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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

Beware the shelf life of law firm evaluations publicly available to others; expiration dates?

Posted on February 16, 2010
When organizations collect evaluations of law firms and make them available to legal departments, there should be some mechanism for deleting out-of-date comments. What was true three years ago may well be obsolete today. Partners change firms; associates have high...

For LPOs you might retain, know the difference between certification and evaluation

Posted on February 16, 2010
An excellent article in Legal Tech. News, Feb. 2010 at 22-23, explains two ways that legal departments can assure themselves about the levels of control and security LPO vendors offer. The two ways are ?a certification program, where the outsourcing....

If your law firm serves you globally, consider multiple regional relationship counsel

Posted on February 16, 2010
Kraft Foods has appointed DLA Piper as its preferred outside counsel. According to Corp. Counsel, Feb. 2010 at 57, the ?nonexclusive appointment took effect on January 1, and applies to all international business units.? Interestingly, DLA Piper set up a...

Ten more ways to knit up the raveled sleeve of a spread-out legal department

Posted on February 16, 2010
If your legal team has offices strung out from Albania to Zimbabwe, you probably wish there were more cohesion, collegiality, and collective culture (See my post of Jan. 16, 2009: physically decentralized law departments with 13 references.). To the dozen...

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After three weeks, the largest benchmark study?s median department has nine lawyers and supports $2.3 billion in revenue

Posted on February 15, 2010
The 93 companies processed to date have 2,096 lawyers, 569 paralegals, and 1,292 other legal support staff. Aggregated, their internal spend has reached almost $900 million and the external counsel spend close to $1 billion. With the median company at...

Webcams in legal departments?

Posted on February 15, 2010
Picture this. The lawyers in a legal department have small cameras attached to their monitors. Their clients or primary outside partners also have cameras. Those unblinking eyes let each of them see the other while they talk, if someone chooses...

On the order of $4,300 of revenue needed to hire typical outside counsel for an hour

Posted on February 15, 2010
A quote from the General Counsel Survey 2009 of Belgium-based consultants FrahanBlond� at 37 came from an exasperated general counsel: ?They [law firms] have no idea how many of our products we have to sell to pay a bill of...

Commitment contracts as a way to induce lawyers to monitor budgets, alternative fees, discounts, etc.

Posted on February 15, 2010
The Economist, Jan. 2, 2010 at 55, reviews various points on procrastination. Why we tend to put off doing something often has to do with our magnified sense of the cost of doing a task now as compared to in...

An odd ad by a North American legal group on the promotion of their former head to worldwide Chief Legal Officer

Posted on February 15, 2010
What do you make of this? A half-page ad in Corp. Counsel, Feb. 2010 at 14, of hands clapping caught my eye. Under a quote about success being a journey, not a destination, it says, ?Wishing our friend and colleague,...

Thoughts on rankings by software of the complexity or value of matters handled by the law department

Posted on February 15, 2010
Matter management systems lack the capability to judge the importance of a matter. Fees alone don?t determine a matter?s strategic importance or legal depth. More specifically, the burn rate on a matter may indicate some measure of its legal intensity,...

Blizzards, winter wonderlands and law departments

Posted on February 12, 2010
For those readers who have endured or been affected by the monsterous snowfalls on the East Coast, here is what my house looked like from the igloo next door. Fortunately, neither rain nor 22+ inches of snow keep this blogger...

An in-house group united to reform international arbitration

Posted on February 11, 2010
Cross-border legal disputes can lead to arbitration, but complaints about arbitration?s costs and delays have increased to the point where the inside attorneys at more than 50 multinational corporations have come together to improve the situation. The group, described in...

Do law firms outsource copying to a vendor but receive a financial interest from them?

Posted on February 11, 2010
A short note in an article troubled me: ?firms house what is represented as an independent copying vendor ? without disclosing to the client any financial interest that the firm may have in the vendor.? The article is in Lit....

The quarterly Litigation Management Report, particularly for claims professionals

Posted on February 11, 2010
My friend, John Kelly sent me the last two issues of his Litigation Management Report. Both of them are about a dozen pages and contain three or four articles and other material. My sense of them is that readers involved...

E-billing software that detects ?block billing,? and some head scratching by me

Posted on February 11, 2010
In Peer to Peer, an ILTA publication at 76, an article by Scott Wirtz swirtz@loeb.com mentions that ?Sophisticated audit techniques can now detect a narrative that contains what is referred to as ?block billing.? Block billing is one term to...

Drawbacks of Uniform Task Based Billing Codes for fees as used by legal departments

Posted on February 11, 2010
On the law department side, several punctures let out a lot of UTBMS air in terms of fees. First, you need software to sort through the time entries and place them in their appropriate categories. Not every law department has...

Reliability of basic benchmark data varies ? from pretty solid to loosely squishy

Posted on February 10, 2010
Most legal departments are able to generate basic data on their staff and spend with reasonable accuracy. The solid standbys include number of lawyers, although there some thought needs to be given to full-time equivalents and contract lawyers (See my...

TrialNet, a less-well known matter management system at LegalTech

Posted on February 10, 2010
An exhibitor at LegalTech New York, TrialNet,certainly has impressive literature to describe its software. A person at the booth said that among the company?s users are the legal departments of Georgia Pacific, Pro Assurance, and Health Corporation of America (HCA)...

A collective on reporting and analysis capabilities for legal departments

Posted on February 10, 2010
A post on visual analytics drove me to imagine uses of it in legal departments (See my post of Feb. 10, 2010: a future of software that helps in-house counsel make decisions on data.). More generally, the reports software produces...

Visual analytics (VA) and its potential (or mirage) to help legal department managers make sense of voluminous data

Posted on February 10, 2010
An article about human cognitive limitations mentions that software can help us cope. Unable to make sense of a swamp of output from, say, a matter management systems, managers can enlist visual analytics. ?Defined as the science of analytical reasoning...

General counsel need to state specifics of what to change, not confect confusion

Posted on February 10, 2010
Those who speak and write about legal department management should try to do so without jargon, with words pragmatic and clear. The opposite of that style means nothing definite comes through, that you hear the words but can?t understand their...

How many in-house counsel are in the world?s 500 largest corporations? 102,324 ? well, some other benchmarks

Posted on February 09, 2010
High tens of thousands, that?s all I can really estimate. Let me explain this fragment based on a study by Ernst & Young on headquarters locations of the Global 500. In the ten countries with the most, the US leads...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #131 ? posts longa, morsels breva

Posted on February 09, 2010
Attorney-client privilege may soon apply to in-house lawyers in France. As reported in the European Lawyer, Issue 92, Jan. 2010 at 21, the Rapport Darrois proposes to allow lawyers who go in-house to remain as members of their local bar,...

Different offshore legal sites vary by the languages they support

Posted on February 09, 2010
In America, Britain and Canada, most commentary on legal process outsourcing refers to providers in India, where English is commonly spoken and the common law prevails. But for in-house counsel whose primary work language is French or Spanish, other countries...

A definition of the elements of ?process? in Legal Process Offshoring (LPO)

Posted on February 09, 2010
Legal-related work that offshore locations can handle are often thought of as routine but necessary services, support activities, commodity tasks, work carried out over and over ? in a word, processes. But what is a process? A three-part definition by...

In Germany, 20% discounts but a clawback bonus expected for successful projects

Posted on February 09, 2010
The chief corporate lawyer at Deutsche Lufthansa, Nicolai von Ruckteschell, went on record about law firms that serve his company and venture into alternative fees. According to him in the European Lawyer, Issue 91, Nov./Dec. 2009 at 35, "We have...

Five management comments about the law department of Clorox

Posted on February 09, 2010
Laura Stein, the general counsel of Clorox, describes her role and department in Practical Law, Feb. 2010 at 96. From that profile we can make several comments. Benchmarks. The $5.3 billion company employs 30 lawyers, which means slightly fewer than....

Benchmark denominators that pertain to specific industries

Posted on February 08, 2010
Most industries have markers of success, such as movies released by studios, Nielsen ratings for broadcast companies, square feet of warehouses for distribution companies, or ton-miles for truckers. The benchmarks by which general counsel in those industries might compare themselves...

IT functions supporting law departments and law firms share some of the same annoyances

Posted on February 08, 2010
Two points struck me from findings in ILTA?s 2009 Technology Survey, at 42 of law firms: one about the shared challenges of providing technology to lawyers ? inside or outside ? and the other about overhead support for IT that...

Do law departments realize that many firms don?t routinely charge back common expenses?

Posted on February 08, 2010
Gale force winds blow the message that legal departments should tourniquet various expenses charged by profligate law firms. A recent breeze from the opposite quarter, however, tells us that many firms do not frequently or routinely charge to clients expenses...

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