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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

An internal team of offshore legal professionals wasn?t the way to go for British Telecomm

Posted on October 04, 2010
Speaking at the Datacert conference, Generals of the Revolution, last week, Richard Susskind, the author of The End Of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services (Oxford 2008), referred to an interesting event. British Telecomm assembled its own team of...

Richard Susskind on the two strategies for law departments to pare costs

Posted on October 04, 2010
Richard Susskind, the author of The End Of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services (Oxford 2008), spoke recently at the DataCert conference, Generals of the Revolution. As he sees it, law departments under pressure to control costs and spending...

An article lets us infer quite a bit about the complexity of patent practices in legal departments

Posted on October 03, 2010
The Economist, Oct. 2, 2010 at 72, draws on data from the World Intellectual Property Organisation to show that patent applications in 2009 were 450,000 in the United States, 350,000 in Japan, 310,000 in China and 140,000 in Europe (my...

The contribution of institutional knowledge in firms may vary by area of representation

Posted on October 03, 2010
A veteran in-house lawyer ruminated on the importance of law firms accumulating familiarity with their clients business, strategies, and employees. In his view, for one-off major law suits such background history and knowledge may have almost nothing to add...

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Rebuttals to six arguments against competitive RFP processes

Posted on October 03, 2010
Recently I put myself in the shoes of an opponent of competitive bids to select firms and came up with six arguments, in quotes below. Let me now unlace those shoes (See my post of Sept. 22, 2010: opposition to...

The concept of baseline external spend by legal departments and a call for clarity

Posted on October 03, 2010
All general counsel complain that their budget this year is swollen by some anomalous and uncontrollable charges. Their company bought another company and whacking big legal fees came with that acquisition. The plant closing of four years ago erupted discrimination...

Do firms bill more as a settlement appears to be nearer? Probably

Posted on October 03, 2010
Firms bill more when settlement discussions are underway. That is the belief of some in-house litigators. When a responsible partner realizes that the trough may soon be emptied by resolution of the case, lots of thirsty timekeepers crowd in to...

Some deny that employees who choose their own work goals have higher motivation

Posted on October 03, 2010
Four performance myths get set straight in an article in talent mgt., Sept. 2010 at 12. The author states one as ?When employees select their own work goals, their motivation to achieve them is greater.? Not necessarily. Research has shown...

Use free online software to survey your clients for their perceptions about your department

Posted on October 03, 2010
An article in the ACC Docket, Sept. 2010 at 22, mentions that the small legal department of Bangor Hydro Electric used a web-based survey last year to gather client satisfaction data (See my post of March 26, 2007: Snap and...

Interplay between budgets and benchmarks

Posted on September 30, 2010
Both are tools for management that have distinguished pedigrees. Every general counsel creates budgets and most should seek benchmarks from time to time. Both offer more insights to those comfortable with mathematics. Percentage change, compound annual growth rates, correlations and...

Data going back a decade on costs and awards of wrongful-termination suits

Posted on September 30, 2010
A ten-year-old article said that the median costs of wrongful-termination awards reached $151,800 for men and $75,000 for women (based on 1,700 verdicts rendered between 1988 and 1995). The article is in Admin. Sciences Quarterly, 2000 at 557. Even in...

Trial date management as a cost-management technique mentioned for legal departments

Posted on September 30, 2010
An advertising supplement by CT Tymetrix in Corp. Counsel, Sept. 2010 at 3, reels off 11 methods by which legal departments manage external legal costs. Experienced, managers of departments know about all of them and will find nothing new, except...

Blizzard of invoices each year to a multinational legal department, Novartis

Posted on September 30, 2010
A piece in Met. Corp. Counsel, Sept. 2010 at 28, offers a stunning metric about the number of invoices Novartis AG?s legal and intellectual property groups cope with annually. The groups work with more than 300 law firms, legal vendors,...

Three controversial players in the demimonde of patents without operations on a list of 25 honorees

Posted on September 30, 2010
Among the 25 most influential people in IP singled out by Intell. Prop., Fall 2010 at 13, three of them loom large in the controversial domain of what some refer to as patent trolls. John Amster, the CEO of RPX...

One-third of the people recognized as making the most difference IP are in-house lawyers

Posted on September 30, 2010
Intell. Prop., Fall 2010 at 13, honors ?the 25 most influential people in IP.? Of that esteemed group, seven in-house lawyers appear. They include Robert Armitage, the General Counsel of Eli Lilly; Terri Chen, Chief Trademark Counsel at Google; Daniel...

Past 10 columns for InsideCounsel: Morrison on Metrics

Posted on September 30, 2010
The columns I write for InsideCounsel every two weeks give me the opportunity to go deeper than my blog posts. I can sit back and think a bit, too, and go deeper. My posts that point to the columns to...

The absolute truth about normalized metrics for benchmarks

Posted on September 30, 2010
My column for InsideCounsel explains absolute and normalized figures and why normalized figures so importantly contribute to benchmark studies. Click here to read the column. The columns draws on and goes beyond the following posts (See my post of May...

Even if value added outcomes are elusive, pursue well-intentioned processes

Posted on September 28, 2010
In-house managers of law firms should shift to law firms part of the burden to show whether they are cost effective. How might firms do this? That I leave to the ingenuity of law firm partners but it could start...

Why the assumption that ?cost pressure? always comes from outside (above) the law department?

Posted on September 28, 2010
It bothers me that the common refrain goes like this: ?Pressure from the CEO or the CFO forces the general counsel to cut costs.? Beyond cavil, the two top executives often mandate budget cuts and what functional head voluntarily signs...

Beyond relationship partners at key firms, a view that general counsel should commune with managing partners

Posted on September 28, 2010
The former general counsel of Bombardier urges in the ACC Docket, Sept. 2010 at Supp. 7, a link in addition to relationship partners between a legal department and its primary law firms. Daniel Desjardins ?believes that it is equally important...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #138: posts longa, morsels breva

Posted on September 28, 2010
Retirement formulas, such as 50 years ol...

My congregation of recent posts on correlations and multiple regression

Posted on September 28, 2010
Thirty months ago there were enough posts on statistical correlation for me to assemble them (See my post of Feb.13, 2008: correlations with 16 references.). Since then, many other posts have referred to possible correlations in the intricacies of legal...

21st century patent lawyers should contribute far beyond prosecution of patents

Posted on September 28, 2010
Fortune, Sept. 27, 2010 at 76, states that 3M owns 40,000 patents and patent applications, with only about a quarter of them in the US. A number that massive and scattered helps you appreciate the crucial role of inside patent...

Writing competently, thinking to match, and success as an in-house lawyer

Posted on September 28, 2010
A person can think well without being able to write well, but no one writes well without thinking well. From that profound claim, let?s move to the practical. Writing proficiency may in fact distinguish in-house counsel more than external counsel...

Toward 700+ legal departments; fourth release in late October; add your data now!

Posted on September 27, 2010
You still have time to learn from the most comprehensive benchmark study ever done, and at no cost. If you would like to see a mini-version of the report, write me from your corporate address. Or click on this link,...

Does a general counsel face more difficult ethical pressures than colleagues if asked to do significantly more with less?

Posted on September 27, 2010
Assume that the workload of a law department increases steadily yet the CEO requires cuts in both legal staffing and outside spending. Does the imbalance of professional obligation as a lawyer to a client and the exigencies of a company...

In-house patent lawyers can team with colleagues to prepare an opportunity matrix

Posted on September 27, 2010
To value a corporation?s patent portfolio is one of the inter-disciplinary contributions of in-house patent counsel. Inter-disciplinary because technology professionals, commercial managers, and finance specialists have to combine their talents. Partnering Perspectives, Summer 2010, at 5, by Sutherland Asbill &...

Mega-cities probably house the largest law departments and almost certainly the largest share of them

Posted on September 27, 2010
Of the Fortune Global 500 companies, 165 are based in 10 vast cities. I presume that their legal departments staff many of their lawyers in those megalopolises. Here are the leaders from Foreign Policy, Sept./Oct. 2010 at 125: Tokyo (51...

A law department that forces its key law firms to invest at their cost in technology

Posted on September 27, 2010
Rather than paraphrase, here is the surprising quote from an interview with the former general counsel of Bombardier: The Canadian company?s GC ?requires key firms that work with his law department [to] invest in whatever systems they need to provide...

Doubtful law departments are the yeast for document-integrity software rising throughout the company

Posted on September 27, 2010
Vendors see trends that might surprise the rest of us. In Met. Corp. Counsel, Sept. 2010 at 28, a software provider, WorkShare, promotes its applications that assure the integrity of documents ? the original has not been altered ? and...

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