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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

Standardized scores as a quick way to compare a law department to industry peers

Posted on July 01, 2010
Using my data from legal departments of 42 technology companies, I calculated their standardized scores. Standardized scores convert a metric into standard deviations above or below the average (See my post of Aug. 4, 2009: compare differences in terms of...

Hire your retired lawyers to save money and time

Posted on June 30, 2010
Exec. Counsel, April/May 2010 at 26, in an article by Hildebrandt consultants, explains that a ?leading utility company has been successfully working with its retired lawyers for the past five years.? The former lawyers can work much more flexible hours...

Allowance rates for patent applications as one indicator of effectiveness

Posted on June 30, 2010
Treading into an area full of unknowns for me, I note from Exec. Counsel, April/May 2010 at 26, some data about USPTO rates for allowing patents. ?The allowance rate varied only slightly from 2005 to 2007, from 55 percent to...

Insights from the Economist on the LPO industry in India

Posted on June 30, 2010
A piece in the redoubtable Economist, June 26, 2010 at 69, concludes that cost-saving efforts in the West and systemic improvements in the East continue to favor the Indian legal process outsourcing industry (LPO). They cite a study by ValueNotes...

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The more cases your lawyers handle, the more law firms they manage, but no metric

Posted on June 30, 2010
A numeric norm undoubtedly exists between the number of cases handled per litigation lawyer inside and the number of outside counsel managed by the same lawyer. In general, you would expect that the more lawsuits in the dossier of an...

Perhaps occasionally force-rank your outside counsel and drop the laggards

Posted on June 30, 2010
If a general counsel decided to drop a set number or percentage of the law firms used that were paid more than a de minimis amount, that would encourage better evaluations of firms. In-house lawyers would also more credibly tell...

A department uses templates in e-mails to notify custodians of documents about legal holds

Posted on June 29, 2010
A piece on Gerry Kenney, the general counsel of NEC Corp. of America, explains how his law department handles litigation holds (See my post of Aug. 27, 2008: litigation hold notices with 6 references.). Once they identify custodians who control...

An export/import function that falls under the responsibility of a general counsel

Posted on June 29, 2010
General counsel can find themselves with all kinds of functions reporting to them. An unusual example appears at Polaris Industries a $1.6 billion manufacturer of snowmobiles and other products. The law department of Polaris has four lawyers and paralegals in...

Codean software that maps and links defined terms in a contract

Posted on June 29, 2010
Roaming the aisles at LegalTech West, I noticed a new participant, Codean. It says that its software, Visualizer, ?automatically analyzes legal documents for defined terms without user intervention to generate a live, hyperlinked version of the document...

At staff meetings, assign a different lawyer each time to serve as chair

Posted on June 28, 2010
Every month the 22 lawyers of Coca-Cola in Europe dial in for a conference call. (Every quarter the entire legal staff calls in.). For the monthly calls, according to a supplement in the ACC Docket, June 2010 after 32, ?the...

Management differences between legal departments of publicly traded vs. privately held companies

Posted on June 28, 2010
Although it is easy to list differences between companies that have publicly-traded shares and privately held companies, how those differences play out in legal department responsibilities, structure and budget so far remains unknown. In the fullness of time and benchmark...

Unusual contingency fee based on costs advanced by a firm and the eye-popping result

Posted on June 25, 2010
The American Lawyer, June 2010 at 15, exposes the plight of King & Spalding in the aftermath of a seeming triumph in an international arbitration. The arbitration awarded the firm?s client (one Waguih Siag) $133 million. Siag settled for less,...

Instant value from instant messaging among members of a legal team

Posted on June 25, 2010
A supplement in the ACC Docket, June 2010 after 32, describes how the 22 lawyers that make up Coca-Cola Europe?s legal team keep in touch. Located in 10 countries across Europe, they rely on telephone calls, email, video conferences and...

An overlooked detriment when you bring aboard senior associates ? risk avoidance to risk management

Posted on June 25, 2010
The initiative of Hewlett-Packard to hire four first-year associates to start in September has deservedly gotten much play. One aspect of the article in the Recorder, June 21, 2010 at 5, however, may have been overlooked and deserves comment. The...

Generalist business lawyers and law-area experts

Posted on June 25, 2010
A supplement in the ACC Docket, June 2010 after 32, uses terminology from Coca-Cola?s legal group in Europe. They describe their business unit lawyers as ?operational lawyers? and their specialty lawyers as ?functional lawyers.? Other legal departments apply different labels...

Network externalities ? benchmark insights increase in value as the member numbers exceed 500

Posted on June 23, 2010
In a network market for a service, the value of the service increases with the number of its adopters. A clear example would be a benchmark survey since the value of the reports increase directly with the expansion of the...

Give your brain the reins, don?t canter to fit in if your head can gallop

Posted on June 23, 2010
A piece the ACC Docket, June 2010 at 18, strains a bit (pun intended) to compare weight lifting to practicing law in-house, but most of its points head in the right direction. Except one. The author says that athletes shouldn?t...

When ticked off and hot under the collar, five steps that might help you cool down

Posted on June 23, 2010
No, the first step is not to count to ten, although that can?t hurt. Instead, talent mgt., June 2010 at 37, offers these suggestions. They have a whiff of the therapists couch, ?Give Peace a Chance,? New Agism and tie-died...

Five kinds of conflict and examples for each from legal departments

Posted on June 23, 2010
From talent mgt., June 2010 at 36, we can find out about five varieties of conflict. Each of them flares up in legal departments. Process: such as if two managers of litigation each believe that their way to handle litigation...

There?s methodology in that madness of benchmarking

Posted on June 23, 2010
With so much of my effort the past five months on the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey, I made a bard pun to lead into my posts on benchmark methodology. Several of them grapple with the meanings of key terms...

Rewards and recognition for lawyers who contribute to a knowledge management system

Posted on June 21, 2010
An article in the Acad. Mgt. Exec., May 2005 at 15, devoted much attention to a reward system Siemens put in place to build usage and content of its knowledge management (KM) system. Siemens awarded ?shares? to valuable contributions, those...

Client training by the legal department and two metrics to show how it can pay for itself

Posted on June 21, 2010
An article in the Acad. Mgt. Exec., Feb. 2005 at 9, concerns incivility in the work place. It gives two statistics that are at least five years old that can help a law department justify its cost and value its...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #135: posts longa, morsels breva

Posted on June 18, 2010
A complimentary dummy book from EMC on in-house discovery groups. I had to smile at the recent SuperConference when I saw that EMC was handing out complimentary copies of the familiar yellow and black explanations for morons: Jake Frazier, Bringing...

Corporate lawyers have feelings too, more than they acknowledge

Posted on June 18, 2010
In his recent book, Amartya Sen refuses to elevate rationality above feelings. In fact, ?reason and emotion play complementary roles in human reflection?(at 39), he observes, and later he reiterates the point. ?Indeed, in celebrating reason, there is no particular...

A data point about the number of solicitors practicing in-house in Britain

Posted on June 18, 2010
The most recent statistics from the Law Society of Britain are as of 31 July 2008. The Society tallied 139,666 solicitors on its rolls. The number of those with practicing certificates was less, at 112,433. The number of solicitors employed...

World Cup has no monopoly on goals ? setting performance goals for lawyers

Posted on June 18, 2010
I got a kick out of these two points about goals. A manager can set two kinds of goals for an employee. One kind, the most common, sets a performance outcome. For example, ?You should submit applications for 15 patents...

Much-maligned bureaucracy also has a positive contribution

Posted on June 17, 2010
I have always assumed that a bureaucratic organization stifles creativity, fosters dissatisfaction, and de-motivates employees. Never assume! Some organizational researchers present positive aspects of bureaucracy. It provides guidance for workers, clarifies responsibilities, and reduces stress...

All other things being equal, deliberate and careful selection of new hires should pay off

Posted on June 17, 2010
Research indicates that selectivity in staffing is positively related to firm performance, according to an article in the Acad. of Mgt. Rev., 1996 Aug., at 952. Perhaps there lurks in that finding a comparative metric for law departments. If we...

Distributive justice (outcome fairness) and procedural justice (method fairness)

Posted on June 17, 2010
Research into what people feel is a just outcome suggests that people are concerned not only with the perceived fairness of the outcome in a particular situation, but also with the perceived fairness of the process that determined the outcome....

No prospect of agreement on a dominant value that defines the ?best law departments?

Posted on June 17, 2010
One of the many powerful ideas clearly expressed in Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Harvard Univ. 2009) at 15, is the ?plurality of competing principles? put forth to explain different notions of justice. Sen believes that no single value...

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