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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

A five-way struggle to entice the general counsel and senior lawyers of major US companies

Posted on March 01, 2010
Five organizations will vie in 2010 to win the favors of general counsel who lead legal teams at large US companies. The competition will be fascinating to watch and whatever the outcome will likely benefit all managers of legal departments....

Recruit lawyers through an ad in a major trade publication? (Microsoft does)

Posted on March 01, 2010
Oodles of lawyers desperately want jobs, it?s a buyers? market for any legal department that has an opening, and unsolicited resumes and beseeching inquiries flood in to general counsel ? or so I thought. Why bother to throw out a...

Benchmark data from insurance companies and the effects of two accounting systems

Posted on March 01, 2010
As part of my global benchmarking initiative, I learned from a participant that the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) requires insurance companies to use something called ?statutory accounting,? while GAAP accounting is the most common among non-insurance companies...

Intriguing idea based on Sabine Chalmers?: post-mortem competitions by law firms

Posted on February 25, 2010
On a panel summarized in the ACC Docket, Jan./Feb. 2010 at 91, the always thoughtful Sabine Chalmers, chief legal officer of Anheuser-InBev, spoke admiringly of a ?law firm that came to her with an analysis of a previous deal, explaining...

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Smaller departments, pooling their legal spend, might obtain better terms from a firm

Posted on February 25, 2010
Martine Turcotte, Chief Legal & Regulatory Officer of BCE, Inc., lobbed out a provocative idea at a recent panel. In the words of the ACC Docket, Jan./Feb. 2010 at 91, she ?mentioned an interest in exploring the pooling of resources...

45 percent of Microsoft?s legal fees to be on an alternative fee basis, re general counsel

Posted on February 25, 2010
Brad Smith, Microsoft?s general counsel, made some comments on a panel reported in the ACC Docket, Jan./Feb. 2010 at 89-90. He said his budget had been reduced by 10 percent. Given some figures previously published, he may have taken a...

Might your legal department benefit from a ?pulse? survey?

Posted on February 25, 2010
In an article from HR Mag., Feb. 2010 at 52, on employee engagement, the author mentions that Zappos.com sends around detailed surveys twice a year. The company also relies on ?monthly, five question pulse surveys that ask employees to respond...

To determine the financial stability of a law firm, how far should legal departments inquire?

Posted on February 25, 2010
When coalescing its group of outside counsel into a smaller number of primary firms or selecting a firm for a multi-year commitment, a law department rightfully wants to select firms that are financially solid, that will prosper during the term...

Differences between the terms ?contract lawyer? and ?temporary lawyer?

Posted on February 25, 2010
HR Mag., Feb. 2010 at 31, provides definitions of the two kinds of workers: Contract workers are ?workers employed by a company that provides them or their services to others under contract. They are usually assigned to only one customer...

Five blogs honored in April 2009 for their focus on legal outsourcing and offshoring

Posted on February 23, 2010
My friend Tariq Akbar, CEO of LegalEase Solutions, sent me a link to 100 Best Outsourcing and Offshoring Blogs & Resources compiled by oDeskBlog. I have inserted below the portion for the five blogs under the category Legal Process Outsourcing:...

Benchmarks tend to have incomplete revenue data from privately held companies

Posted on February 23, 2010
Privately held companies often keep to themselves the amount of their annual revenue. Unfortunately, if their legal department?s management has an interest in benchmarking but won?t disclose corporate revenue, many key metrics are eviscerated. Notably, lawyers per billion of revenue...

Institutional isomorphism and legal department practices and benchmarks

Posted on February 23, 2010
Academic theorists have named ?the tendency of organizations in a particular sector to converge on a common way of working and set of beliefs that justify that way of working.? Institutional isomorphism is the off-putting label, but the term and...

Secondary thoughts about ?primary law firms?

Posted on February 23, 2010
Shot through and through this blog?s 5,000 posts are references to ?primary law firms.? One post tried to define the slippery term and gathered nine earlier references (See my post of March 23, 2009: definition of key, principal, primary, or...

Another instance of a firm creating value for clients and licensing it (DLA Piper and UAE laws)

Posted on February 23, 2010
DLA Piper has created a repository of laws from the United Arab Emirates, the confederation of seven states that are part of the Gulf States. The UAE includes seven statelets, the best known being Dubai and Abu Dhabi. As described...

The five principles to increase employee engagement, and how well they apply to in-house attorneys

Posted on February 23, 2010
If it?s in the HBR, it must be true. So here are the five from the Harv. Bus. Rev., March 2010 at 24: ?Keep people informed, listen, set clear objectives, match the person with the job, and create meaningful work.?...

Three innovations from non-US firms about billing and fees

Posted on February 22, 2010
You might want to think about these steps taken by two UK firms and an Italian firm, as reprted in the Financial Times, Innovative Lawyers 2009 at 37. Linklaters has created a ?global pricing function.? For the huge UK firm,...

Spread of managerial effectiveness as law departments become bigger because of more threats and opportunities

Posted on February 22, 2010
The more lawyers in a legal department, the more choices its general counsel and managing attorneys can make. With 100 lawyers the number of initiatives, decisions, permutations of structure and process, and investments are uncountable. Because of that profusion, some...

Part XLIV of a collection of embedded metaposts

Posted on February 22, 2010
Ten more embedded metaposts (See my post of Dec. 16, 2009: Part XLIII), conjointly with the number of their back references. 1. Affinity groups (See my post of Feb. 4, 2010: groups for legal department specialists, not substantive, with 3...

Five years; five thousand posts; five hundred thousand page views ? High Fives!!

Posted on February 20, 2010
A half decade ago today I published my first post. This is post number 5,241. Between those milestones, thousands of readers of LawDepartmentManagementBlog have viewed 464,555 pages. Nearly 800 of you have honored this blog by adding it to your...

Reliability of benchmark findings ? how representative are the participants?

Posted on February 19, 2010
Do benchmark surveys get a normal and fair distribution of participants? All surveys contend with the methodological problem of self-selection. A portion ? usually small ? of the people invited to take a survey respond, many decline. The small percentage...

Determinants of UK legal function structure: area of law, business unit, or geography

Posted on February 19, 2010
In US legal departments, a good proportion of lawyers dedicate their support to one or more business units. By contrast, among a group of UK legal departments that took part in a recent survey, ?around 29% of respondents say their...

15 percent more productivity from wide-screen flat-panel LCD monitors (at least in discovery)

Posted on February 19, 2010
An article about King & Spalding?s 150-person Discovery Center describes the history and attributes of that Center. They use project attorneys and staff attorneys for document review. But what stood out for me was a sentence about the productivity returns...

Law departments should favor firms that have automated drafting for complex transactions

Posted on February 19, 2010
A good example of converting formerly bespoke and expensive drafting into a document assembly-type process appears in Met. Corp. Counsel, Feb. 2010 at 7. General counsel should take note of this general approach. Latham & Watkins has developed a program...

A joint development effort by a legal department and a firm to manage corporate-entity compliance

Posted on February 19, 2010
At Legal Tech New York, a partner from Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe described a global corporate secretarial service the firm developed in tandem with Cisco?s legal department. To comply with a raft of national requirements for the hundreds of companies...

Double litigation budgets at DuPont Legal: one for company financials, one for departmental strategy

Posted on February 19, 2010
DuPont Legal?s operational budget is what it submits as one of the company?s functional units. Based on it, the legal team distributes its in-house costs as well as its outside counsel costs, spend on patents and trademarks, and regional costs....

Approximately how many lawyers practice in-house, in an organization other than a law firm? Some data

Posted on February 19, 2010
If you have an estimate for the number of corporate counsel in any country other than North American or Europe, please email me. I am trying to figure out a plausible ratio of in-house lawyers to lawyers in private practice...

Approximately how many lawyers in your country practice in-house, in an organization other than a law firm?

Posted on February 18, 2010
If you have an estimate for the number of corporate counsel in any country other than the United States or Europe, please email me rees@reesmorrison.com. I am trying to figure out a plausible ratio of in-house lawyers to lawyers in...

Cost per hour of inside counsel interacts with lawyers as a percentage of all legal staff

Posted on February 17, 2010
For a given internal budget, law departments vary significantly in their calculated cost per lawyer hour depending on the number of lawyers they have. If 1,800 chargeable hours per attorney is assumed, then an internal budget of $4,500,000 means $312...

Empirical data plus two key assumptions imply 40,000 legal departments in Europe

Posted on February 17, 2010
Data from 2004 compiled by the Council of European Lawyers showed slightly more than 620,000 lawyers in the 17 countries covered. Taking that number as current, assume five percent of them practice as employees of corporate entities (conservative, since UK...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #132 ? posts longa, morsels breva

Posted on February 16, 2010
The ?world rank? of this blog, Phi Beta Blogga, and other memorabilia. According to SiteLogr.com, on February 11th, the ?world rank? was 1,256,081. Now that the applause has died down, it can also be revealed that this site placed an...

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