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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

Not structure but decision-making prowess sets a legal department above the crowd

Posted on June 09, 2010
?Contrary to popular belief, performance is not determined solely by the nature, scale and disposition of resources, important though they may be.? Instead, argues an article by three Bain partners in the Harvard Bus. Rev., June 2010 at 54, it...

Reprise of thoughtful posts (IMHO): ten best posts on this Blog of April 2010

Posted on June 09, 2010
Proportion of complex legal work in law departments is low and complexity does not equal high value (April 6, 2010) As a quote suggests, a general counsel might look to offshore providers to dispatch routine work and hope thereby to...

A colorful peek at the world?s largest benchmark report (500+ departments)

Posted on June 08, 2010
This is but one of the 60-page report?s many graphical pages, showing quartiles and other metrics. The next release will cover well more than 500 legal departments, so click here and get your report in its entirety in July.

A growing trend toward disclosure lawyers who are deemed high potentials

Posted on June 08, 2010
The only post here that discusses pros and cons of secrecy about high-potential lawyers comes down on the side of non-disclosure (See my post of June 24, 2007: identification causes problems.). But an article in the Harvard Bus. Rev., June...

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A chronology of yet another four-time general counsel

Posted on June 08, 2010
If you graduate law school at 25, let?s say, and work five years in a law firm, then join a legal department, you might become a general counsel at 40. Consider a real person who easily bested that pace. Thomas...

Part XLVIII of a collection of embedded metaposts

Posted on June 08, 2010
New embedded metaposts, one for each finger, as well as the number of posts they cite (See my post of May 24, 2010: Part XLVII). 1. Bidders? teleconferences (See my post of May 28, 2010: bidders? conferences in connection with...

?Plural grounding? presents arguments for or against without setting priorities

Posted on June 07, 2010
I look down on mere lists of reasons for or against something if the lister does not rank the reasons in some order, such as of their persuasiveness. It isn?t good enough to throw out a whole bunch of arguments...

Millions paid to a general counsel under a ?change of control? provision

Posted on June 07, 2010
When Merck bought Schering-Plough in late 2009, Schering-Plough?s general counsel, Thomas Sabatino, lost his job but gained a healthy dose of termination benefits. As summarized by Corp. Counsel, June 2010 at 35, ?he would be eligible for just over $12...

The right information to present about data collection and participants in a survey

Posted on June 07, 2010
Ranting about methodological shortcomings of surveys doesn?t help me much. If I pick at this survey because it uses misleading averages, that survey because it hides the number of participants, and another survey because its sample size is very small,...

Survey data on the cases most commonly litigated by US companies

Posted on June 07, 2010
Respondents to a survey a few months back indicated the three types of cases most commonly litigated by the company. The most frequently selected were ?contract disputes? (54%), ?employment discrimination? (41%), and ?personal injury? (26%). In addition, ?complex commercial,? ?product...

Three European providers of software for legal departments

Posted on June 07, 2010
My friend Roy Russell, a principal of Ascertus,a leading legal-technology consultant based in the UK, passed on to me some details about a matter management system and two corporate secretarial packages. I am not personally familiar with the software on...

Sloppy time entries by law firm lawyers vitiate insights from in-house review or analytical software

Posted on June 04, 2010
?To this day, we are surprised at how many lawyers delegate the coding of their time entirely to their administrative assistants without any attempt to ensure that the resulting output is accurate or useful.? These are the plaintive words of...

US corporations and the percentage of their cases in which they are plaintiff, defendant, or non-party (plus state or federal venue)

Posted on June 04, 2010
Data comes recently from a survey that had 367 general counsel who responded and whose company had averaged at least one lawsuit per year for five years. ?On average, respondent companies were plaintiffs in 18 percent of their cases, defendants...

Caution against finger-pointing if (when) some cost-reduction decision boomerangs

Posted on June 03, 2010
Behind selection of the key partner to handle a matter, the most effective way to moderate costs is for thoughtful in-house lawyers to shape, narrow and target the legal services provided by the partner. ?Take only those five depositions.? ?Don?t...

To improve hourly billing, raise rates for the truly experienced, lower them for other timekeepers

Posted on June 03, 2010
My friend Bob Haig, the indefatigable editor of West?s Successful Partnering between Inside and Outside Counsel, kindly sent me the updated chapter 14 on billing. Written by Brackett Denniston and Alex Dimitrief of General Electric, it summarizes nicely the current...

The ?standard hourly rate? is ephemeral ? same timekeeper often bills different rates to different clients

Posted on June 03, 2010
Preliminary findings from the 2010 Real Rate Report to be issued by CT TyMetrix in September disabuse us further of the notion that law firms maintain standard billing rates for individual timekeepers. A handout at the SuperConference about the Report...

Data on general counsel who participate in multiple benchmark studies

Posted on June 02, 2010
Many general counsel appreciate benchmark efforts. More than 300 have done so in the recently released General Counsel Metrics, LLC Global Benchmark Survey. But, what about total participation rates? Of the three other benchmark surveys that are available for purchase,...

An aggregation of new international cases in 2008 before 14 arbitral institutions

Posted on June 02, 2010
A table in the FTI Journal, Spring 2010 at 39, counts new filings of international arbitrations per year going back to 2000. It covers 14 arbitral institutions. In 2008, the top four by number of new filings were AAA-ICDR (US,...

Hourly rates of US partners in 2008, surprisingly low

Posted on June 02, 2010
CT TyMetrix recently announced its 2010 Real Rate Report which will issue in September. Meanwhile, a handout at the SuperConference provided data on the 2009 median, weighted, partner hourly rate in the United States. Based on more than $4 billion...

Mindsets that ought to undergird effective alternative fee arrangements

Posted on June 02, 2010
A cluster of ways of thinking needs to mesh for a law department to have confidence that a law firm will perform well under an alternative fee arrangement. Six come to mind Data mining ? to set the matter or...

Seven steps in the Puma law department?s multi-pronged program against counterfeiting

Posted on June 01, 2010
This blog has offered some posts on IP counterfeiting, but not much on what a law department can to do about it (See my post of March 16, 2010: counterfeit and piracy of goods with 6 references.). Therefore, when InsideCounsel,...

Why don?t law firms test their invoices against their client?s e-billing rules before submitting them?

Posted on June 01, 2010
A comment in InsideCounsel, June 2010 at 57, triggered several thoughts. ?The next real advance would be for firms to be able to test their bill against their client?s guidelines before submission and avoid the whole back and forth.? A...

Replacement of a matter management system can rank up there with a root canal

Posted on June 01, 2010
A comment by a consultant in InsideCounsel, June 2010 at 56, brought home a truth about matter management and e-billing systems: ?The cost to change systems is extraordinary.? The cost to license a new system represents only a part of...

Three providers of contract management software at SuperConference

Posted on June 01, 2010
I was glad to have an opportunity at the SuperConference to collect information from three providers of software: Contract Express, Emptoris, and Selectica. At a high level I came to appreciate better that contract management should mean much more than...

Objet trouve benchmarks from a factoid about Unilever?s patent function

Posted on June 01, 2010
The chief patent counsel at Unilever, Matthew Goodwin, directs ?one hundred people in seven offices worldwide,? according to InsideCounsel,June 2010 at 44. That is all the piece says about metrics but with a few minutes research what can we build...

Six boundary conditions for alternative fee arrangements (AFAs)

Posted on June 01, 2010
At the recent SuperConference, several panels talked about alternatives to hourly billing. I strongly favor them, but there are some limitations on their applicability. Think of them as boundary conditions, and consider these half dozen. ? Small law departments with...

The second biggest risk CFOs of firms worry about? Exceeding the investment on fixed-fee services

Posted on May 31, 2010
A survey by Sweet & Maxwell of finance directors at the top-100 UK law firms asked about financial threats the directors foresee. The most pressing was downward pressure on fees, but the second one deserves discussion. ?The second greatest threat...

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