Law Department Management: In-House Counsel

Home -> Law Blog Directory -> In-House Counsel Blogs

OR PHONE (866) 635-1838 for Bankruptcy Help, (866) 635-6190 for Divorce,
(866) 635-2689 for Personal Injury or (866) 635-9402 for Criminal Defense

Find a Local Lawyer

Bankruptcy (866) 635-1838
Divorce (866) 635-6190
Personal Injury (866) 635-2689
Criminal Defense (866) 635-9402

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

Law departments that set minimum ?chargeable hours? compound the ills of tracking time

Posted on July 26, 2010
Not a fan of time tracking in legal departments, except for limited times and purposes, I question even more internal tracking of time when there are stated expectations of chargeable hours. That practice is problematic for the same reasons that...

Law departments, even when they use big firms, deal with malpractice issues

Posted on July 26, 2010
I have had little to say over the years about malpractice (See my post of Nov. 8, 2009: malpractice of law firms with 8 references.). Mostly, it has seemed to me that companies with legal departments hire capable firms and...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #137: posts longa, morsels breva

Posted on July 26, 2010
Emails before bed or a double espresso. An item in PC Today, June 2010 at 8, quotes a sleep expert: ?Checking emails just before bed halts the production of sleep enhancing melatonin and has the same effect as drinking a...

Twelve benefits for you when you take part in the 600+ department benchmark study

Posted on July 25, 2010
The September release of the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey will have more than 600 law departments in it. No wonder, since there are at least a dozen good reasons to submit your department?s data: 1. Find out how you...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

A bit of theory describing legal departments as mathematical spaces

Posted on July 25, 2010
Richard Ogle, Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas (Harv. Bus. School 2007) at 238, introduces the term ?space? which he uses ?in the mathematical sense of a complex abstract entity characterized by very high dimensionality and...

A network model for legal departments with three layers

Posted on July 25, 2010
Richard Ogle, Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas (Harv. Bus. School 2007) at 20, explains that the promulgation and exploration of network theory evolved from work on complexity theory. This blog has skimmed several concepts from...

For lawyers, brains and creativity show no statistical correlation

Posted on July 25, 2010
Richard Ogle, Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas (Harv. Bus. School 2007) at 15, cites research that surprises me. ?Beyond the level of 115 [IQ], there is no observable correlation between intelligence and creativity.? I have...

Some mathematical relations important to general counsel are curvilinear

Posted on July 25, 2010
Many relationships between metrics are not linear ? there is not constant change in one in step with changes in another. In addition, to note a few, there are exponential functions, power-law functions, and U-shaped functions. As an example of...

Software general counsel should regret if it raises the amounts billed to them

Posted on July 25, 2010
An Economist article, July 24, 2010, at 72, steps into the world of law firms billing by the hour. The final paragraph suggests that law firms lose much of their worked time because of their ?tired and overworked attorneys who...

Major consolidation in the online compliance training industry

Posted on July 23, 2010
Yesterday, SAI Global Limited announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Integrity Interactive, a leading Compliance and Ethics solutions provider, subject to US regulatory approval. Hats off to Jeff Kaplan of Kaplan Walker for alerting me to...

Ten percent of the Fortune Global 500 in benchmark survey: the large and the small of it

Posted on July 22, 2010
If your legal department has scores of lawyers and your company bestrides the commercial world like a colossus ? you are on some Fortune list ? you find comparable benchmarks hard to find. So, it might pique your interest to...

An expert on compliance offers some thoughts about compliance heads reporting to the general counsel

Posted on July 22, 2010
My friend, Jeff Kaplan, offers some good ideas about how to assure the independence of a chief ethics and compliance officer (CECO) who reports to the general counsel. ?However, even where the analysis leads one to conclude that administrative reporting...

Three dozen software packages that are credited to enable creative thinking

Posted on July 20, 2010
A recent article lists more than 40 software tools claimed to be able to support and manage innovation. The article is in the MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Summer 2010 at 45, and it breaks the software into four broad categories...

Resource Dependence Theory (RDT) and its applicability to legal departments

Posted on July 20, 2010
Resource Dependence Theory is the study of organizations and how their external resources affect their behavior. It may have something to offer for general counsel, but I am not sure. The procurement of external resources is an important tenet of...

Rotating law firms off your account based on the passage of time? No!

Posted on July 20, 2010
One suggested role for an internal auditor of a legal department involves reviewing and monitoring legal invoices. A recent article from Compliance Week (July 7, 2010) by Jos� Tabuena, senior vice president of governance and compliance with PhyServe Physician Services,...

Unquestioned use of research and misquotes to boot now mis-portray dramatic legal cost increases

Posted on July 20, 2010
The source of the quote came from the Jan. 2009 issue of the California Lawyer. ?A survey by the Corporate Executive Board found that large-company spending on law firms grew by 49 percent between 2002 and 2005.? OK, ten percent...

Survey suggests in-house lawyers are from Mars, IT staff from Venus, but what on earth does it mean?

Posted on July 19, 2010
Am. Legal Tech. Insider (#24) July 2010 passed on some research commissioned by Recommind. They found that the disconnect between legal and IT departments has deteriorated over the past 12 months. Last year, 67 percent of respondents described the relationship...

Three findings about decision-making under stress

Posted on July 19, 2010
Attorneys in corporations often feel under stress so it is useful to understand more about how stress affects decisions. A number of points come out of an article in Acad. Mgt. J., July 2005 at 497. Time pressures seem to...

You can?t value what you do not know ? Nobelist on fees based on advance valuation of a law firm?s knowledge

Posted on July 19, 2010
Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow said something about doctors that applies equally to lawyers: ?[T]the value of information is frequently not known in any meaningful sense to the buyer; if, indeed, he knew enough to measure the value of information, he...

How are the constructs of ?risk? and ?value? similar? Seven commonalities

Posted on July 19, 2010
Both are unmeasurable before the event. Law department can?t a priori state hard numbers associated with them. Both are enormously value laden. Fundamental beliefs of people shape strongly how they understand and interpret the terms. Both swim in contingent circumstances...

Do all the support functions get dumped on, including (or even particularly) legal?

Posted on July 19, 2010
I?m out on a limb here, since all I claim to know a bit about are law departments, but what does this quote suggest: ?[O]ur study found that many organizations have a negative perception of their IT departments. Often executives...

A three-part bucketing of IT spending and its applicability to legal spending

Posted on July 19, 2010
An article in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Summer 2010 at 17, describes three broad buckets of IT expenditures: operations (day-to-day taking care of business), process improvement (bigger projects to add capabilities), and innovation (new initiatives and major changes)...

Achieve ?full transparency in all talent management processes?

Posted on July 19, 2010
Being one who relishes confirmation of my own beliefs, I nodded when I read one of three recommendations to improve talent processes: ?Start with the assumption of full transparency in all talent management processes.? From talent mgt., June 2010 at....

Motorola?s structure: its law department houses Licensing and Ethics & Compliance

Posted on July 15, 2010
One of the speakers at the SuperConference was from Motorola?s law department. She described the structure of the department, which has two unusual features. Overall, there are four clusters of lawyers dedicated to business units, with regional lawyers reporting up...

Not much of an argument that when you merely describe your spending fully you show value

Posted on July 15, 2010
A viewpoint that leaves me doubtful about its validity came from a panelist at the SuperConference. He said the just know and describing your data about spending ?shows your client your value.? I suppose that compared to a black box...

Draw a clear line between contracts that need legal review and purchase orders that do not

Posted on July 15, 2010
One of the speakers at the SuperConference was the general counsel of LG Electronics (US), a $6 billion dollar manufacturer that has only five in-house lawyers. Among their efforts to cope with the flood of work was to set clear...

10,000+ extranets used by clients of one law firm!

Posted on July 15, 2010
This blogger has questioned extranets offered by law firms for their clients on the grounds that law department staff do not want to learn many different systems (See my post of April 8, 2008: extranets with 13 references.). But that...

To control outside costs, require inside lawyers to get signoff each time from their supervisor

Posted on July 14, 2010
Long ago I took the position that it belittles an in-house lawyer to have to obtain approval before retaining outside counsel. If you are mature enough as a lawyer to handle a legal problem, you should be mature enough to...

Marketing the department?s services internally has huge importance

Posted on July 14, 2010
Far from the truth is it that in-house lawyers can just relax and let the work flow in. When you are in-house and only have one customer (business unit Widget or function HR) who can freeze you out or not...

A ?special litigation committee? to monitor expensive and risky lawsuits?

Posted on July 14, 2010
An article in Compliance Week (July 7, 2010) by Jos� Tabuena, SVP of governance and compliance with PhyServe Physician Services, mentions a function I have never seen. ?One example of where legal and audit teams can cooperate is in financial...

Previous | Next

Related Law Bulletins

Insurance Department Issues Second Annual Ohio Medical Liability Closed Claim Report
COLUMBUS — The Ohio Department of Insurance has issued its secon...

Injury Verdict Upheld in Chicago Police Department Auto Accident
A verdict awarded from a personal injury case in Chicago against t...

Department Of State Update on Implementation of E3 Visas for Australians
Our office receives many questions about when the new E-3 visa cat...