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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

Reconciling odd results of a survey on ?work-life balance? and ?workload?

Posted on May 06, 2010
Survey data from 348 in-house lawyers on two subjective states of mind, ?work-life balance? and ?workload,? left me with some questions. As released in InsideCounsel, March 2010 at 50, the lawyers gave these responses when asked ?How satisfied are you...

What nine advantages do in-house lawyers see in their jobs, and four remarks?

Posted on May 03, 2010
Based on the responses of 348 in-house counsel (one-third of which are general counsel and 51 percent come from public companies), InsideCounsel, March 2010 at 47, discloses nine advantages of working as in-house counsel, plus rankings. ?Work-life balance? led with...

Involvement of vendor in preparation of ROI document

Posted on May 03, 2010
Vendors produce sparkling accounts of how their software or service reaps huge benefits, quickly. They have wonderful ROI calculations, in other words, not to mention persuasive charts and figures. But, take it all with a shaker of salt. Even so,...

Overarching management theories applicable to legal departments

Posted on May 03, 2010
Theoretically, theories can explain many aspects of legal department functions (See my post of Dec. 7, 2008 #2: theories referred to on this blog.). Theories abound for all kinds of perspectives, so I thought I would highlight at least nine...

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A drawback of allocating points instead of ranking

Posted on May 03, 2010
I have advocated allocating points as an evaluation method that serves better than a simple ranking of 1, 2, 3 (See my post of Aug. 14, 2005: better to ask respondents to allocate points; July 4, 2006: sophisticated technique; July...

I doubt general counsel really care about a key firm?s ?legal capacity insurance?

Posted on May 03, 2010
Four law professors believe that ?Legal capacity insurance? comes to the fore as one of the benefits to a legal department of fashioning a long-term relationship with a law firm. This notion comes from an unpublished article (at 12), by...

Not MFN but BUCK ? Best Under Conditions Known

Posted on April 30, 2010
Having heard about licensing terms that need to be FRAN (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory), I thought of Most Favored Nation terms. Law departments so routinely insist on MFN terms from their primary firms that the privilege has been diluted to...

May I brag a bit? Five fan quotes about LawDepartmentManagementBlog.com

Posted on April 30, 2010
Immodesty will get a blogger/consultant nowhere, so here are five praises that would make my mother proud, my children dubious, and my wife ironic. ?Rees Morrison was not presenting at the conference but attending. And as the guru of law...

A statistical test, a two-group mean-comparison, can show whether differences are meaningful between benchmarks

Posted on April 30, 2010
With the data from the ongoing survey of General Counsel Metrics, it will be possible to tell whether departments in the UK, for example, differ in their fundamental metrics from departments in France. Certainly the metrics will differ, such as...

Ten principles of knowledge management, by Thomas Davenport

Posted on April 30, 2010
According to a summary in a presentation I saw, researcher, author and thought leader Thomas Davenport maintains that knowledge management (KM): 1. Is expensive if done well, although I believe there are low-cost initiatives like search software that can make...

Three methodological and statistical points about benchmark data

Posted on April 30, 2010
The coefficient of variation is the ratio of the standard deviation of a set of numbers to the average value of the numbers. The lower the coefficient the tighter the data set. For example, using more than 350 law departments...

Data from Russian legal departments about discounts increasing as matters become more routine

Posted on April 29, 2010
LexisNexis Martindale-Hubble, in conjunction with the Forbes Institute, recently published a benchmarking report based on data from legal departments in Russia. One of the findings shows that legal departments obtain higher discounts for more routine work...

The higher the revenue per employee, the higher the number of inside lawyers per employee?

Posted on April 29, 2010
My hypothesis runs like this: as companies generate more revenue for each employee, they are likely to be in higher margin industries, less labor intensive, more intellectual property intensive. As such, per employee they probably have more lawyers in-house...

Hard and disciplined work over an extended period makes much more of a difference than ?innate? talent

Posted on April 29, 2010
This is the thesis of Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else (Penguin Group 2008). I am convinced by Colvin and we should all feel both liberated and empowered. Liberated because expertise and skill...

?Information technology ? is a misnomer? or seriously under-inclusive

Posted on April 29, 2010
?The biggest impact of technology is not on information management, it?s on people management, it?s on relationship management, it?s on process management, it?s on systems management? (emphasis in original). The speaker is Michael Schrage, of the MIT Center for Digital...

Economists would not believe a gap persists between fees paid law firms and value delivered

Posted on April 29, 2010
Classical economics holds that if law firms charge more than what in-house lawyers are willing to pay, those fees will decline. If demand is less than supply, prices fall. Absent a monopoly, and no law firm in the United States...

Spun off thoughts based on the large litigation group at Ford Motor

Posted on April 28, 2010
Corp. Counsel, March 2010 at 77-79, makes several points about the litigation group at Ford Motor. (1) The group employs the most lawyers in the department. That should sadden everyone except those in the litigation group, because no company sees...

Puzzled over discounts that differ depending on the projected value of the legal services

Posted on April 28, 2010
Summarizing discussion points at a conference of the Iberian Lawyer?s In-House Club, the author wrote that general counsel ?had been requesting a reduction in law firm rates for lower value work ? but had not yet looked for deep discounts...

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

Posted on April 28, 2010
A web portal by Dell wins an award for innovation. The March 2010 issue of Law Tech. News explains that Dell?s patent team ?created an external hosted web portal that not only provides Dell?s internal patent team with a system...

Five ways to safely learn about and mitigate serious blowups

Posted on April 28, 2010
An article about stability and change in an organization, and specifically about how those two concepts are a duality not a dualism, explains how ?mindfulness? is one of three ways variability enables stability. Writing in the Acad. Mgt. Rev., April....

Employee engagement is situational; drivers vary across and even within industries

Posted on April 28, 2010
When employers across different companies use comparable surveys of employee engagement, you would think that some drivers of engagement would surface as more common and compelling. Not true. According to talent mgt., March 2010 at 42, ?the drivers of employee...

How management practices vary as they diffuse from law department to law department

Posted on April 28, 2010
Hundreds of management practices thrive in the ecosystem that is legal departments. Some of them stay local, others take root everywhere. Academics refer to the spread of a management practice as ?diffusion.? A thoughtful article in the Acad. Mgt. Rev...

One activity ? litigation lessons learned ? and the breadth of management values it calls into play

Posted on April 27, 2010
A large law department I know handles many lawsuits. Its lawyers who manage those suits prepare closing reports that state lessons learned. They aggregate the lessons periodically and study them for trends and conclusions, which goes beyond a one-shot post...

Information equals how much you learn from unexpected events

Posted on April 27, 2010
Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, calculated ?that the information content of any event was proportional to the logarithm of its inverse probability of occurrence.? On the off chance that quote leaves you with any doubt, the Economist, April...

A formula to show how similar one legal department is to another on the four key dimensions

Posted on April 26, 2010
Theoretically we can describe every legal department with a single index figure. The figure captures for each department its four fundamentals of metrical benchmarks: number of legal staff, amount of legal spend, size of corporate revenue, and category of industry...

Webinar on Connected regarding first release of benchmark findings

Posted on April 26, 2010
On May 6th, Martindale-Hubble?s Connected will host a webinar on law department management metrics. The first findings from the largest-ever benchmarking, prepared by General Counsel Metrics, LLC, will be released and discussed that day. All you need to do to...

Compensation in legal departments, if true to usual norms, is not distributed by productivity of the lawyers

Posted on April 26, 2010
?Any three workers in a group performing similar tasks earn substantially more than any other two.? This quote from the NY Times, April 25, 2010 at BU4, befuddled me. The author, a respected economist at Cornell, explains that while economic...

A huge internal team that reviews invoices submitted to CNA

Posted on April 26, 2010
Thomas Dunlop, AVP Legal Services Operations, CNA Insurance, oversees CNA?s panel firms, litigation guideline and expense management, Legal Services operations, and legal vendor management and contracting. To the point of this post, according to Corp...

Fee quotes that are much lower than comparables are double-edged

Posted on April 26, 2010
?A quote given by a law firm that is well below the market expectation does not instill confidence either in the quality that may be ultimately offered, or the firm?s ability to foresee the potential issues that may arise.? A...

Get your tesseract together and visualize the four most important benchmark metrics

Posted on April 23, 2010
Tesseracts are four-dimensional cubes with sixteen corners and thirty-two edges (compared to a cube?s eight and twelve). Topologists and geometric mathematicians work with and describe tesseracts by using four coordinates for each point. By comparison, the standard X-Y graph uses...

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