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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

Inherent sex differences do not explain the improving situation of women in the ranks of senior in-house lawyers, talent does

Posted on February 04, 2011
Women lawyers are neurologically very similar to men lawyers. Inside the brain, there are no sex differences in mirror neuron functioning; no intra-brain communication differences because of lateralization and the larger corpus callosum of women; and foetal levels of testosterone...

If the costs of lawyers have risen have risen at the same rate as other artisan-type professional services, where?s the beef?

Posted on February 04, 2011
Amidst all the hand-wringing and chest-beating about the ?spiraling? cost of outside counsel, a broader perspective would recognize that ?all industries that use highly educated labor have had to pay more for their major service providers.? The quote in the...

Ten posts of December 2010 with the most crunchy ideas

Posted on February 04, 2011
Twenty industries ranked by ?legal efficiency? based on the world?s largest benchmark survey (Dec. 1, 2010) On lawyers per billion dollars of revenue, legal staff per billion, internal spending as a percentage of revenue, and external spending as a percentage...

Huge praise for in-house tax lawyers and accountants at General Electric

Posted on February 03, 2011
A piece in the NY Times, Feb. 2, 2011 at B11, discusses the widely varying tax rates paid by major US corporations. Here comes the laudatory sentence: ?G.E. is so good at avoiding taxes that some people consider its tax...

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Rees Morrison?s Morsels #145: posts longa, morsels

Posted on February 03, 2011
Climbing the Avvo rankings. The Alexa rank of this blog on the legal blog list was Number 106 (Alexa rank of 1,055,886) on January 17, 2011 (See my post of March 9, 2009: number 260 and Alexa 30-day number of...

GCM benchmark survey starts strong ? half the respondents so far are new

Posted on February 03, 2011
Of the first 70 participants in this year?s General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey, which opened in late January, slightly more than half of them are return respondents from last year. That means the others are new to the world?s largest...

More data on compliance and reporting to the general counsel

Posted on February 02, 2011
Based on a survey of its members where 810 of them responded last year, the Society for Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE) produced data on the reporting lines of the chief compliance officer (See my post of July 23, 2010:...

From South Africa, a document assembly offering (XpressDox)

Posted on February 02, 2011
During my annual trek through the aisles of LegalTechNY, I spotted a new entrant, at least for me, in the document assembly group. XpressDox comes from South Africa and boasts that it more than 500 law firms around the globe...

Follow the money, and in-house lawyers do ? to online sites that give data on salaries

Posted on February 02, 2011
Everyone cares about how much money they make and whether their paycheck is higher or lower than peers. So, fueling the clamor, on the last day of January I published my column with InsideCounsel on some sources online for in-house...

For web surfers, a surfeit of sites for those who want to improve their writing

Posted on February 02, 2011
?Writing maketh the blogger,? a little known line from Shakespeare?s lost masterpiece Hamblog and Julionline, often comes to my mind. Not just those who scribble for WordPress and TypePad and the like, but all in-house lawyers need prose ability. So....

Data from law firms about helpdesk support probably matches causes of law department calls

Posted on February 02, 2011
A company that provides help-desk support, Intelliteach, analyzed 600,000 helpdesk tickets from numerous law firms over a nine-month period. Graphically displayed in ILTA?s quarterly PeertoPeer, Dec. 2010 at 65, the categories where problems arose probably map well to the problems...

Claimed in-sourcing of legal work to cope with cost pressure needs support from benchmark metrics

Posted on February 01, 2011
?As the cost of outside counsel has risen, businesses have brought an increasing amount of work in-house.? With that declaration, Mark Roellig, the General Counsel of Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, kicks off a thoughtful article in the Am...

Three observations about the law department of Silver Lake Technology Management

Posted on February 01, 2011
From a profile of the General Counsel of Silver Lake Technology Management LLC, a private investment firm, I note these points. The Nat'l LJ, Jan. 31, 2011 at 8, mentions that Silver Lake has more than $14 billion under management....

Will there someday soon be an app cottage industry for matter management systems?

Posted on February 01, 2011
As I read in CFO, Nov. 2010 at 41 about apps, I conjured up a cornucopia of them for matter management software. The article said that ?people increasingly prefer that information and communications capabilities be available at the touch of...

Even if competitive selections aren?t pre-ordained, how often do they even bless a change?

Posted on February 01, 2011
Interviewing law firms recently about the effects on them of a major convergence effort, I heard one partner say ?Out of every ten of these programs, five to six never get past the RFP stage.? Few companies that launch an...

A heterogeneity index and what it can tell about distributions of law firms retained, minority staff, software usage and more

Posted on January 30, 2011
A general formula for calculating heterogeneity in a group is 1-?i2 where i is the proportion of members in the ith category. What does that mean in English? Let?s apply it to law firms retained by a department. Let?s say...

Cognitive entrenchment, a term that describes the rigidity that may encrust expertise

Posted on January 30, 2011
A trade-off appears to exist: as you become more expert in a knowledge area (such as tax law) you become less flexible. An article dubs this ?cognitive entrenchment,? and to explain the phenomenon grounds it in schemas of knowledge (Acad....

Data on the importance of headhunters and some projections about the law departments they like to draw from

Posted on January 30, 2011
?Currently, the average U.S. manager stays with an employer for a median of six years, and about two thirds of the open positions are filled by outsiders.? Both figures from Perspectives, Nov. 2010 at 46, seem high if I consider...

Another role of national coordinating counsel: to help pick which lawsuits to take to trial

Posted on January 30, 2011
National coordinating counsel handle important tasks. They can help responses to document requests be responded to consistently. They can work with public relations to build a consistent picture for the public of a spate of suits. They can take similar...

Free-riders and rent-seekers in law departments

Posted on January 30, 2011
Rent-seekers, a term used by economists and political scientists for those who extort extra benefits because of their power, exist in law departments. A Deputy General Counsel who balks at agreeing to a new software package may get a pass...

More work for the IP department if the company, like Fujitsu, publishes its IP strategy

Posted on January 30, 2011
In 2006, Fujitsu began publishing its intellectual property strategy. Fujitsu, according to Intellectual Prop. Mag., Sept. 2010 at 93, is the world?s third largest IT services company and a major technology innovator. Making its IP direction available to the world,...

Four ways that EADS encourages patentable research

Posted on January 28, 2011
How does EADS, the global aerospace Group that manufactures the Airbus, encourage innovation among its researchers? What it does, works. As summarized in 2010 Intelligence Report & Directory Series of Leaders League at 67, EADS had 7,200 patents in its...

IP teams of French companies can report to any of several different departments, led by law departments

Posted on January 28, 2011
A study conducted in 2009 by OPI, a French intellectual property consultancy, looked at the reporting position of intellectual property departments (patents, trademarks, designs and models). As summarized in 2010 Intelligence Report & Directory Series of Leaders League at 81,...

Brainstorming replaced by creativity techniques based more on neuroscience

Posted on January 28, 2011
When you want new solutions to a problem, you should realize some researchers believe that traditional brainstorming posits an old-fashioned view of creativity. It divorces inspiration from analysis, which is far from the way the brain operates. According to strategy...

Value delivered by a law department as suggested by the number of ?economically significant? regulations dealt with

Posted on January 28, 2011
One way to establish the relative importance of legislation quantifies its impact either in costs imposed or benefits obtained. Researchers at Georgetown University, under Susan Dudley, Director of its Regulatory Studies Center, deem an ?economically significant? consequence of a regulatory...

20 jargon giants in-house lawyers should shudder at and shun

Posted on January 28, 2011
An article from Conference Rev., Winter 2011 at 37, tickled me. It lampoons business jargon. Throughout, the article skewers all manner of clich�s, acronyms, styles of obfuscatory speech, and words sucked of all meaning. The Orwellian/Dilbertian mess of messaging presents...

Perfectionism pulverizes productivity ? good quality in the shortest time and least cost is the goal

Posted on January 28, 2011
?The pursuit of perfection is one of the great adversaries of speed, performance and execution? writes an author in the Conference Rev., Winter 2011 at 5. In-house counsel should take the advice to heart: ?Rather than seeking what cannot in...

Some topics from a profile of the general counsel of Marathon Oil

Posted on January 26, 2011
The law department of Marathon Oil, headed by general counsel Sylvia Kerrigan, enjoys a profile page in Practical Law, Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 at 96. Embedded in it lurk some blog-worthy topics. At $53.47 billion in revenues but only 65 lawyers,...

Concentration and lack thereof in the business segments that serve corporate law departments

Posted on January 26, 2011
A recent book on networks mentions that ?you?ll typically find that the top three suppliers account for between a third and two-thirds? of any manufacturing or commercial category. Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood, Superconnect: Harnessing the power of networks and...

To know your total spend is not enough; put it in the corporate context with a ratio to revenue

Posted on January 26, 2011
Don?t congratulate yourself and stop once you have gathered and confirmed the total amount your law department spends. Stopping there is a risk, as Ron Pol sees it, because ?measuring total legal costs reinforces perceiving legal as a cost-center drain...

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