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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

Might a governmental committee mandate that law departments provide benchmark data?

Posted on April 23, 2010
An article about the costs of e-discovery raises an idea regarding mandatory collection of data from law departments and what they spend for litigation and on e-discovery. ?It would do the [Federal Rules Advisory Committee] good to collect data on...

Neuro-linguistic programming pushed as a useful tool for managers of legal departments

Posted on April 23, 2010
Trevor Faure, author of The Smarter Legal Model: more from less (Practical Law 2010) devotes pages 50-66 of his book to the basic principles of neuro-linguistic program (NLP). I have questioned the utility of NLP (See my post of Oct....

$2,500 per lawyer per day: the human scale of total legal department spending

Posted on April 23, 2010
Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, The Numbers Game (Gotham Books 2009) at 18, gave me the idea to translate legal department spend into dollars per lawyer per day. We can all grasp more easily such human-scale metrics. I started with...

Three recommendations for how to handle references by vendors

Posted on April 23, 2010
In the latest issue of Met. Corp. Counsel, April 2010 at 21, two authors from a software vendor make three suggestions for law departments to consider when they check vendor references. The first two apply equally to references from law...

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The practicality of the breakfast meeting with a law firm, rather than the traditional lunch

Posted on April 22, 2010
Let?s break the silence about breaking the fast. Hard as it may be to stomach, somehow, despite all my efforts and 5,350 posts, I skipped breakfast. My gratitude, therefore, extends across the Atlantic to the Iberian Lawyer, Jan./Feb. 2010 at...

Part XLVI of a collection of embedded metaposts

Posted on April 22, 2010
Two more handfuls of embedded metaposts and their back references (See my post of March 11, 2010: Part XLV), plus their back references. 1. Agency theory (See my post of April 21, 2010: agency theory with 7 references and 1...

Law departments and uses of non-legal artificial intelligence

Posted on April 21, 2010
Marc Lauritsen?s new book, The Lawyer?s Guide to Working Smarter with Knowledge Tools (ABA 2010) at 64-65 lists several artificial intelligence topics. Those most applicable to law (not robotics, for example) pushed to me to find out which of them...

Conflicting interests inherent in any supervisory relationship (agency theory)

Posted on April 21, 2010
No manager can control an independent contractor (law firm lawyer, temporary hire, consultant, vendor) as well as an employee. Each external worker has interests that diverge from the manager?s to some degree. Even employees pursue their own interests...

The huge legal team at Barclays, some earlier posts on it, and a cost-saving step with temps

Posted on April 21, 2010
The legal team at Barclays has swollen to 800 lawyers, according to Corp. Counsel, April 2010 at 20, but even as grand as that it feels pinched for resources. When I read that, I rummaged for earlier posts about the...

Benchmark surveys, subsidiaries, and some stable ratios over a nine-year period

Posted on April 21, 2010
The 2002 PricewaterhouseCoopers Law Department Spending Survey, covering data from nine years ago, yields a couple of observations. The report states at page 4 under ?Company Ownership? that 24 of the participants are a subsidiary of a publicly traded company...

Some unusual factors why departments might choose particular law firms for very significant matters

Posted on April 21, 2010
One question on a survey of general counsel asked them to rate 19 factors that might bear on their hiring decision for major matters. Several of the factors struck me as novel, if not bizarre. ?Market share of the firm...

Ask your law firms if your work is profitable for them??? What me worry?

Posted on April 20, 2010
At a recent conference of the Iberian Lawyer?s In-House Club, ?Some in-house lawyers said they meet regularly with their external lawyers to ask if the work is profitable for them, although some other lawyers said this was not appropriate.? I...

Divergent interests of the legal department (company) and outside counsel in statements to the press

Posted on April 20, 2010
Speak to the journalists yourself, general counsel, rather than through the partner at a law firm who represents you. That is the message of an article by Prof. Michele DeStefano Beardslee in the Georgetown J. of Legal Ethics, Fall 2009...

To improve processes, a formula suggests how many people you will need to train (lots!)

Posted on April 20, 2010
?Generally speaking, the number of people an organization needs to train in process improvement is the square root of the number of personnel.? That rule of thumb, from the Harv. Bus. Rev., April 2010 at 56, means that a law...

Match the other party?s contract against industry (or your) standards, and software that may assist

Posted on April 20, 2010
In the battle of the forms, a weapon I had not heard about is new software that says it can show where the other side?s contract differs from yours. Its creator, a company called kiiac, claims to help: ?Where your...

One million dollars per inside lawyer ? a guideline metric based on your total legal budget

Posted on April 19, 2010
Take your total legal spending (your budget for internal compensation and operations plus your expenditures on law firms and other external vendors). Divide that number by your lawyer count at the end of the year. If you are a large...

General counsel and their broadening role in the court of public opinion

Posted on April 19, 2010
A law review article, based on empirical research, makes a good case for the vital role of general counsel when a company?s legal problems come to the unwanted attention of the public. Public relations plays a crucial role when there...

A chart that conveys spend on outside counsel in a fresh and illuminating way

Posted on April 19, 2010
A chart in a consulting report did an excellent job of conveying efficiently quite a bit of information. It had thirteen columns, with no spaces between them, each column being for a different type of spending by the client law...

Document assembly users among major companies, and two new entrants

Posted on April 19, 2010
An article lists 20 ?companies using document assembly tools: Amazon, BBC, Cadence, Catlin Group, Cisco, Credit Suisse, Dow Jones, EADS, Ford, GE, Johnson & Johnson, McAfee, Microsoft, Munich Re, Nissan, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Royal Bank of Scotland, Standard Chartered Bank, Telstra, Wespac...

18 speculations on why there was so much silence during a bidders? conference call with many law firms

Posted on April 19, 2010
Having just conducted a conference call for numerous law firms invited to respond to a lengthy Request for Proposal, I ruminated on why there were only a handful of questions. Some possible reasons came to mind, which I have listed...

The Three Cs that Tom Sager of DuPont looks for in his key law firms

Posted on April 16, 2010
The ubiquitous Tom Sager, general counsel of DuPont, told an Ark conference that he looks for three key attributes in his company?s primary law firms. He looks for ?closeness, closure, and collaboration.? Actually, his first term was ?loyalty,? but I...

Thoughts on how many law firms an individual in-house lawyer can effectively manage

Posted on April 16, 2010
At a conference organized by Ark, an experienced Chief Operating Officer of a major legal department offered some ideas on how many law firms a lawyer can manage. One of his lawyers manages seven firms, ?which I think is too...

Is a European Patent Attorney an attorney for purposes of benchmarking?

Posted on April 16, 2010
My global benchmarking uncovers nuances. Here is one that a thoughtful participant wrote about. ?I wanted to get your thoughts on a specific question of current interest (with respect to benchmarking). For global corporations such as ours, would you consider...

A mysterious risk that justifies absolving your legal department of responsibility for third-party invoices?

Posted on April 16, 2010
Tucked into a list of 70 points on a checklist for outside counsel guidelines, published by the ACC Docket, March 2010 at 48-49, is the cautiously worded number 67: ?Consider prohibiting your legal department?s responsibility for third-party invoices...

Total legal spend as a percentage of revenue, potent and pervasive

Posted on April 16, 2010
It is beyond cavil that over time, total legal spending expressed as a percentage of a company?s revenue (turnover), tells the most about comparative legal department performance (See my post of Nov. 15, 2009: poll results put ratio as most...

Total legal spend declines as companies grow, and seven more possible reasons why

Posted on April 16, 2010
Size matters, and the size of a company as measured by revenue affects its ratio of total legal spending to that revenue. That key ratio, total legal spending (TLS), made up of inside law-department spend plus the department?s external spend...

Everywhere you look, a network or association of law firms ? at least 38!

Posted on April 14, 2010
Almost two years ago, a metapost pulled together what I had written on these pages about networks of law firms (See my post of Feb. 21, 2008 #2: law firm networks with 7 references.). Those posts included 18 networks (aka...

Close the presses on your own newsletter, but roll them on a corporate one

Posted on April 14, 2010
For all but a tiny handful of enormous legal departments, a newsletter leaves a musty, old-fashioned impression. The same material put on an intranet may be somewhat more acceptable, but even then whatever effort the publishing requires may be wasted...

Known total legal spend and the undercount of total external legal spend

Posted on April 14, 2010
Heads of the legal function should control all spending on external counsel. Should, but don?t. Many general counsel oversee only certain expenditures by their company on external counsel. Finance may retain tax advisors; human resources turns to some partners (including...

Data on the HQ country of the first 332 participants in the General Counsel Metrics benchmark study

Posted on April 13, 2010
Less than three months underway, but already one-third of the way to 1,000 law departments, the largest study of benchmark metrics ever assembled has a geographic distribution that is a function of several factors. First, though, let me share the...

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