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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 favorable byproduct of convergence: more opportunity for collective evaluations of firms

Posted on August 05, 2009
If the lawyers in-house who retain outside counsel can choose whomever they want, it may turn out to be unusual for any of them to use the same counsel. With such divergence, evaluations of outside counsel will not be collective,...

LawProspector data on significant federal litigation and uses for general counsel

Posted on August 05, 2009
LawProspector, founded in early 2008 by a group of attorneys working in the litigation support field, has gathered data on the largest active pieces of litigation in the US federal courts. This data ?is loosely defined by the intersection of...

Another blog book review (blook review?) ? 13 posts on Managing the Modern Law Firm

Posted on August 05, 2009
Laura Empson, ed., Managing the Modern Law Firm: New Challenges New Perspectives (Oxford Univ. Press 2007), will mostly interest managing partners of law firms. That said, three chapters speak to concerns of general counsel, one on diversity, a fascinating chapter...

A journalistic charge against partnering firms, but where is the support for it?

Posted on August 05, 2009
Sometimes journalists write something that makes sense to them, but offer no evidence. A sentence to illustrate follows an explanation of ?convergence? and gives a consequence of law firms that ?begin to operate as long-term partners, offering cost efficiencies and...

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Research: embedded ties between law firms and departments lower rates yet can increase firm profits

Posted on August 05, 2009
"Firms in which two thirds of their large corporate clients are in a long-term relations on average charge $4.07 less per hour for partners and $1.60 less per hour for associates than firms in which only one-third of their large...

Board member training in ethics and compliance, often conducted by the general counsel

Posted on August 04, 2009
The Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics disseminated a seven-question survey to its members regarding board training. The Society got back 171 responses and published a summary, written by a partner of Jeff Kaplan, one of my guest bloggers, in...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #112 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes

Posted on August 04, 2009
Independent counsel to a Board of Directors. Even when a company has a legal department, Board members sometimes retain outside counsel (See my post of July 25, 2005: costs of Boards retaining independent counsel; Sept. 13, 2005: Carey International; Sept...

The Laffey Matrix for outside counsel costs

Posted on August 04, 2009
Dan Williams of t-Mobile earns a big thanks for telling me about the so-called Laffey Matrix. The matrix is a table of hourly rates for outside attorneys and paralegals prepared by the Civil Division of the United States Attorney?s Office...

Contrast normative and positive descriptions of the managerial actions general counsel take

Posted on August 04, 2009
The difference between normative economics and positive economics comes from Deirdre McCloskey, How to Be Human Though an Economist (U. of Mich. 2000) at 62-63. As the distinction applies to managers of in-house lawyers, a normative view says whether a...

Push your law firms to budget matters by means of a narrowing fee funnel

Posted on August 04, 2009
Thinking about fixed fees the other day with a law firm?s Executive Director, I thought of a funnel for fee estimates. The funnel starts early in a matter with the law firm giving a broad but reasonable range for what...

How to add another monitor for your workspace, and why

Posted on August 04, 2009
By guest author Steven Levy There is increasing evidence that having dual monitors generates huge productivity gains. If you have a laptop, you?re already set for dual monitors. You?ve got your new widescreen beauty; your laptop screen becomes the second...

A ?legal heat map? to identify offshorable legal services

Posted on August 04, 2009
A long article about management initiatives in the legal group at Rio Tinto, in Legal Strat. Rev., Summer 2009 at 13, describes a service provider?s tool called a ?legal heat map.? The provider, CPA Global, a major LPO company, developed...

To compare different metrics, use the technique of stating them as standard deviations

Posted on August 04, 2009
If you standardize the values of variables that vary on their measurements, you can compare their relative magnitude. For example, say you want to match how your department stands on cases per lawyer against paralegal base pay. The two metrics...

Who are you? Please answer the one-question poll on the right side ? early results

Posted on August 03, 2009
So far, 50 people have been good enough to click on the poll to the right and indicate their position. The plurality are law department lawyers (46%), followed by law firm lawyers (16%) and service providers (14 percent). Non-lawyer members...

Two-way evaluations of individual performance ? internal of external and the reverse

Posted on August 03, 2009
Monsanto?s legal department ?involves itself in succession issues for legal teams at their preferred providers,? according to Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, June 2009 at 65. I have previously written (See my post of Jan. 13, 2008: interventions that go to...

Global managing attorney, a big step from a non-lawyer director of operations

Posted on August 03, 2009
Doctors only trust doctors, CPAs only respect CPAs, and lawyers only accept direction from lawyers (maybe). Since administrators (especially non-lawyers) can only go so far to tell lawyers what to do, it is not surprising that a large legal department...

Productivity bang for the buck with a large monitor

Posted on August 03, 2009
Law Department Management Blog welcomes guest blogger Steven Levy. For a number of years, Steven was the Senior Director, Information Systems Department, Microsoft Legal and Corporate Affairs. You can dramatically improve your computer-time productivity with a simple ? and increasingly...

Consider whether the key partners at your major firms sit on Boards of other companies

Posted on August 03, 2009
"Firms with partners who sit on the boards of directors of corporations that are not their clients are able to charge a higher price than firms without these types of ties." The authors who pointed out this correlation (Brian Uzzi,...

A 1910 reference to a corporate legal department from a vast collection of old newspapers

Posted on August 03, 2009
I poked around on a site operated by the Library of Congress that has , compiled 1.2 million pages of American newspapers published between 1880 and 1922. Naturally, I searched the terms ?legal department? and ?law department.? ?Legal department? returned...

Does your compliance and ethics program do this ? a one-minute self test?

Posted on August 03, 2009
By guest author Jeffrey M. Kaplan How would your compliance and ethics (C&E) program fare if evaluated under the Department of Justice?s corporate criminal charging standards or the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations? This one-minute self test - based on...

Data showing that the larger the legal department the larger the firms it retains

Posted on July 31, 2009
Three authors (Brian Uzzi, Ryon Lancaster and Shannon Dunlap) present tabular data in Laura Empson, ed., Managing The Modern Law Firm: New Challenges New Perspectives (Oxford Univ. Press 2007) at 99. The table shows data for five groups of 133...

The debate over whether strong ties should decrease or increase rate adjustments

Posted on July 31, 2009
If I were a general counsel, when I look at billing rate increases of my favored incumbent firms (See my post of April 16, 2009: incumbent firms with 11 references.), I would want to see two trends. One trend should...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #111 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes

Posted on July 31, 2009
Environmental nudges on e-mails. I like this message at the bottom of emails (See my post of Dec. 26, 2008 #4:: huge, wasteful disclaimer in the footer of every e-mail from a company.). ?Please consider the environment before printing this...

An assemblage of process improvement techniques

Posted on July 31, 2009
Included in this overview are metaposts and comments that have to do with process improvement. It includes two metaposts on Six Sigma, as well as one each on process mapping, kaizen and cycle time (See my post of Feb. 13,...

Ten Best Posts of June 2009 from Law Department Management Blog

Posted on July 31, 2009
Here are the ten best from my 99 posts in June 2009. If the brief description of the post entices you, click on the post title to read it all. If you would these posts in a file, email me...

Lawyer intelligence, judged by law school rank, might alter legal department management

Posted on July 31, 2009
The authors of a chapter in Laura Empson, ed., Managing The Modern Law Firm: New Challenges New Perspectives (Oxford Univ. Press 2007) at 104, wanted to operationalize quality for the law firms they were studying. To operationalize is to devise...

A ?blook review? (a blogger book review) ? nine blog posts give a feel for a book

Posted on July 30, 2009
Just as this blogger does not try for encyclopedic pieces or comprehensive treatments of topics, he no longer writes traditional book reviews. But he will plunder thoughtful points from a book, and has done so abundantly with Leigh Dance?s stimulating...

Thank goodness only a small percentage of partners are rainmakers

Posted on July 30, 2009
General counsel may feel besieged by solicitors ? a pun lurks there on the English term for non-litigation lawyers and the common meaning of those who solicit. One view, however, is that ?In many firms, regardless of size or reach,...

?The professionalization of law firms in the UK started in the early 1990s?, and spread in-house

Posted on July 30, 2009
The consequences of this change to legal departments occurred to me as I read E. Leigh Dance, Bright Ideas: Insights from Legal Luminaries Worldwide (Mill City Press 2009) at 161. Simon Slater of First Counsel expressed this view. Assume Slater...

Reporting lines, locations of lawyers, and broader geographic responsibilities

Posted on July 30, 2009
Back in the day, companies thought of their international operations on a country-by-country basis and it made sense to have a local lawyer or two in-country report to the general manager of that country. Times change, as pointed out in...

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