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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 benchmark metric, patents per lawyer, suffers from degradation in China

Posted on November 22, 2010
A patent is a patent is a patent. We wish, Gertrude. It is comforting to assume that the building blocks of benchmarks, among others lawyers, paralegals, lawsuits, patents, have fairly consistent meanings among general counsel and around the world. For...

Rees?s Pieces newest newsletter hot off the press; you are invited to request it or subscribe

Posted on November 22, 2010
My latest newsletter just went out to my hundreds of subscribers. It reprints the five posts that were most frequently viewed or clicked on during the previous thirty days and adds some comments by me. Nothing fancy, the newsletter embodies...

Three dubious quotes from a consultant: law firm control, commodity work and procurement?s involvement

Posted on November 22, 2010
Consultant Jeffrey Brandt in Law Tech. News, Nov. 2010, at 30, gives three reasons why Richard Susskind's message of change is ?finally hitting the windshield of firm leaders.? Metaphorically in synch, my reaction to each is to squash his impressions...

Mathematics underlies three building blocks of management: information theory, network theory, and decision theory

Posted on November 19, 2010
A framework evolving slowly for me orients law department management around three broad conceptual systems: the theory domains referred to separately as information, network, and decisions. In the course of gradually fleshing out, understanding, and applying this tripartite framework, I...

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Ripples from the Romantic Era in some law department managers

Posted on November 19, 2010
Eighteenth and nineteenth century Romanticism has been viewed as a reaction to the perceived hyper-rationality advocated by Enlightenment thinkers. For Romantics, passion and ineffable beauty, pastoral values and the soul, heart and community, all were dimensions of life appreciated mostly...

Core competencies have to do with crucial contributions by lawyers, not their personal attributes

Posted on November 19, 2010
A core competency of a law department has to do with its outputs, what it delivers not how it produces it. So, with this definition of the term, it does not include characteristics of the legal team, a mistake I...

Assuming nearly all publicly traded companies have an in-house team, some data to consider

Posted on November 19, 2010
The companies listed on the United States? major stock exchanges number 4,048. Quite plausibly, each of them has at least one in-house lawyer, if only to deal with Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC filings, and exchange requirements. If I had data on the...

Checks and balances, swords and shields, carrots and sticks ? the complementarities of law departments (Chaff Legal Counsel?)

Posted on November 19, 2010
The yin-yang of in-house legal counsel appeals to me as a metaphor, and there are others (See my post of Nov. 7, 2010: metaphors with 25 references.). Law departments slash with a ?sword? that asserts the rights of the company...

The whispered worry: business executives might hire incompetent friends to provide legal services

Posted on November 18, 2010
One threat law departments always raise when the discussion turns to whether clients should be able to retain lawyers on their own ? ?Manager X might hire his golf club buddy.? I wonder about this worry, since Manager X has...

If you reduce the number of litigation firms you use, you can either transition cases or run out the string

Posted on November 18, 2010
Law departments that converge ? significantly shrink the number of law firms used ? can take pending cases away from the firms that don?t make the short list or they can bar in-house counsel from giving them more. The former...

As if the other side to a contract were not difficult enough, you may butt heads with your own sales force

Posted on November 18, 2010
During a recent consulting project, I interviewed a lawyer who spends much of his time on sales agreements. ?Sometimes I spend more time tussling with my sales force over terms than I do with the other side,? he said. This...

Think in terms of law department management issues not eras

Posted on November 18, 2010
?Study problems, not periods? appears in Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues (Univ. Chicago, 2006) at xiv, where she quotes an unnamed historian. The injunction for historians applies to managers of law departments. It is not very useful to talk...

The signal-to-noise ratio and its relationship to information transfer and energy

Posted on November 17, 2010
One article in Julian Dibbell, ed., The Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale Univ. 2010) at 65 (by Douglas Fox), explains clarity as essentially a thermodynamic relationship. If you double the signal-to-noise ratio in a message you quadruple the energy someone...

For in-house writers, format conventions adhered to encourage both clarity and creativity

Posted on November 17, 2010
Many bloggers write longer posts than I do. Theirs verge on articles, mine stick to the three-paragraph maximum with a formula: state an idea clearly, give the source or back references; add further thoughts. Enforced formats force insights and clarity...

Contract simplification cannot proceed without client agreement on basic business positions

Posted on November 17, 2010
Until recently, an easy recommendation to a law department said to simplify the gaggle of contracts they dealt with both in number and in content. With some experience, however, it has become clear that lawyers on their own can only...

Not that it settles the issue, but some arguments against parallel settlement counsel

Posted on November 17, 2010
At first blush, it makes sense that in major litigation a law department might unleash one firm to fight tooth and nail and coax another firm to sing soothingly, calm the savage beast, and seek common ground for settlement. I...

A large Portuguese legal team, not to mention its Polish lawyers, and global common issues

Posted on November 11, 2010
Portugal?s largest retailer, Jer�nimo Martins, had three lawyers in 1999, when its current Head of Legal, Ant�nio Alves, joined. In the decade that followed, he has built the department significantly. He currently has two lawyers reporting to him directly at...

Discounts based on the amount of associates leveraged on a matter?

Posted on November 11, 2010
The IBA Daily News, Oct. 5, 2010 at 1, quoted a panelist from a major New York firm on his firm?s view of discounts. ?We look at hourly rates subject to discounts on highly leveraged work. So on an antitrust...

My response to a comment about the inadvisability of measuring the complexity of contracts

Posted on November 10, 2010
Steven Levy commented on my post about metrics that might quantify the complexity of contracts (See my post of Oct. 31, 2010: Halstead metrics translated to law departments.). The problem is that Halstead metrics measure code complexity (sort of) but...

A benchmark denominator, to divide lawyers, spend etc. by normalized sales and assets

Posted on November 10, 2010
For years I have blithely divided legal spend by company revenue and thought that did the right normalization. Then I read an academic?s research paper that divided a metric by ?the average of normalized sales and assets.? Good grief! A...

More software components of the complete contract system

Posted on November 10, 2010
Hard on my post about a contract approval matrix (See my post of Nov. 8, 2010: approval matrix and templates.), someone pointed out to me even more planets orbiting the contract sun. They particularly noted other kinds of software that...

Employed lawyers (in-house counsel) compared to employed physicians (corporate doctors)

Posted on November 09, 2010
The Admin. Sciences Quarterly, June 2003 at 311, reviewed a book called The Company Doctor: Risk, Responsibilities, and Corporate Professionalism (by Elaine Draper). The author interviewed more than 100 professionals engaged as or working with physicians in large corporations ?whose...

Nowhere near a discipline, management of in-house lawyers will take time to achieve coherence

Posted on November 09, 2010
Much as I admire and have learned from Stephen H. Kellert, Borrowed Knowledge: Chaos Theory and the Challenge of Learning Across Disciplines (Univ. Chic. 2008), it leaves me doubtful that even in the mid-term there will be recognized, encompassing principals...

Myths perpetuated about inside lawyers if they balloon the budget on outside counsel

Posted on November 09, 2010
When a legal department goes hat in hand for a budget increase, having paid more than was projected that year for, say, outside counsel, clients accumulate and confirm stereotypes. Invidious beliefs about lawyers (to some degree, but not entirely, urban...

In addition to contract templates, standards, fall-back language ? an approval matrix

Posted on November 08, 2010
One unheralded piece of the contract suite, by which I mean the array of software and processes that let a company get its contracts executed, is the approval matrix. It guides lawyers and clients regarding the level of manager who...

Opportunities and risks with metaphorical borrowings from other disciplines

Posted on November 08, 2010
The undeveloped field of law department management, a field without theory, short of empirical data, unresearched and rarely even openly disputed, needs all the insights it can get. Some flashes can come from concepts and insights kidnapped from other disciplines...

?Lawyers would rub the fuzz off a peach? ? the latent animus of clients toward lawyers

Posted on November 08, 2010
Even strenuous efforts to ?team? with clients, to be ?business partners? and to ?align? may all lead to disappointed in-house legal departments. At bottom, clients may grudgingly appreciate that their lawyers guide them through the legal thickets, but more fundamentally...

The gale of metaphors blowing through these blog posts

Posted on November 07, 2010
Once aware of metaphors, you notice they spring up everywhere ? to invoke yet another one (See my post of Oct. 12, 2010: metaphors enable cognition; and Nov. 14, 2005: metaphors of managers.). My blog posts are dappled with metaphors...

The improper and odd role of an inside lawyer referred to in Social Network

Posted on November 07, 2010
The excellent movie about Facebook?s Mark Zuckerberg, Social Network, has a couple of fleeting references to a corporate lawyer. The ?rowing twins? who eventually sued Zuckerberg call their wealthy father?s in-house lawyer for legal advice when they believe Zuckerberg has...

September?s scintillating subjects ? the month?s ten most interesting posts

Posted on November 07, 2010
More examples pulled together of legal departments pulling together (Sept. 8, 2010) Commends collective actions by legal departments and notes examples Deep down, law firm leaders may not want law departments to improve (Sept. 8, 2010) Some partners may harbor...

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