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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

Is cost sanity hopeless for legal departments in light of e-discovery?s crazy projected increases?

Posted on July 14, 2010
Consider this ravening projection of e-discovery costs. In KMWorld, July/Aug. 2010 at 6, ?Gartner [the research group] ? reported that e-discovery vendor revenue grew 30 percent in 2008, and predicts an annual growth rate of 21 percent through 2013.? Let?s...

Disturbing findings for legal departments regarding time tracking by law firms

Posted on July 12, 2010
Am. Legal Tech. Insider (#24) July 2010 altisubs@legaltechnology.com summarizes findings from a survey by Smart WebParts of lawyers? time recording practices. Four findings should perturb in-house lawyers who care about external costs. It should disturb in-house lawyers who struggle to...

Internal audits and the COSO framework for testing a legal department?s controls?

Posted on July 12, 2010
This quote, from a recent article, baffles me. ?Auditors should be familiar with control criteria involving the legal department under the COSO framework. For example, to test the implementation and effectiveness of the control environment, auditors can compile a list...

Could a law department declare 10-11AM as quiet time, with the goal of no internal calls, visits or emails?

Posted on July 12, 2010
Here is where this off-beat idea comes from. ?An example of a strategy for controlling the predictability of intrusions in organizations is the institution of ?quiet time,? whereby members of an organization agreed to a standard period of clock time....

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?Signaling? functions of a law department: posh firms, pricey partners, progressive practices

Posted on July 12, 2010
Law firms can proclaim to the world their quality, experience and prestige by their lush offices, their massive size, and their stratospheric billing rates. Each of these attributes economists would characterize as a ?signal.? A signal is easy to observe...

Positivism and its perspectives on knowledge about law department management

Posted on July 08, 2010
The set of philosophical beliefs known as ?positivism? holds that objective truth exists, that humans can accurately understand those truths, and that scientific tools best enable us to do so. Measurement, rationality, certainty, and comprehension are neither ironic nor useless...

Part XLIX of a collection of embedded metaposts

Posted on July 08, 2010
Ten more collections of posts on a topic (metaposts), bedecked with the number of posts they cite (See my post of June 8, 2010: Part XLVIII). 1. Benchmark methodology (See my post of June 23, 2010: methodological considerations in benchmarking...

Internal auditors who review the legal department ? ambitious goals

Posted on July 08, 2010
Expectations about what internal audit can do to improve a legal department may be unrealistic. An article in Compliance Week (July 7, 2010) by Jos� Tabuena, senior vice president of governance and compliance with PhyServe Physician Services, gives an example...

Government legal departments post useful information online

Posted on July 08, 2010
Agencies of the federal government have disclosure obligations that go far beyond what private corporations must do. For example, you can find all sorts of information for outside counsel engaged by the FDIC on its legal department website. You can...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #136: posts longa, morsels breva

Posted on July 08, 2010
Legal informatics has a website. Dr. Adam Wyner?s blog on legal informatics for legal professionals looks very interesting. It covers Web. 2.0 concepts in the legal field. Language Logic Law Software National differences in pay and the effect on total...

Law departments that licensed CPi software that infringes a patent could themselves be embroiled in litigation

Posted on July 07, 2010
A Stamford, CT-based company, WhitServe LLC, is aggressively targeting firms it believes have infringed its patents relating to the delivery of professional services over the Internet, including methods for online patent and trademark renewals. One of the targets is a...

Lighten the load on your department with consistently formatted policies easily available

Posted on July 07, 2010
The Red Flag Group was praised by a speaker at the InsideCounsel SuperConference. Brian Martin, the general counsel of KLA Tencor explained that his $2+ billion company retained the Red Flag Group to ?take all the company?s policies and put...

Data on the reporting lines of chief compliance officers

Posted on July 07, 2010
The Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics surveyed its members in 2009. According to a summary of the findings by John Soriano in Compliance Week, the survey found a plurality (45%) of chief compliance officers reported directly to the CEO....

Greatest challenges facing adoption or support of informal learning initiatives

Posted on July 07, 2010
talent mgt., June 2010 at 17, contains an extract from a survey of 520 chief learning officers. They gave their views on what hobbles programs to boost informal learning. ?Too hard to measure and show ROI? (26%) ?Corporate culture hinders...

Huge difference in a key benchmark across geographic regions

Posted on July 07, 2010
Data from the 500-plus legal departments in General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey highlights how the costs of legal services swing widely in different parts of the world. One example is the subject of my latest Morrison on Metrics column for...

Second benchmark release due soon: 500+ legal departments with 3,000 thousand more lawyers, quartile summaries, and regional data

Posted on July 06, 2010
Will you take a few minutes to complete the General Counsel Metrics survey? Will you take another minute and email this post to a general counsel you know who might welcome benchmarking data? Since the release of the first benchmark...

A regulator would tell companies that compliance heads should not report to legal

Posted on July 06, 2010
This blog has commented before on the reporting lines of chief compliance officers (CCO?s) (See my post of Jan. 20, 2009: reporting lines of compliance function with 11 references.). It had not occurred to me that government agencies might take...

Comments on 300+ comments on this blog for the past 18 months

Posted on July 06, 2010
I reviewed all the comments posted here since the start of 2009, more than 300 of them. The retrospective got me thinking. First, I very much appreciate comments and hope that they increase. Second, I have not made it a...

Topics under-represented among the 120 best posts of the past 12 months: clients and technology

Posted on July 06, 2010
Previous posts consider the three most common categories among my ?ten bests?: outside counsel, metrics, and thinking (See my post of July 5, 2010: 39 on outside counsel; July 5, 2010: 16 on metrics; and July 5 , 2010: 12...

Why metrics are the second most common group in the 120 best posts on this blog from May 2009 -- May 2010

Posted on July 05, 2010
The question posed by the header has some easy answers. Much truth lies in the commonplace notion that you can manage something better if you have numbers to back you up. If you know what your average effective rate is...

Contingency theory and its applicability to legal departments

Posted on July 05, 2010
The essence of contingency theory is that the value of management practices depend on the contingencies of the situation. What happens in a legal department is not the inevitable working out of predetermined linkages and rules but rather depends on...

Analysis of the 120 best posts on this blog from May 2009 through May 2010 ? outside counsel management predominates

Posted on July 05, 2010
What patterns do I see in the first year?s worth of monthly compilations of most interesting posts? (Email me rees@reesmorrison.com if you would like the entire 28-page collection.) It turns out that 39 of them have to do with relations...

Two technology topics with torque ? programming and multiplicity of packages

Posted on July 05, 2010
Met. Corp. Counsel, June 2010 at 9, has two quotes that twisted my mind from an interview of the CEO of Datacert. Bear in mind that the speaker leads a company that has just announced a ?platform? with patented software...

Best management posts of May 2010 ? which completes a year of ?Best Posts?

Posted on July 04, 2010
I hope these ten interest you also and compel you to click on the link to read the entire post. Meanwhile, I have been toiling with the set from the full year since I started. This blog will scoop everyone...

Law departments should expect questions from law firms that receive an RFP

Posted on July 01, 2010
Having consulted on quite a few RFP processes by law departments, I appreciate the novelty and the wisdom of a comment made by a website designer. Asked whether she responds to RFPs, she writes ?If we're excited about the project,...

A comment or two on some data regarding internal vs. external costs per hour

Posted on July 01, 2010
An article by Thomson Hildebrandt consultants in Exec. Counsel, April/May 2010 at 27, mentions differences in cost per hour of inside lawyers and outside counsel. As found by the group?s survey, ?the fully-loaded inside hourly cost per lawyer is $214...

Some management insights into Proctor & Gamble?s massive legal department

Posted on July 01, 2010
The profiles of general counsel that appear in various trade publications dwell on employees, revenue and the number of lawyers, but they don?t ask about spending or non-lawyer staff. Even so, there is much to glean. Take one instance. In...

Seven years of Serengeti data on median spending on outside counsel

Posted on July 01, 2010
Each year the ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey collects data on how much participating legal departments spend on outside counsel. The median for 2008 was $1.2 million. Thus, of the 390 participants last year who provided data for the previous...

omeone wrote the book I yearn to write and here?s the cover

Posted on July 01, 2010

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