog wrought?

Posted on December 14, 2010
This post stands proudly at the front of a line of 6,000! Seventy months ago, on Feb. 20, 2005, the first post stood up and since then the procession has conga-lined its way to this milestone. A few thoughts occurred...

In-house counsel might consider keeping a ?commonplace book? for professional notes

Posted on December 14, 2010
Back in the 18th and 19th centuries many people kept journals that were called ?commonplace books.? They wrote out observations, inspirational quotes, poems they liked, aphorisms, sketches, ideas worth preserving. They mined those collections to keep the insights fresh and...

Out in the open, that open office plans probably find little favor from law department lawyers

Posted on December 14, 2010
A while back, I wrote a few posts about open-office plans (See my post of Sept. 16, 2008: physical layout of offices; and Sept. 30, 2009: hallways, conference rooms etc. of legal departments.). That movement, I sense, has gone nowhere...

Ten years for a management idea to build critical mass, then ten years to become commonplace

Posted on December 14, 2010
Another provocative idea is found in Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From ? The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead 2010) at 12. Johnson proposes the 10/10 rule for new technologies in communication: ?a decade to build the new platform...

A ?positive quarter-power law? may quantify how much more innovative larger law departments are than smaller departments

Posted on December 14, 2010
Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From ? The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead 2010) at 9-10, explains a fascinating study of cities around the world. The study gathered data on creativity and innovation, such as patents, R&D budgets, ?supercreative?...

Smaller companies start with outside counsel but with growth bring in legal work and lower their total costs

Posted on December 14, 2010
Small companies spend such a high percentage of their revenue on legal matters because of the importance of legal services and their cost. The 2010 ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey found that companies with less than $100 million in annual...

Pareto optimality as a consideration when dealing with the law firms that represent your department

Posted on November 24, 2010
Pareto optimality, roughly, describes a situation in which no one?s position can be improved without making someone else?s position worse. That definition comes from Stephen H. Kellert, Borrowed Knowledge: Chaos Theory and the Challenge of Learning Across Disciplines (Univ...

We need ?lawhacking,? like a Wiki to collect the tips of efficient in-house lawyers

Posted on November 24, 2010
Lifehacking is a grassroots Internet movement begun in 2003 when a British tech writer, frustrated by his own inefficiency, polled many of his productive friends for their tips. As described in Julian Dibbell, ed., The Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale...

Choice overload in RFPs and some strategies to cope

Posted on November 24, 2010
An RFP to 20 law firms sounds great ? ?proposals from that many will give us more insights, more leverage, stronger competition, and a better selection? ? but the selection team has almost certainly overestimated its capacity tor manage all...

The dollars at stake in an activity as a possible basis for fees paid the law firm

Posted on November 24, 2010
Payment to a law firm based on the value of what is at stake makes sense at times. An article in Law Practice, Nov./Dec. 2010 at 34, gives several examples of ?price as a percentage of a dependent variable, such...

?Weekly rates? of law firms and some derivative thoughts about them

Posted on November 24, 2010
An article in Law Practice, Nov./Dec. 2010 at 34, mentions several variations on the billable hour, including ?daily, weekly and annual rates for individuals and teams.? My vote against daily rates has already been cast, with later equivocation (See my...

Part XLXIII of a collection of embedded metaposts

Posted on November 24, 2010
The hits just keep on rolling at station WBLOG! 1. Competitive bids, RFPs hyperpost (See my post of Oct.12, 2010: competitive bid processes with 7 references and 6 metaposts.). 2. Contract templates, form contracts (See my post of Nov. 8,...

My most recent column for InsideCounsel on metrics and people in law departments

Posted on November 24, 2010
The hard fact is that if a general counsel wants to materially dent the internal budget, you have to fire people. Upwards of 80 percent of that budget falls to compensation, benefits, and people-related overhead. To cut you must terminate....

?Legal and janitorial services? in online marketplaces for procurement

Posted on November 23, 2010
Relish this juxtaposition from an article about electronic exchanges between purchasing companies and selling providers: ?Increasingly, companies trade in services, too, placing bids for legal and janitorial work, for example.? The dirty truth is ought...

Passivity and pusillanimity of law departments when they should aggressively insist on detailed proposals for alternative fees

Posted on November 23, 2010
The Chairman of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, a 500-plus attorney firm with revenues of more than $1 billion, wrote about alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) in Law Practice, Nov./Dec. 2010 at 29. John Murphy noted that one-third of the firm?s revenue,...

Contrary to hype, total legal spending 2008-9 likely rose as a percentage of revenue

Posted on November 23, 2010
A press release by Thomson Reuters Hildebrandt BakerRobbins about its benchmark findings touts the first-ever decline in year over year total legal spending. In its words, ?The 2010 survey showed a decrease in total legal spending ? by 1 percent...

Beta, fixed-fee arrangements with law firms, and some beta-blockers that you better understand to abate beta

Posted on November 23, 2010
If you ask a law firm to propose a set fee to handle a future stream of your legal services, if they take into account the range of the possible mixes of those services, if they conjure up all the...

Law departments in the 720+ of General Counsel Metrics? benchmark survey are from high per-capita-income nations

Posted on November 23, 2010
National wealth and solid legal systems support each other, which also justifies management-savvy law departments. Or that is my take-away from a chart in strategy+bus., Winter 2010 at 17. The chart shows manufacturing as a percent of GDP for close...

Over the counter or prescription: over the top drugs to boost mental performance

Posted on November 23, 2010
Some drugs are believed to boost memory (See my post of Feb. 7, 2006: 40 drugs that improve memory, including modafinil; May 30, 2006: working memory; Aug. 19, 2007 #2: ?2b-adrenoceptor and yohimbine; March 2, 2008 #4: ampakines and the...

Juggling too many things shifts from your hippocampus to your striatum, and why that matters

Posted on November 23, 2010
Concentrate on the task at hand. One reason is that ?when forced to multitask, the overloaded brain shifts its processing from the hippocampus (responsible for memory) to the striatum (responsible for rote tasks), making it hard to learn a task...

Bring your own virtualized computer to work and spend your technology stipend

Posted on November 22, 2010
Advances in virtualization, where portions of computers or servers are cordoned off for specific purposes, may lead to a welcome flexibility for in-house lawyers. According to the Economist, Nov. 20, 2010 at 75, ?Companies can install a secure virtual heart...

On online opinion tool that lets voters shift the topic being commented on

Posted on November 22, 2010
For an offsite or a planning session, a general counsel might solicit opinions from the members of the law department. Several software packages enable low-cost yet powerful means to gather such input. A software program from All Our Ideas, developed...

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