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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

Billing rates understandably increase as lawyer?s specialization increases

Posted on April 09, 2009
In-house attorneys gnash their teeth at partner rates that near the $1,000 mark, but those rates at least partially reflect specialization. As they become more experienced, specialists can more it readily recognize patterns and apply familiar tools so they are...

A fixed-fee arrangement, for environmental litigation, and some of advantages and worries

Posted on April 09, 2009
In 2004, after eight rounds of a competitive bid run by eLawForum, Unocal chose Howrey to handle its entire environmental caseload through 2009 on a fixed fee. Litigation 2005 spells out the details of this arrangement. At the time, the...

Collected thoughts on law firms and the quality of their work

Posted on April 09, 2009
Many people have had trouble defining ?quality,? and I won?t join that struggle. Even so, in-house lawyers value quality legal work by law firms (See my post of Oct. 16, 2006: survey data about quality as an attribute of law...

A fixed fee to handle 450 labor, employment and ERISA cases over five years

Posted on April 09, 2009
A white paper entitled ?eLawforum: Transforming Legal Services,? published in February 2004 at 11, describes a large-scale competitive bid. The unnamed Fortune 500 company packaged its labor, employment and ERISA litigation over a projected five-year period...

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Rees Morrison?s Morsels #98 ? additions to earlier posts or brief comments

Posted on April 09, 2009
Morphology. The basic idea is that if you understand the underlying parts of a system (the system?s sub-functions), you will better understand the entire system. Law departments are systems, but it is not clear what are their morphological components (See...

A study and software that estimate the costs of e-discovery

Posted on April 09, 2009
A presenter at a recent conference, David McCann, the President and CEO of DataconEED, described a major study his company has done of more than 200 lawsuits and the electronic discovery they unleashed. The study extracted some 15 key factors...

Responsibility for contract management and the size of contract portfolios

Posted on April 08, 2009
More often than any other function, the corporate legal department manages contracts once they are executed. The following findings that elaborate on that statement come from Exari, which compiled data from more than 100 corporate respondents at the ACC Annual...

Wide differences between law departments in the percentage of contracts they review

Posted on April 08, 2009
A report by Exari, ?Corporate Counsel Contracts Survey Report,?compiles data from more than 100 corporate respondents at the ACC Annual Meeting and LegalTech New York in February 2009. Three quarters of the respondents were from Fortune 1000 law departments...

Before important changes in your department, steer to a pilot program

Posted on April 08, 2009
Piloting is the practice of testing an innovation in real, yet controlled conditions to improve it and fix bugs (See my post of Feb. 20, 2006: get more value from pilot programs.). All kinds of program changes by law departments...

Internal collaboration on some projects can be bad for your law department

Posted on April 08, 2009
To paraphrase a recent article, a general counsel should not ask, ?How can I get people to collaborate more?? The general counsel should ask, ?Will collaboration on this project create or destroy value?? The article, in the Harv. Bus. Rev.,...

A tell-all expos� of this blogger, including a meandering career and bold vision for this blog

Posted on April 08, 2009
Steve Taylor spoke with me several weeks ago and the profile he wrote came out in Of Counsel, April 2009, at 14. The six-page tell-all is Download Of Counsel Rees Morrison profile . Possibly off interest in a non-tabloid vein...

Cost per internal lawyer hour and the ratio of support staff

Posted on April 08, 2009
If a group of law departments have similar ratios of lawyers to non-lawyers, then a comparison of fully-loaded internal cost per lawyer hour gets at something comparable and meaningful. Otherwise, if the data comes from law departments that have significantly...

Productivity, quality, and risk (PQR) ? the three horsemen of every general counsel

Posted on April 08, 2009
What is the goal of management in a law department? To improve productivity, to increase the quality of legal advice, or to reduce legal risk? Clearly, we need operational definitions of these slithery PQR terms and some way to measure...

Codes of Business Conduct and what in-house counsel can accept as gifts or business entertainment

Posted on April 08, 2009
Many Codes of Business Conduct lay out ground rules that limit what employees, including lawyers, can accept from outside business contacts, such as law firm partners or vendors wooing them for business (See my post of Nov. 5, 2007: law-firm...

We need a common definition for ?regional law firms? as compared to ?rim biggies?

Posted on April 08, 2009
To share thoughts about regional law firms, we need a definition, and one part is the negative definition that they are not large, national law firms (See my post of Dec. 27, 2008: definition of ?small? law department; and Dec....

Brainwriting 6-3-5 as an alternative to established brainstorming

Posted on April 06, 2009
Brainwriting 6-3-5 alters classic brainstorming in ways that encourage equal participation from all team members by having them write their ideas rather than say them. The technique is described in David Silverstein, Philip Samuel, and Neil DeCarlo, The Innovator?s Toolkit:...

Notes on the ?Twenty most influential general counsel in America?

Posted on April 06, 2009
In its April Fool?s Day issue, the National Law Journal announced the ?20 most influential general counsel in America.? No doubt every one of them is a distinguished lawyer and person. For sure every one of the general counsel on...

How to train clients so that the company benefits the most ? 18 more choices

Posted on April 06, 2009
Three times I have commented on how to train internal clients and I mentioned 11 different techniques (See my post of July 14, 2005: lecture, lecture discussion, film, small group discussion, case studies, role playing, practical exercises, and unstructured exercises;...

Service tickets as a way to gather feedback from members of the law department

Posted on April 06, 2009
An article describes a practice at HCL Technologies, an Indian IT services company, whereby the company collects immediate comments by employees. As portrayed by MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Winter 2009 at 46, employees can fill out ?service tickets?...

Conduct a ?role-sizing? to match responsibilities to titles and compensation levels

Posted on April 06, 2009
A law department of nearly 100 lawyers that I have worked with introduced an interesting concept to me: ?role sizing.? Since I know nothing more than that fact, let me speculate what role sizing entails. To role size might be...

In-house fox guarding the firm henhouse ? unrealistic to expect invoices to be slashed

Posted on April 06, 2009
Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse! How can a general counsel realistically expect the lawyer who is ostensibly managing the staffing and services provided by law firm to review the invoices of that firm and materially reduce them? If...

Part XXVIII of a collection of embedded metaposts

Posted on April 05, 2009
Here are the latest embedded metaposts (See my post of March 19, 2009: Part XXVII.), each of which shows the number of references cited within them. 1. Collaboration and teamwork (See my post of April 5, 2009: teamwork and collaboration...

Six search methods to retrieve documents from knowledge bases

Posted on April 05, 2009
A recent article describes six ?search technologies,? each of which can help a law department?s members find useful material stored on drives, intranets, or databases. The ABA J., Vol. 95, April 2009 at 43, focuses on litigation support rather than...

Disadvantages of picking a core team at a law firm to work on matters

Posted on April 05, 2009
As no good deed goes unpunished, so no good idea goes uncriticized (See my post of March 23, 2009: pros and cons of various practices, with 13 references and two metaposts.). Although I like the idea of a law department...

Parameters for a fixed-fee retainer paid to a law firm for occasional short calls

Posted on April 05, 2009
Many law departments would like to have an arrangement with a law firm whereby in-house lawyers or clients can telephone with a quick question and yet not worry about racking up fees. The solution is a retainer agreement whereby the...

Higher discounts for lower-value work?

Posted on April 05, 2009
A co-panelist recently mentioned as a cost-control method the practice of requesting higher discounts for work that the law department deems to be of less value. There may be a kernel of a useful idea in that practice, but I...

Some of the intellectually deepest ideas from this blog (res mensan)

Posted on April 05, 2009
A portion of the 4,200 posts on this blog are cerebral. For example, the ones I picked for this collection touch on deep and deeply significant ideas. Perhaps the most intellectually significant idea dealt with by this blog is neuroscience...

Most important concepts for general counsel as managers: the next ten

Posted on April 05, 2009
The ten most important management concepts chief legal officers should understand were unveiled earlier (See my post of Feb. 1, 2009: ten most important concepts: client, risk, quality, productivity, talent and then structure, information flow, decisions, value and objectivity)...

?What have we stopped doing this quarter that we did last quarter??

Posted on April 05, 2009
A general counsel on a recent panel said that he wants an answer to this question from his team every quarter. He does not want to hear about matters that ended; he wants to hear about low-value activities that are...

Sometimes in-house lawyers need to back away from the table

Posted on April 05, 2009
Lawyers for corporations always want a ?seat at the table.? But sometimes, if the truth be told, it is a good idea not to be at the table. For example, if a business manager brings along an in-house lawyer to...

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