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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

Seven reasons why law departments do not take dramatic action against costs

Posted on February 19, 2009
Jordan Furlong writes clearly and persuasively about three telling reasons why general counsel haven?t sharpened their cost-cutting knives. Midway through he summarize his reasons: ?I actually think the first two reasons account for most of the problem: GCs are under-incentivized...

?Some of the Partners? Infighting Was Apparent to Us?

Posted on February 19, 2009
? groaned the GC, commenting on the competition going on between two partners from a large law firm who battled right in front of him for his attention. Each of the two partners wanted the right to be credited as...

A large IP department demonstrates the breadth of the specialty practice

Posted on February 19, 2009
IP Review, Iss. 24, Winter 2008/2009 at 13, profiles the German automotive components company, Bosch. It explains that the large IP team of Bosch has two sector-specific patent groups (mechanical and electronic), a licensing expert, a trademark specialist, and an...

A hundred-year old patent department

Posted on February 18, 2009
In Germany in 1897, Robert Bosch applied to register a patent for the magneto device that starts a car?s engine. Eleven years later, his company formed an intellectual property division, which celebrated its centenary last year. During the intervening 100...

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Ten suggestions for how to hear from everyone in a group

Posted on February 18, 2009
Techniques exist to encourage people to speak out in meetings (See my post of May 8, 2008: instant feedback after a meeting.). These ideas are most constructive in staff meetings where members periodically convene. 1. Remind senior lawyers and big...

Blanket waivers sought by law firms

Posted on February 18, 2009
Large law firms will accept smaller assignments if doing so will not conflict them out of larger assignments later. In fact, Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, Aug. 2008 at 22, states that ?more companies are being asked to sign a blanket...

The law departments of law firms

Posted on February 18, 2009
Until I spoke recently with Elizabeth Chambliss, a professor at NY Law School, I had only thought of law firms, some of the large ones at least, as having a single (and perhaps part-time) ?general counsel? (See my post of...

Should general counsel insist that their outside law firms use legal-offshore personnel?

Posted on February 18, 2009
This was one of the questions Paul Boynton asked me on a recent podcast. My response was ?no, but that is an interesting possibility.? As I thought about it later, there is no reason a general counsel can?t ask a...

Low-cost recruiting by State Farm?s Law Department through Google Adwords

Posted on February 18, 2009
At the top of my Gmail on Feb. 16th was a Google ad by the Law Department of State Farm! They are recruiting lawyers. When I clicked through, I read: Legal / Litigation Our mission is to provide high quality,...

Law departments should be able to claim savings if accounts payable spends less on checks

Posted on February 18, 2009
Little is known by me about the cost to a company of processing a law firm invoice (See my post of Nov. 5, 2006: ?processing invoices?; Sept. 14, 2005: estimate of costs; April 6, 2008: multiple payment destinations.). Yet the...

?The Firm Should Market Me More? [Bruce Heintz, Outside Looking In]

Posted on February 18, 2009
... requested the GC, explaining that one of the roles of the relationship partner is to act as a talent agent to introduce the firm?s rising stars and up-and-coming practice areas. But I thought that law departments were tired of...

Speculation on the FBI?s high number of lawyers per billion of budget

Posted on February 16, 2009
Government agencies use budgets instead of revenue for their basic comparative metric. For example, the FBI has a $6 billion budget, according to Diversity & The Bar, Jan./Feb. 2009 at 42. Its office of the general counsel, headed by Valerie...

Debut of guest author, Bruce Heintz, as Outside Looking In

Posted on February 16, 2009
Law Department Management Blog welcomes as a guest author leading law-firm consultant Bruce Heintz. Bruce has written five posts which will appear in the next few days. Each begins with a pithy quote from a GC that raises a particular...

Software to manage Board material is not yet widely used by law departments

Posted on February 16, 2009
This is still a nascent genre. According to the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) 2008 Law Department Survey, when asked which packages they use, three quarters of the 45 respondents said ?none.? And these were mostly large companies with large...

Circulate posts from this blog to your colleagues with permalinks

Posted on February 15, 2009
In the past week, at least 50 people have visited this site from a very large pharmaceutical company. As I reconstruct what happened, somebody senior notified the law department that a particular post on this blog ought to be read....

The tough lot of the law department for a spin-off

Posted on February 15, 2009
After a corporate spin-off, such as when Kraft left the Philip Morris orbit, Catalent emerged from Cardinal Health, or Cendant broke itself into pieces, a spanking new law department enters the world (See my post of March 2, 2008: spin-off;...

Three specialized software packages: entity management, ethics compliance and IP management

Posted on February 15, 2009
The International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) 2008 Law Department Survey at 11 reports on three kinds of specialized software for law departments. This post lists the packages and the percentage of the 45 respondent law departments, mostly large, that reported...

Perplexing data on users of e-billing software

Posted on February 15, 2009
The website of LegalMaster lists approximately 131 companies and what seems to be the e-billing system their law department uses. After some scrubbing of that data, I can pass on below the number of users for two dozen packages and...

Matter management systems are only as good as their reporting capabilities

Posted on February 15, 2009
Matter management systems all have reporting capabilities, from canned reports that come with installation to elaborate report writers. The low-tech way to supplement those capabilities is to export data to a spreadsheet and massage it there (See my post of...

Rabid-dog quotes, which provoked me to disagree strongly

Posted on February 15, 2009
In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch calmly deals with a rabid dog. He shoots it. Similarly, a number of statements quoted on this blog have triggered in me a metaphorical desire to do the same. After telling off another...

?The critical legal issue facing business today is reducing business risk.?

Posted on February 15, 2009
No. I disagree with this quote, which comes from ACC Docket, Vol. 27, Jan./Feb. 2009 at 58. Sure, if you run a company that specializes in consulting on compliance solutions, like the author of that tendentious quote, every corporate problem...

Data for small departments on the mix between salaries, bonuses and incentive compensation

Posted on February 14, 2009
The ACC Empsight Small Law Compensation Survey provides data about general counsel of law departments with fewer than 10 lawyers. The data comes from ACC Docket, Vol. 27, Jan./Feb. 2009 at 8. The Survey gives the mix for them between...

?State-of-the-art technology? as another hackneyed term

Posted on February 14, 2009
No one boasts of their plain-vanilla software, their program that gets the job done and thank you ma?am. Everyone in articles brags about chrome-plated, futuristic, leading-edge whizbang that is the talk of the town. Magazines praise you and pick you...

Some specifics about an RFP process for single lawsuits

Posted on February 14, 2009
Alex Arato, associate general counsel of CA Inc., recently described his law department?s RFP process. As reported in InsideCounsel, Jan. 2009 at 58, Arato solicits around five to seven firms for proposals on individual matters. That number makes sense (See...

?Demand Management? at Royal Bank of Canada?s legal department

Posted on February 14, 2009
InsideCounsel, Jan. 2009 at 57, summarizes of a gathering of in-house counsel. Murray Aust, a senior counsel at Royal Bank of Canada, describes briefly his law department?s program called ?Demand Management.? He refers to it as the complement to vendor...

Obstacles to change ? concentration required and errors while learning

Posted on February 14, 2009
An article in the McKinsey Quarterly, 2008, No. 4, at 131, by two Stanford professors, has much to offer about innovation in an organization. ?Learning how to do something new is far more time-consuming than doing what you already know;...

?World-class? should mean improvement year over year, instead of an end state

Posted on February 14, 2009
Some general counsel aspire to have their law department operate at a ?world-class? level (See my post of May 16, 2007: misguided goals embedded in the aspiration.). By that term they mean their team should perform at the level of...

An update on the unicorn of law department management, best practices

Posted on February 14, 2009
Best practices do not exist, despite what many general counsel would like to believe. A few years ago I collected a few posts on ?best practices,? but since then there have been two dozen more (See my post of June...

Do a few basics well and creatively, rather than seizing on the next great idea

Posted on February 14, 2009
A splendid article in the McKinsey Quarterly, 2008, No. 4, at 131, by Stanford professors Hayagreeva Rao and Robert Sutton, makes the counter-intuitive point that efforts to innovate get a boost from constraints. Oddly, if you limit the number of...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #92 ? additions to earlier posts

Posted on February 13, 2009
Cost savings in discovery from the use of translation software. If discovery produces documents that are not in a language you or your litigation lawyers can read, t can be dramatically cheaper to have software do the brunt of the...

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