In-House Counsel

Each of these terms deserves lengthy treatment for the reason that they are crucial to the effective management of work in a law department. I think I ran across this list in material from the General Counsel Roundtable, but the exact provenance is now lost. Here I loosely define the terms and include a few posts that have addressed some of them.

Role clarity ? who is responsible for what work and the practical delineation of those roles has so many manifestations on this blog that it defies collection.

Division of labor ? each person should do what they are best at (See my post of April 27, 2006: economic notion of comparative advantage applied to lawyers.).

Core competencies ? capabilities of the legal department that are most valuable to the corporation (See my post of May 23, 2008: core competence with 12 references.).

Delegation ? the assignment of work to the least expensive, capable person (See my post of Aug. 28, 2008: delegation in a law department with 14 references.).

Resources ? the tools and facilities that enable members of the legal department to perform most effectively (See my post of July 20, 2008: people should not be called ?resources?.).

Processes ? understood and often codified ways of accomplishing something (See my post of July 31, 2009: several references and five metaposts on processes.).