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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

You manage people better through improving their understanding than directing their behavior

Posted on May 20, 2010
A recent book about neuroscience and management makes the point that the common practice in business is to focus on managing the behavior of workers. Not good. To focus on the values and understanding of workers, says the author, is...

Why insist on alternative fees when you could pay and explain the value you perceived you got?

Posted on May 20, 2010
A gutsy law department could say, for new matters familiar to it and a trusted law firm, ?We will pay you what we think each month?s work was worth AND we will explicitly state why we gave it that value.?...

A proposal for how in-house lawyers can help to assess and mitigate compliance and ethics risks

Posted on May 20, 2010
Jeff Kaplan published a piece on May 9th about the interplay between lawyers in law departments and a company?s compliance efforts. His idea is worth pondering. ?Much has been written on the need for C&E functions to be independent of...

An article on four methodological challenges for legal department benchmarks

Posted on May 20, 2010
Modestly I consider myself an expert on law department benchmarking and benchmark metrics. With that experience, moreover, comes an acute appreciation for methodological morasses, those difficulties that cause data to be less precise or accurate than we wish...

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Internal promotions to general counsel: ?veterans? compared to ?auditions?

Posted on May 20, 2010
When we consider data on those lawyers promoted to head the legal team ? chief legal officer, head of legal, general counsel, call it what you will ? a facile distinction divides them into internal promotions and external hires. But...

Bar passage rate in Korea at less than 5% must restrict number of in-house lawyers and warp benchmarks

Posted on May 18, 2010
According to Researching Law, Spring 2010 at 9, ?Until very recently, the bar passage rate in South Korea has been extremely low ? even less than 5% -- so that studying law in South Korea in preparation for a legal...

IP department observations from Sweden

Posted on May 18, 2010
A recent interview of Hanns Hallesius, Electrolux?s head of IP, brought to the fore several observations. Hallesius said ?We?ve already moved away from a focus on ownership of tangible property, as a measurement of value, to the use of intangible...

Four embellishments on the top-ranked external cost-saving initiatives from a recent survey

Posted on May 18, 2010
The Second Annual Law Department Operations Survey at 9, lists 16 initiatives that administrators in large US legal departments ranked by effectiveness. At the top, selected by seven out of ten, is ?Use less expensive attorneys (i.e., regional firms)...

General counsel, like CEOs, might succeed more often when promoted from inside

Posted on May 18, 2010
?Four out of five times, boards choose insider candidates when selecting a CEO. Insiders tend to perform better and last longer.? The quote comes from strategy + bus., Summer 2010 at 80. Booz & Company analyzed successions of CEOs at...

Track time by periodic screenshots analyzed with recognition software!

Posted on May 18, 2010
Personal privacy advocates (and all lawyers who work in-house) will abhor this idea. I?m not an advocate either, but the idea has First Amendment rights. According to the Economist, May 15, 2010 at 69, a company that provides remote workers...

Should benchmark studies segregate small law departments?

Posted on May 18, 2010
As particle physicists delve deeper into the atom, they find stranger and stranger properties at very small scales: anti-particles, quarks, uncertainty principles, strong and weak forces, flavors. Loosely analogously, as benchmarkers gather data from law departments of one or two...

Profit margins of a company or industry probably correlate with total legal spending as a percentage of revenue

Posted on May 12, 2010
Research will confirm, I predict, that the larger the profit margin of a company, the more it spends on legal services. Profit margin is net income divided by revenues, or net profits divided by sales: how much out of every...

The IP maturity ladder and what it suggests about IP staffing and spending

Posted on May 12, 2010
Someone has proposed a taxonomy to describe corporate intellectual property departments. It has five stages, ?with ?defensive? at the bottom rung and ?visionary? at the top, and ?cost control?, ?profit center? and ?integrated? marking the steps up in between...

One law department?s five ?pillars? includes legal department management!

Posted on May 12, 2010
Praise this quote from a general counsel: ?We have defined our areas of focus in-house in terms of five ?pillars,? including transactions support, dispute resolution, compliance, vendor support, people and talent, and legal department management.? The quote can be found...

Two more clues as to how many legal departments there might be in a country: traded companies and corporate tax returns

Posted on May 12, 2010
I?ve been on a kick to figure out the number of law departments in this country. One method might be to count the number of companies in the United States that have publicly traded securities. Not all of them have...

Modest goals characterize most in-house lawyers and departments

Posted on May 12, 2010
Not every in-house lawyers pines to be a general counsel; many don?t want the pressure and demands (See my post of Sept. 10, 2005: OK to have some B-players who have hit a plateau; May 18, 2007: stress and pressure...

Six outside law firms per inside lawyer ? a data point from Cox Communications

Posted on May 12, 2010
An article about the law department at Cox Communications offers several benchmark tidbits. With 23,000 employees and 17 lawyers, it has one lawyer for every 1,353 employees (See my post of April 18, 2009: lawyers per 1,000 employees with 6...

Expand productive time by reducing supervision of unchanged tasks

Posted on May 12, 2010
An article in the Harvard Bus. Rev., May 2010 at 77, discusses practical steps to reduce overhead. Under the first category of incremental savings, what the authors call reductions of 10 percent, is to ?reduce spending on department management.? The....

If there were a law department maturity ladder ? don?t try to climb it

Posted on May 12, 2010
A previous post laid out five stages of development for intellectual property departments (See my post of May 11, 2010: IP maturity ladder.). What I didn?t write was that the metaphor of rungs of development did not ring true, so...

Social network analysis could reinforce and quantify a depiction of a legal department?s value

Posted on May 11, 2010
Some social network analysts study the frequency and strength of connections between people. For example, an article in the Harvard Mag., May-June 2010 at 46, shows networks for Harvard inventors who applied for patents between 2003 and 2008. The size,...

Correlations of general counsel attributes to key benchmark metrics

Posted on May 11, 2010
Assume you have total legal spending as a percentage of revenue for hundreds of legal departments. Assume further that you gather demographic and career data about the general counsel of those departments. Directories such as the Aspen Directory of Corporate...

In today?s conditions, general counsel might find they have additional responsibilities

Posted on May 11, 2010
Jerry Okarma is the vice president, secretary and general counsel of Johnson Controls. He is a member of the company?s executive operating team, and oversees all legal and compliance activities of the company. In addition, and to the point of...

Value from a law firm: defined ex post but not ex ante

Posted on May 10, 2010
It is fruitless to define value of legal services in advance (ex ante) because all we can do beforehand is trot out platitudes such as knowledgeable, responsive, creative, inexpensive, practical. Such unarguable, bland and Boy-Scout-motto desiderata help as much as...

Law departments per billion dollars of Gross Domestic Product: 0.5-0.8 in developed countries

Posted on May 10, 2010
We might be able to deduce the approximate number of legal departments in a country based on its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Follow my reasoning from four examples. Portugal?s organization for in-house lawyers has 1,200 members. If the typical law....

Once your department has dieted, it?s important to keep the weight off

Posted on May 10, 2010
An interview of Jerry Okarma, General Counsel of Johnson Controls, quotes him on recent efforts to reduce costs ?including making absolutely sure that the investment in legal support needs to be made, and made now. Costs and expenses that can...

Benchmarks based on legal departments in a country have confounding data from branch offices of foreign law departments

Posted on May 10, 2010
To a fair degree, a sizeable benchmarking study can isolate law departments that have all or nearly all their lawyers in one country. Once you recognize, however, that foreign companies may also have groups of lawyers in that country it...

Discounts and volume discounts still permit invoice write-offs

Posted on May 10, 2010
Even if you have an agreement with a firm as to discounts, or even that its discount level goes up as you pay more, you should still check their invoices. Just because the firm shaves some fees doesn?t mean it...

Martindale-Hubble?s Connected hosts a webinar on global benchmarks for law departments

Posted on May 07, 2010
More than a hundred members of Connected registered for the hour-long webinar on May 6th. Three panelists, including this blogger, explained the benchmark study of General Counsel Metrics, which had 362 participants in the preliminary data presented. The first part...

Thoughts on law departments if there are many fewer publicly traded companies since Sarbanes

Posted on May 06, 2010
Since Sarbanes-Oxley was enacted in 2002, ?costs [of being publicly traded] have proven to be much higher, while the number of companies going public has dropped sharply.? The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2010 at 47, mentions this, which made me think...

Hours worked suggest lower satisfaction with workload than is reported

Posted on May 06, 2010
Having just touched on workloads and work-life balance (See my post of May 6, 2010: balancing two survey results.), let?s ponder a related finding. Again drawing on the massive survey of satisfaction by InsideCounsel, March 2010 at 51, consider that....

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