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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

Client satisfaction may rise with seniority of clients and distort company-wide impressions

Posted on March 18, 2011
Surveys find that richer people report higher satisfaction with life than poorer people. Data on this oft-found result comes from Eduardo Porter, The Price of Everything: Solving the mystery of why we pay what we do (Portfolio/Penguin 2011) at 62,...

Law firm panels were common among French law departments, fee arrangements less so

Posted on March 16, 2011
A survey of French law departments during the fall of 2010 asked whether they had put in place a panel of law firms and negotiated fee arrangement with those firms. From responses of 91 general counsel, two thirds of them...

A law firm?s prestige might turn on a pleasure center of the brain

Posted on March 16, 2011
If one thing costs more than another, similar thing, that fact alone ?turns on the neurons in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with pleasure feelings.? Eduardo Porter, The Price of Everything: Solving the mystery of...

More research on what law department lawyers say they value when they select firms

Posted on March 16, 2011
Georgetown University Law Center?s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession coordinated yet another highly successful conference last week. Among the wide-ranging presentations about trends in the delivery of corporate legal services that Professor Mitt Regan and his colleagues...

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Similar amounts spent per in-house lawyer by German and US law departments, and the same ratio

Posted on March 14, 2011
My overall point from a blog posts during the past few weeks about benchmark data from Germany has been the striking similarities between most of them and their US counterparts. Another example is inside and outside spending per lawyer and...

Legal department consigned to ?process-oriented? and thus dull

Posted on March 14, 2011
?We trust our legal department to be risk-averse and process-oriented, and as a result, they?re not very provocative and they?re not controversial.? With those disparaging words from KM World, March 2011 at S3, an executive of a content management vendor...

Jingoism and braggadocio about proclaimed superiority of management in US law departments

Posted on March 13, 2011
It is often said in blog posts, articles and conferences that general counsel of US companies are managerially advanced compared to general counsel of the rest of the world. ?Them?s fightin? words,? you could say! How someone could demonstrate such...

An unusual example of experts that are not lawyers (13 engineers) in the litigation group of a law department

Posted on March 13, 2011
Caterpillar has 18 lawyers in its litigation department. The department?s head lawyer, deputy general counsel Lance High, also has on his team 13 engineers ?dedicated to helping with cases that challenge the design and manufacture of Caterpillar?s products...

Spin-offs shrink law departments, and The Williams Companies dropped by two-thirds

Posted on March 12, 2011
The lead article in Corp. Counsel, March 2011 at 67, profiles seven experienced administrators (aka business managers, managing directors, directors of administration, etc.). The piece on Danette Gallatin of The Williams Companies had a couple of sentences not so much...

More evidence of this being the Decade of Data

Posted on March 12, 2011
Data will play an increasingly important role for general counsel as they navigate the turbulent years, so I should add three more sources of such data (See my post of June 16, 2010: six pools of management data for general...

Do general counsel care about ?thought leadership? by law firms?

Posted on March 12, 2011
My jaws clench when I hear the term ?thought leadership.? Promiscuous, the term makes me think of grandiose, otiose and comatose. Grandiose because we all stand on the shoulders of giants, everything has been thought of or said before, and...

The access costs of knowledge, a concept useful to those who manage in-house legal staff

Posted on March 12, 2011
Enlightenment thinkers understood that knowledge only brings benefits if it enables useful change and if those who can bring about the changes can learn of it. Access to knowledge counts for as much as creation for without the means to...

Early findings from 142 in GCM?s 2011 benchmark survey regarding 30+ matter management systems

Posted on March 12, 2011
Seven weeks from its start, 142 law departments have submitted data for the 2011 General Counsel Metrics global benchmark survey. Of them, 76 completed the question regarding their matter management system. Astoundingly, they mentioned 30 different systems! Part of that...

Surveys should ask not for ranges when collecting numbers, but actual numbers

Posted on March 11, 2011
Poring over a compliance function survey now underway by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Compliance Week, I noted that they ask for the number of employees in the function and gave nine ranges to choose: 1, 2, 3-5, 6-10, up to ?more than...

Does compliance really get involved in 33 areas, as a recent survey asks?

Posted on March 11, 2011
A friend sent me word of a compliance function survey being conducted jointly by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Compliance Week. One question asks ?To what extent is your compliance function directly responsible for or involved in the following areas?? It then asks...

Thoughts on why the ALA doesn?t have many members who are law department administrators

Posted on March 11, 2011
A recent article in Corporate Counsel discusses administrators of law departments. The author notes that the Association of Legal Administrators (ALA) just added its 10,000th member, but that only two percent of them work for companies. A decade ago, if...

A methodological flaw of surveys that ask for scores on a scale

Posted on March 11, 2011
Many surveys of law departments ask questions to be answered on a scale, such as ?How satisfied are you with the technology used by your primary law firms?? The scale goes from 1 (?not very satisfied?) to 2 (?reasonably satisfied?...

Huge productivity increases for most in-house lawyers in the past decades

Posted on March 11, 2011
For every hour today?s in-house lawyer works, productivity far exceeds what was possible as recently as 20 years ago. That?s a broad claim for a tiny post, but let me draw on economic history, inspired by Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois...

For professionals, boundaries more than bureaucracy ? a very important management style difference for clever workers

Posted on March 11, 2011
Capable professionals achieve more and are more contented if their work constraints are more like boundaries than bureaucracy. If simple rules, constitutional principles, broad descriptions of authority accompanied by inspiring goals, set the direction and structure, in-house lawyers and their...

A contrast in law department styles: close Gemeinschaft or distant Gesellschaft

Posted on March 10, 2011
Sociologists often invoke a ?sharp distinction between rural Gemeinschaft (inherited, emotional community) and urban Gesellschaft (created, cold society).? Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can?t Explain the Modern World (Univ. Chic...

The ratio of meeting time to working time

Posted on March 10, 2011
Meetings -- @#$&^%$ -- the bane of in-house lawyers. Can?t live with them but (in a big company) can?t live without them. Further, a well-known software designer, Will Wright of Electronic Arts, estimated that with a team of twenty people,...

A third newly-found blog by a General Counsel

Posted on March 10, 2011
One aggregated post (what I call a metapost) and two individual posts since its appearance have noted and welcomed blogs by in-house counsel (See my post of Feb. 17, 2011: lists 11 blogs by in-house lawyers; March 1, 2011: Melanie...

A third newly-found blog by a General Counsel

An addendum to reflections on structure in Indra?s law department

Posted on March 10, 2011
Comments I made earlier about Indra?s structure said nothing about an additional layer in law departments and a frequent cause of hard-to-resolve management issues: a geographic reporting matrix (See my post of Jan. 11, 2011: Indra?s law department structure...

An addendum to reflections on structure in Indra?s law department

Cost per hour in Germany matches that of the US for internal lawyers

Posted on March 06, 2011
Data from 2009 for 56 of the largest German companies indicate that the average cost per hour of their in-house lawyers was ?148. At 1.5 US dollars per Euro as the approximate exchange rate, the cost was in the range...

A large number of competitors covered in the matter management and e-billing arena, and more probably in the wings

Posted on March 06, 2011
A recent market report from Hyperion Research describes a dozen vendors of matter management and e-billing who are identified as ?Market Participants.? The Aug. 2010 MarketView Report of Hyperion Research, ?e-Billing and Matter Management Systems for Corporations,? at 14-17 gives...

From January, the ten most interesting posts according to their poster (me)

Posted on March 06, 2011
1. An effective law department: a common notion but it lacks construct validity (Jan. 4, 2011) A construct is (1) research-based, (2) its meaning is agreed upon by a consensus of professionals qualified in the appropriate field of study, and...

Dramatic increase in responsibility of general counsel over two decades according to the Harvard Business Review, with three of my own observations

Posted on March 03, 2011
The Harv. Bus. Rev., March 2011 at 65, has an article about ?the new path to the c-suite.? One part looks at what it takes to become a chief legal officer. It explains what the author sees as the dramatic...

Yet another blog hosted by an in-house lawyer, the anonymous Mr. Bizzle

Posted on March 03, 2011
This newest find is cloaked in secrecy, since Mr. Bizzle blogs under cover of darkness. Why? ?I blog anonymously because I feel less self-conscious that way. I haven?t covered my tracks that well, so I try to avoid controversy.? What...

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