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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

Five distortions that afflict groups: group think, false consensus, chill, and passive-aggressive, and dominance

Posted on July 22, 2009
Groupthink: Group members can collectively ? and often unconsciously ? pressure dissidents to agree to a position the majority favors. According to James Dunning?s recent comment ??Groupthink,? as it is known in less eminent circles, can literally be lethal -...

Professional development must be the personal responsibility of each in-house attorney

Posted on July 22, 2009
?Professional development is a fusion of career planning and development ? for yourself ? and continuing education and training in both the law and your company?s business ? for the benefit of your client.? This distinction comes from GC Mid-Atlantic,...

The burden of administrative time demands on in-house counsel

Posted on July 22, 2009
The cliché ?doing more with less? implies spending more time on work that benefits clients, less on things that help the legal department run, i.e., administrative tasks. Whatever detracts from client service has lower value (See my post of May...

A patent benchmark ? percentage of applications filed by internal lawyers

Posted on July 21, 2009
A recent article reports that IBM?s patent attorneys ?filed more than 70 percent of the company?s patents in 2008 for software and services.? The article does not say what percentage of Big Blue?s hardware and other patent applications are generated....

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Committees in legal departments, how they differ from project teams, etc.

Posted on July 21, 2009
Whereas a project team can be somewhat informal, a committee in a legal department is duly appointed and has more formally structured delegations (See my post of May 13, 2009: 11 committees in Exelon?s law department.). Also, a committee just...

Comments based on the Hartford?s litigation group

Posted on July 21, 2009
The Hartford Financial Services Group won Corporate Counsel?s 2009 Best Legal Department award. It has 210 in-house lawyers supporting 2008 revenue of $9.2 billion. Further, ?All firms that do a significant amount of [litigation] work for the company are assigned...

Pros and cons of legal teams, where members work from different locations

Posted on July 21, 2009
Virtual teams of lawyers, where not all of them are located in one place, occur more and more frequently, either with inside or outside counsel. An article in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Summer 2009 at 65, nicely lays...

Eleven reasons why a law department might transfer a pending matter to a different firm

Posted on July 20, 2009
Few in-house managers blithely transfer matters underway from one law firm to another, but it happens ? or it ought to happen (See my post of Sept. 12, 2008: transfer matters to new counsel with 8 references.). Under various circumstances,...

Two secondment tips: build them into competitive bids and scale them to fees paid

Posted on July 20, 2009
From an onging discussion on LinkedIin about secondments, I extracted two ideas offered by in-house attorneys. I added the bold font to highlight the comments: ?I think the only way to begin to secure a free secondee is when you...

Newsletters produced by in-house legal groups

Posted on July 20, 2009
Among the many reasons the Hartford Financial Services Group won Corporate Counsel?s 2009 award for Best Legal Department is that in the fall of 2008 it launched a quarterly newsletter on ethics, compliance, and privacy. They call it The Hartford...

Fourth set of 13 blogs that have referred visitors to Law Department Management Blog

Posted on July 19, 2009
Traffic is one reward for blogging, so I am always grateful when other blogs or websites either cite to one of my posts or include me on their blog roll. I have thanked 40 so far, and here add another...

Hyperpost ? ten collected metaposts ? on legal department benchmarks

Posted on July 19, 2009
Mavens of metrics might want to see the full cupboard of metaposts that are available on this blog. Here they are! One group covers a range of benchmark topics (See my post of Feb. 25, 2008: practice area benchmarks with...

E-billing survey suggests not too many bills per vendor

Posted on July 19, 2009
Eight well-known e-billing providers -- Allegiant, Bottomline, Bridgeway, CTTymetrix, DataCert, doeLegal, LawTrac, and Serenget ? provided data for a survey I sent to a total of 10 providers. I have written a series of posts about the analysis (See my...

Definitions of legal department management terms ? eleven more and an offer of a free download that presents nearly 100

Posted on July 19, 2009
In my quest to create the OED (Online Explanations and Definitions) for legal department managers, I have made a decent start. This blog has defined upwards of 90 terms. I have compiled them, for anyone who emails me and asks...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #109 ? additions to earlier posts and short takes

Posted on July 19, 2009
Litigation up, or perhaps down, during a recession. "During an economic recession and certainly during this one, litigation revenues can be expected to increase as a percentage of the firm's total revenues" (See my post of June 28, 2009: spending...

Please describe (confidentially) the best example you have encountered of good leadership by an in-house lawyer

Posted on July 19, 2009
Tell me your tale of a general counsel showing admirable leadership! Readers would like to hear about examples of general counsel who demonstrated admirable leadership or management. If you email me or call me [973.568.9110] with an example, I will...

Don?t even consider termination premiums with your law firms

Posted on July 17, 2009
"Similarly, the parties can and should consider termination premiums in the event that a client abandons the project midstream or, having learned the lawyer?s strategy, opts to engage less-expensive counsel." This sentence, from Law Practice, Vol. 35, June 2009 at...

Should you expect your firms to bring you results from their competitive intelligence (CI) programs?

Posted on July 17, 2009
A recent white paper cites an article that says ?in order to correctly anticipate potential risks to clients, firms can implement competitive intelligence (CI) programs.? Later, Future Law Office: Delivering Value-Added Legal Services in Challenging Times (Robert Half Legal 2009)...

Unexpected number of law firms and vendors per user of leading e-billing systems

Posted on July 17, 2009
Eight prominent e-billing providers -- Allegiant, Bottomline, Bridgeway, CTTymetrix, DataCert, doeLegal, LawTrac, and Serengeti ? responded to a survey I sent to a total of 10 providers. The survey asked them to provide metrics for three questions (See my post...

If you send your RFP to fewer firms, each is likely to try harder and respond better

Posted on July 17, 2009
A series of experiments has found that the more participants there are in a competition, on average the less hard people try. The studies are described in the Economist, July 11, 2009 at 82. It?s as if people have an...

More information about and applications of Information Theory

Posted on July 17, 2009
Claude Shannon outlined the principles of Information Theory in 1948, and the applications of his seminal work surround us still. According to the astounding publication by Autonomy, Meaning Based Computing, 2009 at 23-24, ?Shannon stated that information could be treated...

Host an innovation tournament in your legal department to identify and reward good ideas

Posted on July 17, 2009
Here is a mashup of ideas: cash rewards for cost saving ideas and a tournament to honor good ideas. MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Summer 2009 at 17, reviews a book about innovation tournaments. The book explains a method...

The frequent flyer way to unify a global legal department

Posted on July 17, 2009
?At Hilton, I or another member of law department executive management team personally visited our locations with lawyers at least once every three months (or have the lawyers visit headquarters).? Tim Glassett, the former general counsel of Hilton Hotels, explains...

Who knows how much US law departments spend per year on US law firms?

Posted on July 16, 2009
1. According to one source, the top 200 law firms in the US earned $84 billion in 2008 (See my post of July 7, 2009: 200 largest US law firms and their revenue in 2008.). I have not seen estimates...

General counsel who travel frequently, especially those of global companies, need stamina

Posted on July 16, 2009
"One of the most surprising lessons I've learned in this job is that you need to be in shape physically to lead a global function. That is a part of the balance you can't forgo. The travel and the hours...

SharePoint application for knowledge distribution at Hilton, a global legal department

Posted on July 16, 2009
An example of how a SharePoint application helps a legal department appears in E. Leigh Dance, Bright Ideas: Insights from Legal Luminaries Worldwide (Mill City Press 2009) at 19. Tim Glassett, the former general counsel of Hilton Hotels and its...

Soft skills that benefit in-house counsel

Posted on July 16, 2009
Most lawyers think of continuing legal education almost entirely in terms of the need to freshen their knowledge of a substantive area of law (See my post of May 25, 2008: CLE with 30 references.). Few think of the softer...

A three-ply description of the structure and roles of global legal department

Posted on July 16, 2009
Three functional dimensions of a multi-national law department: ?general business lawyers with global responsibility, legal specialists in the core legal fields for the company's operations, and in-house lawyers on the ground in the main jurisdictions where the company conducts its...

Misguided elevation of creative solutions over effective solutions

Posted on July 16, 2009
If an in-house lawyer asks a law firm for assistance, an important measure of that firm?s contribution should not be the degree of novelty of its solution. More telling measures are outcome and cost. Creativity, doing something new, is over-rated...

?Business and communication styles? of firms they like matter for in-side lawyers

Posted on July 16, 2009
?Even if a firm has the expertise, if their business and communication style isn?t compatible with ours, it doesn?t really help.? This quote from a general counsel of a small company in Canada comes from Future Law Office: Delivering Value-Added...

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