In-House Counsel

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #86 ? additions to earlier posts

By Rees Morrison

Hear a document to help you proofread it. Text Speaker, software from New York?s Deskshare, states on its website a feature some in-house counsel might like: ?Have the computer "read aloud" any text document. When you're proofreading, hearing the words aloud makes it easy to catch common typing errors.? Nevr thot of thaat.

Matching gift donations ? not included in fully-loaded costs of lawyers. In the midst of the gift-giving season, I realized that corporation matches of charitable contributions by in-house lawyers are not reflected in law department budgets. (Actually, the amounts might be buried in some overall administrative charge to the department.) The amounts are small, admittedly, in relation to the internal budget of a legal department, but my point is confirmed: what it costs a company to maintain an employee lawyer is understated (See my post of Aug. 27, 2008: fully-loaded cost per lawyer hour with 31 references.).

Total respondents to a survey does not mean respondents to a particular question. It is not enough to know how many people responded to a survey. For a particular question in the survey, you want to know how many of the respondents completed it (often shown as the ?n,? such as ?n=34?). I have pored over a survey that had about 50 respondents, but noticed that on several questions, only half of them or so completed it (See my post of March 2, 2008: surveys of law departments with 72 references.).

Go green, shorten your email disclaimer. Think of the gazillions of times this over-lawyered gobbledy-gook engorges the bottom of each email and each print out. Not just weeping willows weep.

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Full post as published by Law Department Management on December 26, 2008 (boomark / email).