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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

Surveys that show one-third up, one-third down, and one-third neutral may tell us very little

Posted on April 13, 2010
My fascination with figures doesn?t blind me, I hope, to misuses of metrics. One potential distortion occurs when a survey reports that ?one-third of all respondents think hourly billing is doomed? to support their view that massive change is underway...

Ironic: perturbed over hours billed by outside counsel, but attracted by cost-per-hour inside

Posted on April 13, 2010
General counsel, or at least a number of vocal ones, lambaste hourly-based billing by the firms they retain. ?It?s not the time spent that matters,? they thunder, ?it?s the value of that time!? Heads everywhere nod in agreement, although feet...

IP audits and some data on how frequently in-house lawyers may be involved

Posted on April 13, 2010
One finding from CPA Global?s State of the IP Industry Survey last year concerned how regularly the 93 participant companies assessed the value of their intellectual property (IP) assets. The executive summary says that ?while 20% of companies say they...

Two points on Procurement: they stay away if your costs are under control but they can help on ancillary services

Posted on April 13, 2010
Asked about Procurement?s involvement with his legal department, a speaker at an Ark Conference last week recalled very little interaction or pressure for Procurement to step in. ?They think we have a good handle on legal spend so they leave...

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Average number of IP holdings per company and their similarity, from a recent survey

Posted on April 13, 2010
Ninety-three of the responses to last year?s State of the IP Industry Survey, conducted by CPA Global, were from companies. Of that group, 63 percent were heads of IP or senior managers within the department, while the remainder were general...

If a law firm represents you in several areas of law, it?s harder to evaluate the performance of the firm as a whole

Posted on April 12, 2010
As equities analysts have a harder time evaluating the stock of conglomerates, so law departments may have a harder time evaluating law firms that have provided them a range of legal services. This idea was expressed at an Ark conference...

Managerial overload when you assemble a virtual team of firms and vendors?

Posted on April 12, 2010
It seems plausible to me that when an inside lawyer has to orchestrate several firms and vendors on a project ? create a virtual team ? that lawyer would have bandwidth to manage fewer cases than a counterpart who hires...

Irony: complaints about high rates of partners yet gripes about not getting enough of their time

Posted on April 12, 2010
Yes, hourly billing rates near $1,000 draw the ire of in-house lawyers. But at an Ark conference this week, a general counsel panel made the point that general counsel often wish they could get more time from the very same,...

Email me for my book chapter on outside counsel benchmarks

Posted on April 09, 2010
My publisher has reverted to me copyright on my book, Law Department Benchmarks: Myths, Metrics and Management (Glasser LegalWorks, 2nd ed. 2001). The second edition may be nine years old but it is full of metrics and discussion that are...

Proposition: plurality of matters are handled by no more than one partner and one associate (possibly a paralegal)

Posted on April 09, 2010
Everyone spends most of their time discussing expensive, large-scale matters staffed with platoons of lawyers, with the apotheosis being the ?bet-the-company? lawsuit. Rare events, those, and thank goodness (See my post of Feb. 28, 2006 chastising the over-use of that...

A handful of antidotes for poisonous decision traps

Posted on April 09, 2010
?The field of neuroeconomics was born out of the realization that the physical workings of the brain place limitations on the way we make decisions.? Gregory Berns, iconoclast: a neuroscientist reveals how to think differently (Harvard Bus. Press 2008) at...

Reputation represents expectations based on a law firm?s past behavior; status reflects position in a hierarchy of value

Posted on April 09, 2010
I modified the header from a quote in an article to be published by Mitt Regan, Co-Director of the Center for the Study of the Legal Profession. The article discusses offshoring legal services (at 113) and whether distinguished firms fear...

Welcome to Global Legal blog and Matt Sullivan

Posted on April 08, 2010
I just heard from Matthew Sullivan, the founder and principal at Red Bridge Strategy, Inc., specializes in helping clients evaluate and globalize legal services through Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) and related arrangements. Based in Pune, India, Matt has also hosted...

Ten most interesting posts (IMHO) from February?s 90+, with URLs

Posted on April 08, 2010
Fear of being seen as a ?sales person? inhibits general counsel from portraying the value of their department (Feb. 1, 2010) General counsel need to publicize the work and accomplishments of their team. Pushing past the standby of lawyers per...

Two more reasons why law firms may be slow to innovate

Posted on April 07, 2010
Whatever a clever law firm devises, competitors will soon learn and sooner thereafter adopt. This inability to capture the major rewards may discourage law firms from incurring the cost of developing innovations. This obstacle comes from an article to be...

A claim that law firms have steadily allocated responsibilities lower

Posted on April 07, 2010
Consider this quote from a law review article. ?Furthermore, the allocation of responsibility has shifted over time, as junior partners now do what senior partners used to, senior associates do work formerly done by junior partners, junior associates the tasks...

In-house lawyers admit some resistance to alternative fee arrangements, but blast law firms, perhaps unfairly

Posted on April 06, 2010
A survey of corporate lawyers conducted by Serengetti asked them to scale their own resistance to alternative fee arrangements (AFA) and their perception of law firm resistance to AFAs. On the scale given, a 1 means ?no resistance?; a 3...

Do law firms that represent you collaborate with each other? Two questions that might surface the truth

Posted on April 06, 2010
Very few general counsel try to have their key law firms cooperate with each other. The exceptions that prove the rule, notably DuPont, don?t share their methods to evaluate the degree and usefulness of their firms sharing information and playing...

Proportion of complex legal work in law departments is low and complexity does not equal high value

Posted on April 06, 2010
A law review article to be published by Mitt Regan, Co-Director of the Center for the Study of the Legal Profession, discusses offshoring legal services. At page 111, among several arguments in favor of outsourcing services, the authors write, ?Finally,...

?Hourly billing? posts on this blog, a profusion of 18

Posted on April 06, 2010
The term ?hourly billing? appears in so many posts here that it was hard for me to accept that I have not compiled the posts that pertain particularly to it. Worse, once I dug in to do so, I found...

A brain trust that doesn?t cost a trust fund, to provide litigation services you trust

Posted on April 06, 2010
Squire, Sanders & Dempsey offers it clients, at no charge, ?periodic detailed case reviews by senior litigation leadership.? As presented in the ACC Docket, March 2010 at 10, ?litigation practice leaders and others periodically meet with case team leaders ?...

400+ legal departments so far in global benchmarking study: preliminary data

Posted on April 02, 2010
As of today, more than 430 legal departments have submitted data (you can click on the upper right hand ad to do so at no charge). Of them, 314 have provided complete data, so I thought I would share some...

A brief shining moment, well actually 4.6 years, on average as a chief legal officer

Posted on April 02, 2010
Based on a survey of large US legal departments, the average number of years a general counsel occupied that position was 4.6 years. The median was even shorter, a mere three years. This data comes from a survey during 2007...

Skewness describes oddly-shaped distributions of numbers, such as invoice amounts

Posted on April 02, 2010
We all understand averages, and many of us understand medians, but few of us understand another descriptive statistic for numbers: skewness (See my post of June 30, 2006: skewness; and March 23, 2007: third central moment.). Imagine a bell curve...

Blogger speaks; a videoclip of the host of LawDepartmentManagementBlog!

Posted on April 02, 2010
At the recent conference hosted by Georgetown Law School on the future of law firms, Lisa DiMonte of MyLegal.com, in conjunction with Greg Bufithis?s Posse List, interviewed me about some of lisa.dimonte@mylegal.commy thoughts on the conference. Here?s a link to...

Information asymmetry about the quality of work to come from a law firm is not such a big deal

Posted on March 31, 2010
An unpublished paper by Michele DeStafano Beardslee and three co-authors at the Georgetown Conference on the Future of Law Firms at 4, emphasizes the baleful effects of information asymmetry regarding the quality of service provided by law firms. She takes...

Predominance of privately held companies in two benchmark surveys of general counsel

Posted on March 31, 2010
An unpublished paper submitted by Michele DeStafano Beardslee and three co-authors to the Georgetown Conference on the Future of Law Firms at 3-4 laments benchmark surveys by trade groups and consulting firms. Aside from low response rates and an inability...

Put material that is useful to clients on the intranet site and direct them to it

Posted on March 31, 2010
Tired of clients asking you the same question? Write the question and a response that instructs lay readers, put them both on your legal department or corporate internal website where they are easy to find, and wait for the next...

?Cross selling is the bane of my existence,? quoth the Chandler

Posted on March 31, 2010
Not one to mince words, the general counsel of Cisco, Mark Chandler, dropped that grenade on an audience primarily of law firm partners at the recent Georgetown Law Conference on Law Firm Evolution. He explained that efforts by partners to...

Happy first birthday to Martindale-Hubble?s Connected!

Posted on March 31, 2010
According to an email that arrived today, Connected launched last March with only 3,000 beta members. ?One year later, the professional network for lawyers has grown to nearly 30,000 members ? including members from more than half of the Fortune...

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