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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

When managing law departments, how many practices exist? Thousands!

Posted on August 17, 2009
How do we define a practice? I believe there are hundreds of solid practices that many, even most, law departments should recognize and contemplate for their own department (See my post of April 2, 2005: survivor bias and best practices;...

Performance mapping and key competencies

Posted on August 17, 2009
In the words of Talent mgt., July 2009 at 26, "There are four steps to the performance mapping process. First, develop performance maps. Second, execute real-time evaluation with star performers. Third, document skills tables for key competencies. And finally, talent...

Part XXXVII of a collection of embedded metaposts

Posted on August 14, 2009
Ten more embedded metaposts (See my post of July 26, 2009: Part XXXVI), each coupled with the number of its back references. 1. Bad behavior by managers II (See my post of March 31, 2009: nine more posts on poor...

More reMarx on DAS KAPITAL ? human, social, organizational, and physical

Posted on August 14, 2009
Three varieties of ?capitals,? as they pertain to legal departments, have appeared on this blog: human capital, social capital and organizational capital. Human capital has the most accumulation. I devote an entire category to Talent Management but there have also...

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No tiers on my pillow: flaws of tiered discounts from hourly rates based on volume

Posted on August 13, 2009
Pfizer, wielding its mighty P3 program, likes to squeeze from its preferred law firms higher discounts the more it uses them. ?To effectively share in the benefits of economies of scale, we [Pfizer] implemented a tiered-volume discount structure, with the...

A book of myths that endanger external counsel, and three that in-house counsel would endorse

Posted on August 13, 2009
A slim book sent me for review from Abacus Law humorously describes 35 dangerous myths lawyers in private practice might succumb to. Three of them, at least, pertain to services provide to legal departments. I have refashioned summaries of them...

You?ll feel so much better if you understand employee satisfaction

Posted on August 13, 2009
What influences satisfaction levels among members of a legal department are numerous. To reel off some of them, they include amenities, client appreciation, the culture of the department, diversity, emotional intelligence, facilities, health, leadership, pro bono, quality of work, vacations,...

The irony of cost parity between US contract attorneys and LPO attorneys [Bob Unterberger]

Posted on August 13, 2009
Is there any incentive for corporations to turn to LPOs for such tasks as document reviews when you compare current Indian rates with the recent downward trend in rates domestically? Fewer and fewer U.S reviews are being performed by the...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #116 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes

Posted on August 13, 2009
More poll results about the positions of readers ? have you taken the poll? Since about July 15th, 81 readers have taken my little poll about positions. As of Aug. 11th, poll takers from law departments rose from 58% to...

Risk management differs from compliance and internal audit ? but from legal?

Posted on August 13, 2009
OpRisk & Compliance, Vol. 10, April 2009 at 29, makes the point that risk management is not like compliance and it is not like audit. One person interviewed for the article offered this view: "The other two [compliance and audit]...

Blook reviews of Trapp and Page on external counsel and Leeson on pirate economics

Posted on August 12, 2009
Having published recently by first two blook reviews, (See my post of July 30, 2009: Leigh Dance book; and Aug. 5, 2009: Laura Empson book.), fairness urged me to recognize another pair of books. First is a UK-published book that...

Voice, governance, involvement influenced by the size of a law department

Posted on August 12, 2009
I read recently that solid thinkers should never ignore the obvious. In that vein, here is an obvious observation about governance in law departments as it is affected by the size of the department. The smaller the law department, the...

The rational-choice model of economists as a framework for understanding legal departments

Posted on August 12, 2009
A charming and informative book, Peter Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton Univ. 2009) at 5, takes as its bedrock model of individual decision making what economists call ?rational choice.? The rational choice framework makes three...

An argument, based on experience, for competitive fixed bids saving 10-15 percent of fees

Posted on August 11, 2009
In my consulting projects, the first-round proposals in competitive bids for fixed fees to handle significant amounts of legal work have varied by fifty percent or more. Stated differently, comparable firms differ in their proposed amounts by upwards of fifty...

A tradeoff, or a ratio, between inside fully-loaded costs and outside payments

Posted on August 11, 2009
Is it possible with legal departments that the less you spend inside the more you spend outside? Not as a percentage of total spending, because that calculation must total 100 percent: if you spend 30 percent inside you must spend...

A surfeit of posts on budgets

Posted on August 11, 2009
In the nick of time after just-in-time budgeting (See my post of Aug. 11, 2009: four techniques for budgets.), I ran a comb through my output since the most recent metapost on budgets. Sure enough, out fell a slew of...

Just-in-time budgeting with four methods

Posted on August 11, 2009
I have written extensively about budgets for legal departments, both internal and for matters handled by external counsel (See my post of Sept. 9, 2008: internal budgets with 27 references; and Sept. 12, 2008: internal budgets with 25 references.). Thus,...

Secondments are not only associates but also of partners

Posted on August 11, 2009
I have always assumed that secondments apply only to associates. Barclays, however, upset my comfortable presumption since they recently obtained as a secondee a litigation partner from Simmons & Simmons. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, Aug. 2009 at 59, does give...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #114 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes

Posted on August 10, 2009
This blog footnoted in a treatise, in Blue Book citation form! Proudly I hail a citation to a post on this blog in a leading treatise, nothing less than Robert Haig, Ed., Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (Thomson...

Doubts about a six-out-of-ten rating of external counsel regarding their ?value for money?

Posted on August 10, 2009
As part of a study conducted for a publication of CPA Global, reported in Legal Strat. Rev., Summer 2009 at V, respondents were asked an ultimate question: ?how they would rate the ?value for money? they got from external legal...

Operating costs of legal departments compared to those of law firms

Posted on August 10, 2009
It has interested me how the operating costs of legal departments differ from those of law firms. Some figures for law firms on that point come from Patrick McKenna?s MCK Int?l Rev., Spring 2009 at 11. www.patrickmcKenna.com The largest expense...

A one-to-one ratio and a significant operations department (Abbott)

Posted on August 10, 2009
Laura Schumacher, the general counsel of Abbott Laboratories, heads 162 lawyers and total staff of 328. The ratio of lawyers to staff is almost exactly even (See my post of April 18, 2009: lawyers as percentage of total legal staff...

A tool to explain e-discovery metrics and an encouragement to save money with lower-cost staff

Posted on August 10, 2009
DiscoveryMetrics?, by Casewerx Development, focuses squarely on reducing a law department?s hemorrhage of expense in litigation -- document review. Manny Guerrero, a Partner and co-founder of Casewerx, sent samples of a DiscoveryMetrics dashboard and from looking at his slides it...

Dispersed benefits for a lawyer from external cost control, but concentrated costs

Posted on August 10, 2009
Peter Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton Univ. 2009), especially 164-171, explains why pirate ships often had sailors who were both black and free, not slaves. In essence, the benefits of slaves onboard were dispersed among...

The economist?s ?signal? by departments when they announce they retain large law firms

Posted on August 10, 2009
Peter Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton Univ. 2009) at 94, discusses the economist?s concept of signaling. ?The key to a successful signal is that it must be more costly for some types of individuals to...

Transaction-cost economics have broad applicability in legal department management

Posted on August 10, 2009
?Transaction costs are the costs of making exchanges ? the time, effort, grief, and sometimes financial costs ? associated with coming to an agreement with someone else.? The definition comes from Peter Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of...

Eight myths procurement professionals harbor about US legal departments

Posted on August 10, 2009
To be more accurate, these eight beliefs are not total inventions of sourcing heads. Some truth creeps in, as I have noted. Myth 1: Legal departments don?t know how much they spend. Fact: Most departments know their total domestic legal...

Client service by walking around: get off the Blackberry and talk to clients in their offices

Posted on August 07, 2009
?Get off email and get out of your office," Stephen Swanson, Abu Dhabi Investment Co.'s chief legal officer, exhorted attendees at a recent conference. "Getting in front of your business colleagues will give you valuable information." This excellent advice appears...

32 steps each legal department can take to protect the environment (and reduce costs)

Posted on August 07, 2009
In three previous posts I listed a total of 27 energy-saving ideas (See my post of April 27, 2008: ten tips; Oct. 12, 2008: nine ideas; Nov. 9, 2008: three ideas; March 11, 2009: four more steps toward environmental preservation;...

Don?t send RFPs to law firms, thinking it is a courtesy, when they aren?t really in contention

Posted on August 07, 2009
It abuses both your legal department and the law firm to send an invitation to compete for work for which the firm is not a plausible contender. Your project team has to answer their questions, respond to their requests, keep...

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