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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

Article predicts general counsel will increasingly be chosen from in-house lawyers, not from law firms

Posted on March 03, 2011
?Though the role of general counsel will continue to attract senior partners from law firms, companies will be more reluctant to pull executives straight from private practice, preferring candidates with in-house experience who understand how to manage the people and...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #146: posts longa, morsels breva

Posted on March 03, 2011
A statistical adjustment to improve data. A footnote to a graph in a recent report adds a statistical explanation: ?To account for the unbalanced nature of the response rate over time, a regression with a time trend and company fixed-effects...

Paul Lippe of Legal OnRamp: To save costs ?Make no small plans.?

Posted on March 01, 2011
Paul Lippe, muse and master of Legal OnRamp, wrote a piece about the top ten ways to reduce legal costs. Number ten particularly inspired me to write. ?10) Make no small plans. Most cost-savings approaches in law amount to no...

Welcome to another general counsel who blogs, Melanie Hatton

Posted on March 01, 2011
When I came across In-House Lawyer, I noticed Melanie Hatton?s credentials. She is the top lawyer for the UK company Latitude, an online digital marketing company. She started blogging in mid-2009 and has put up 49 posts since then. In...

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The overlap of law departments that use matter management software and those that learn from benchmarks ? my latest InsideCounsel column

Posted on March 01, 2011
My column last week was the most interesting one I have written, from my standpoint. It links two important sources and uses of metrics by general counsel: matter management databases and survey metrics for benchmarks. I tried to estimate the...

Three glosses on a good post in support of $1,000 an hour partners

Posted on February 24, 2011
Nat Slavin, co-founder of the Wicker Park Group, wrote extensively on his blog about the Wall Street Journal article (Feb. 23rd, page 1) on $1,000 an hour law firm partners. The article evidently disparaged such high priced legal talent, charging...

Lawyers per billion and per thousand employees in large German law departments

Posted on February 23, 2011
The well-done General Counsel Benchmarking Report for 2009 of Otto Henning & Co. at 64 provides data on the number of lawyers (Rechtsanw�lte weltweit) worldwide its benchmark survey participants reported. From the 56 companies in the survey, all from the...

Hyperion Research?s excellent report on matter management and e-billing

Posted on February 23, 2011
Privileged to review a copy of the Aug. 201 MarketView Report of Hyperion Research, ?e-Billing and Matter Management Systems for Corporations,? I will write a few blog posts. This post covers several thoughts. First, the 76-page report offers huge value...

Paralegals and other staff per lawyer in law departments of Fortune 150 German companies

Posted on February 23, 2011
A report based on 2008 data from 56 of the 150 largest German companies produced benchmark averages for paralegals (Rechtsanwaltsgehilfen) and admins (Sekretariatskr�fte und weiter Assistenzkr�fte) per in-house lawyer. Those departments averaged 0.2 paralegals per lawyer, i...

A shocking finding about how to stimulate creativity: noninvasive brain stimulation

Posted on February 23, 2011
Coffee, tea, or electricity? From the Daily Stat by Harvard Business Rev., Feb. 22, 2011: ?Research subjects who received electrical stimulation of the anterior temporal lobes of the brain were 3 times more likely to come up with the fresh...

Nearly thirty percent higher costs per lawyer in decentralized German law departments

Posted on February 22, 2011
One of the many interesting parts of the impressive General Counsel Benchmarking Report for 2009 of the German consultants, Otto Henning & Co., discusses the total cost per in-house counsel (Anwalt) of centralized and decentralized law departments...

Only a small percentage of chip patents end up in infringement enforcement

Posted on February 22, 2011
A paper on patent litigation in the semiconductor industry includes an unusual metric: ?chip design firms enforce roughly 4 out of every 100 patents they own,? a rate described later as comparable for biotechnology firms but somewhat lower than for...

Data from 2008 on the reporting lines of German general counsel

Posted on February 22, 2011
The General Counsel Benchmarking Report for 2009 of the German strategy consultants Otto Henning & Co. comes in a very impressive book, though entirely in German. The participants in the study were 56 departments, all from the Fortune 150 of...

Trying hard to be objective about attacks on the objectivity of inside lawyers

Posted on February 22, 2011
A recent post quoted someone on the view that in-house lawyers have less objectivity than external lawyers (See my post of Jan. 13, 2011: less independence inside.). This ?less-objective? rationale parallels the deplorable reasoning of the European court in the...

Three unusual expenditures that, still, ought to be folded into fully loaded costs

Posted on February 21, 2011
An earlier post referred to defense costs paid on behalf of an in-house counsel (See my post of Jan. 18, 2011: GlaxoSmithkline lawyer?s defense paid for.). What are the odds that legal defense costs on behalf of an employee lawyer...

Measures of variability in data Part 2: standard deviations

Posted on February 21, 2011
Earlier I explained how to calculate and use statistical variance (See my post of Feb. 18, 2011: variance in statistics.). I used as an example patent applications handled by a group of law firms. To solve the problem that variance...

Why not publicly announced cash awards for innovative management practices useful for law departments?

Posted on February 21, 2011
Intriguingly, at various points Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (Yale Univ. 2009), describes various monetary rewards that were posted in England in the 18th century for successful innovations. The incentives succeeded...

Technology?s effects on law department lawyers, exaggerated short term but under-appreciated long term

Posted on February 21, 2011
?The effects of technological innovation are over rated in the short run but underestimated in the long run.? This apercus from Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (Yale Univ. 2009) at 127, who credits Arthure...

Special offer for Fortune 500-size law departments: an analysis of 95 in the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey: some findings

Posted on February 21, 2011
If you are from a Fortune 500-size company (more than $4 billion in revenue) and you complete the current survey through the notice top right on this blog or use this URL, I will send you the full analysis of...

CLO bloggers behind firewalls: general counsel who keep in touch with an internal blog

Posted on February 21, 2011
Having read my post about general counsel and other inside lawyers who host blogs, Doug Hagerman, the progressive General Counsel of Rockwell Automation, took the time to comment. His experience deserves more than a mere thanks and follow-on remark. ?Hi...

A look back six years ago, the founding of Law Department Management Blog

Posted on February 20, 2011
On my first day of this blog, Feb. 20, 2005, I published seven posts. Since then, 6,174 more posts have trailed along over six years, including more than 500 metaposts and nearly 600 comments. The very first post, about groups...

Network theory applied to law departments, my latest article just published

Posted on February 18, 2011
A multidisciplinary body of research studies so-called networks. Numerous books have been written about social network theory and other derivatives. The properties of networks apply to many aspects of law department operation so my latest article weaves in definitions of...

Teleology when general counsel revise history to describe how they smoothly reached their current management pinnacle

Posted on February 18, 2011
Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (Yale Univ. 2009) at 3, points out the pernicious recurrence in historical writing of teleology. When someone describes what a law department did over a period of years to....

Measures of variabBeyond averages and medians, general counsel should understand statistical ways to describe the variability and distribution of data. One uses the statistical term ility in law department data: variance as a statistical descriptive tool

Posted on February 18, 2011
Beyond averages and medians, general counsel should understand statistical ways to describe the variability and distribution of data. One uses the statistical term called variance. Let?s say you use ten law firms to prepare and prosecute patents. You know how...

In-house lawyers and general counsel who host their own blog ? a collection of 11

Posted on February 17, 2011
At the risk of overlooking someone, a scouring of my posts turned up nearly a dozen in-house lawyers, past or current, who host a blog, or in one case the equivalent of one. I welcome hearing about additions to this...

Part LI of a collection of embedded metaposts

Posted on February 17, 2011
At one point I worried I might exhaust candidates for metaposts. Now I realize that the more posts crowd this blog, the more opportunities arise for collections of them (metaposts) as well as second and even third generation metaposts on...

The tenure of the general counsel does not relate to cost control: years in the position shows no association with total legal spending

Posted on February 17, 2011
I thought that the longer a general counsel has served a company, the lower total legal spending would drop as a percentage of revenue. A veteran general counsel would know the company better, understand its key personnel, be close to...

My February Rees?s Pieces just went to 350+ subscribers ? you?re welcome to get a copy and subscribe at no cost

Posted on February 17, 2011
My approach for the newsletter is to start with what RSS readers of my blog chose most frequently to view. Feedburner identified the ten posts published during January that had the most views and clicks. My newsletter reprints those top...

Decentralized law departments, not knowing full staff and spending figures, may slightly lower published benchmarks as compared to actuals

Posted on February 16, 2011
Consulting to a law department that does not know how much business units spend on outside counsel or how many lawyers practice law inside the company ? both afflictions due to the decentralized operating style of the company, I realized...

Consider joining my LinkedIn group, Law Department Management, and its 510 members

Posted on February 16, 2011
Steadily my LinkedIn group has attracted members from all around the world. The pace of comments has picked up and the group has reached critical mass in terms of vitality and continued growth. As these things go on the Internet,...

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