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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

Legal-department management memology ? Part II (96 words defined on this blog)

Posted on April 18, 2009
Language structures the way we think and experience the world; the atom of thinking and expressing is the word, so I have steadfastly defined many of the management words used by general counsel (See my post of Dec. 11, 2006:...

Confusing data on the number of law firms typically retained by law departments

Posted on April 18, 2009
Surveys report widely different figures for the number of law firms retained by large US law departments. A low-end metric comes from the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, April 2009 at 18, and the ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey. That survey...

A tool to assess and encourage diversity in sexual orientation among law firms

Posted on April 16, 2009
Your law department can get data that rates your primary law firms with regard to their policies and practices pertinent to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) employees. The Human Rights Campaign administers the annual Corporate Equality Index (CEI), which...

Hendiadys, rhetorical trope of the day for law department management

Posted on April 16, 2009
Any blogger who uses hendiadys (a rhetorical figure in which a complex idea is expressed by two words connected by a copulative conjunction) is a blogger after my heart and soul (1). Willem Wiggers, on his blog WeAgree, started a...

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In-house managers of firms should focus on cost, not ?relationship?; three issues

Posted on April 16, 2009
Some law departments assign to each of their primary law firms a senior lawyer, one who should strive for better ways of working between department and firm, better connections across multiple users of the firm, fresh initiatives, pursuit of quality....

Thoughts about favoring non-incumbents in RFP procedures

Posted on April 16, 2009
The law firms that have represented you for a while have a big edge over other law firms if you conduct a competitive bid that pits them against each other. The incumbent firms know more about your business, your matters,...

Maybe law departments should abandon formal evaluations of law firms

Posted on April 16, 2009
Perhaps formal evaluations of outside counsel are lemons not worth the squeeze, lots of work, hard to do, a sour taste afterwards. After all, a lawyer who does not like the performance of a firm can stop giving it work....

Part XXIX of a collection of embedded metaposts

Posted on April 16, 2009
Here are my latest embedded metaposts (See my post of April 5, 2009: Part XXVIII.), each of which shows the number of references cited within them. 1. Approval authorization of invoices (See my post of April 13, 2009: signing off...

Quantify every RFP response question, even if it is only ranking them against each other

Posted on April 16, 2009
Not to be a zealot about the value of scoring RFP responses, I still advocate as part of the review that evaluators convert responses to comparative scores. If an evaluator reads all of the answers to the same question, one...

What do you mean, your law department doesn?t retain a public relations firm?

Posted on April 15, 2009
Some legal departments seem to get into the klieg lights of favorable publicity more than others, perhaps because they have on retainer their own PR firm (See my post of Jan. 30, 2008: publicity by law departments with 12 references;...

Three reasons why legal departments are better positioned to negotiate arrangements with suppliers

Posted on April 15, 2009
Highlighting a point made in a General Counsel Roundtable report, I commend their view that general counsel have several advantages over law firms when their departments choose suppliers and negotiate contracts directly with them. Law departments enjoy stronger market power...

The upcoming singularity -- when in-house costs equal outside billing rates

Posted on April 15, 2009
We are edging toward a singularity, a major inflection point caused by three trends: (1) law departments shed junior lawyers, calculate fully the hourly costs of the remaining senior lawyers, and find the costs are north of $250 an hour;...

Assign cases to categories and manage the categories differently

Posted on April 15, 2009
One technique general counsel should consider is to segment cases into broad tracks according to their risk and match each track to a set of management activities. Cases in the low oversight track ? the majority of cases, which pose...

A six-item form to evaluate law firm performance (FMC Technologies)

Posted on April 15, 2009
Try having your responsible in-house lawyers rate the performance of your major law firms, using a scale of 1 (Unacceptable), 2 (Mediocre), 3 (Good), 4 (Very Good) and 5 (Excellent) on six attributes. These come from FMC Technologies and you...

For an RFP process, streamline agreement to your contract by attaching a form to the second round

Posted on April 15, 2009
Once your law department has selected a firm though a competitive bidding process, there still remains the chore of executing an agreement with the firm. The good news, however, is that the agreement should not take long to finish because...

If you charge back outside counsel fees to clients, do clients then meddle with your management?

Posted on April 15, 2009
Some general counsel reject the suggestion that they charge back to clients the outside counsel payments made on their behalf. One reason for such reluctance is a fear that clients will then believe they have a right to say which...

Some training of lawyers who later join companies does not play well inside

Posted on April 15, 2009
Law school and law firm culture inculcate three orientations that pull at cross-purposes to what consummate in-house attorneys need to do. These three values, as quoted, come from a General Counsel Roundtable publication. ?Excessive focus on quality.? This may serve...

Modest choice of the most innovative in-house use of technology

Posted on April 13, 2009
Law Technology News honored Vulcan Materials with its 2008 ?Most Innovative Use of Technology by an In-House Legal Department.? Vulcan Materials, an S&P 500 company with revenues above $3 billion, is the nation's largest producer of construction aggregates...

CAGR of e-billing implementation and some thoughts on interpretation of the data

Posted on April 13, 2009
According to surveys by the General Counsel Roundtable among its member legal departments, ?use of electronic billing technology? rose from 2001 (25%) to 2006 (41%). Therefore, during the five years, the adoption of e-billing posted a cumulative annual growth rate...

Keep multiple approvals of law firm invoices to a minimum

Posted on April 13, 2009
Authorization levels when lawyers review outside counsel bills are typically set by the financial department, not by the law department. I suppose a general counsel could lower the level, but that makes little sense. The invoice approval level should mean...

Three comments on special fee arrangements touted by a law firm?s brochure

Posted on April 13, 2009
Excerpt from Kirkland & Ellis? brochure, ?Partnering with Clients Through Legal Risk Sharing,? appeared on a slide at a recent webinar. "In certain matters, we have taken part of our fee in equity or stock" (See my post of Jan....

Sixty percent of every HCA lawyer?s bonus is tied to reductions of legal fees

Posted on April 13, 2009
Among the National Law Journal?s ?20 most influential general counsel in America? stands Robert Waterman, the general counsel of HCA Inc. (See my post of April 6, 2009: some observations on the list of 20 general counsel.). The short squib...

Assertion that some law departments prepare ?strategy documents? regarding outside counsel usage

Posted on April 13, 2009
Jon Bellis of Thomson?s Hildebrandt group, holding forth during a recent webinar, claimed that ?A relatively small number of law departments have a written strategy for retaining, using and managing outside counsel ("OC")(as opposed to an OC policy or billing...

Stability over three years of number of matters involving law firms in the US and number of US firms

Posted on April 13, 2009
Survey data from 2006 through 2008 shows that during those three years the number of matters handled by law firms and the number of firms used in the United States has remained relatively stable, at medians of about 350 matters...

Oddly small gap between US and worldwide total legal spending per lawyer

Posted on April 13, 2009
According to a recent survey, total legal spending per lawyer varies little between the median US figure and the worldwide figure. The two, presented by Jon Bellis during a webinar, showed United States lawyers at $1,056,351 per lawyer and worldwide....

Distribution of spending on outside counsel by 10 areas of law

Posted on April 11, 2009
At the 5th Annual IP Counsel Forum, the COO of LexisNexis Examen presented data from a Martindale-Hubbell study on how corporate counsel distribute legal work to law firms. The pie chart had ten slices, each with a percentage. For example,...

Four cost-cutting measures from two law departments

Posted on April 11, 2009
These ideas are not new, but I like being able to cite specific law departments and their actions. An April 6, 2009 posting by the ABA Journal reports that PetSmart is asking its law firms to discount their hourly fees...

Unbundle ? use specialists firms for tasks outside counsel have traditionally done

Posted on April 11, 2009
I define unbundling as law departments removing from law firms tasks commonly handled by them and instead retaining specialists to handle the tasks. Examples abound on this blog (See my post of May 14, 2005: photocopying; Jan. 28, 2007: medical/nurse...

Litigation financed by hedge funds ? the risks it poses to in-house budgets

Posted on April 11, 2009
According to the ABA Journal on April 9th, a hedge fund based in the United Kingdom has just raised $47 million that may now be invested in commercial litigation cases in the United States. ?Juridica Investments Limited helps fund only...

First of all, say economists, let?s outsource all the lawyers!

Posted on April 09, 2009
In February 2004, Prof. Clayton Christenson of the Harvard Business School and Scott Anthony, a partner at Innosight published a white paper entitled ?eLawforum: Transforming Legal Services.? On page 4 of a reprint of that article,a sentence casually throws law...

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