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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

Distinguish between rate increases, fee increases, and outside counsel spend increases

Posted on January 28, 2009
Hourly rates increase year after year at most law firms. That does not necessarily mean that the amount the firm charges to do the same tasks increases at the same level. The firm might use lower-cost associates, write off time,...

14 ?law department? blogs from Justia and data about their rank and currency

Posted on January 28, 2009
Justia is the wonderful group that designed and runs my website. They also maintain a vast directory of law-related blogs. Under the category Corporate Law Department Blogs? 14 are listed. Justia gives each blawg a rank based on the number...

Four more blogs that cover topics aimed at in-house attorneys

Posted on January 28, 2009
In fits and starts I run across blogs kindred to this one: on how best to manage aspects of law departments. Four more have recently surfaced: InHouse Insider by Esq. Recruiting LLC In-House by the staff of the Association of...

Groups are good to share information but not so good to make decisions

Posted on January 28, 2009
A knee-jerk reaction for some general counsel who face a management challenge is to set up a team to study the challenge and recommend what to do. It is engrained in all of us that a group does better than...

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The availabity and self-confident biases afflict law department decision-makers

Posted on January 28, 2009
When people in law departments try to solve a management problem, they can succumb to the seductions of the ?availability bias.? We grab first for the data that is most easily at hand. For example, if the problem is that...

Some of the many sites from which readers reach this blog

Posted on January 25, 2009
During the 30 days ending on January 22, 2009, Feedburner reported the following 19 ?Uncommon Uses? of this blog, LawDepartmentManagementBlog.com. ?Uncommon uses? are accesses of the feed through sites not universal to all of FeedBurner's feed users, such as its...

Law department management is flat ? good practices transcend country borders

Posted on January 25, 2009
Someone visited this blog recently after a Google search of the term ?law department best practices ? Canada.? I smiled at the assumption that Canadian law departments might have unique management hurdles or solutions. Laws, judicial institutions, and the legal...

The bottleneck general counsel is bad for the department and for law firms

Posted on January 25, 2009
?When decision rights are not clear or well distributed, every decision tends to get pushed up the hierarchy." Consequently, if a general counsel does not define the roles and responsibilities adequately for those on the org chart and does not...

A law department promulgates policies on when its lawyers should be involved in decisions

Posted on January 25, 2009
A fascinating article in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Winter 2009 at 38, explains network analysis as a tool to elucidate decision-making. One case study describes a company that had abnormally high levels of collaboration on decisions. Why? "The...

Decisions made in law departments and a method to study their effectiveness

Posted on January 25, 2009
Social scientists could trace a series of decisions as they work their way through a law department. They could record each decision maker?s involvement ? the nature and duration of their input and the result. The resulting process map would...

Lawyers, too, probably favor talking to someone rather than searching a database

Posted on January 25, 2009
Social scientists have discovered that "who you know" has much to do with "what you know." According to research cited in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Winter 2009 at 36, "engineers and scientists looking for information were roughly five...

Attributized Bayesian analysis (!) and the selection of law firms

Posted on January 25, 2009
One of ten ?predictive analytic techniques? describe in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Winter 2009 at 32-35, attributized Bayesian analysis could be used by a law department. For example, the tool could clarify why an in-house lawyer selects firms...

?In many cases, management has no idea how law departments spend money?

Posted on January 23, 2009
This stunning admission comes from J. Alberto Gonzalez-Pita, general counsel of the Las Vegas Sands Corp. His impression is that many C-Suiters think general counsel ?just sit around and write checks all the time ? and very expensive checks with...

Four thoughts on cost-saving techniques implemented en masse

Posted on January 23, 2009
A recent post describes four steps the Gap Inc. is taking to stem increases in legal fees (See my post of Jan. 22, 2009: plans, smaller firms, contract lawyers and offshoring.). From writing about those four steps, four thoughts occurred...

A qualitative difference, perhaps, between an inside hour and an outside hour

Posted on January 23, 2009
Observers of the legal industry make much about the gap between the costs per hour of inside lawyers and the cost per hour of outside counsel. This blogger, indeed, has raised his pen in that debate (See my post of...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #91 ? additions to earlier posts

Posted on January 23, 2009
More costs not included in fully-loaded ...

14 US patent applications that managers of legal departments might want to know about

Posted on January 23, 2009
A previous post on my spelunking among US patent filings for those that have relevance to law department managers lists two granted patents (See my post of Jan. 23, 2009: many more patents that pertain to legal department managers.). This...

Plethora of patents that pertain to legal department management

Posted on January 23, 2009
Intrigued by the handful of patents or patent applications pertinent to general counsel that have come to light, I foraged on Free Patents Online. I searched in abstracts of a US database for the term ?legal.? That term came up...

Another patent for legal strategic planning and streamlined processes

Posted on January 23, 2009
?Legal strategic analysis planning and evaluation control system and method? is the euphonious, lapidary description of United States Patent 5875431. It came to light because a friend of mine, Stuart E. Rickerson, is one of the patent owners. My goal...

Four ways to reduce the budget Gap ? plans, smaller firms, contract lawyers and offshoring

Posted on January 22, 2009
Michelle Banks, the general counsel of The Gap Inc. summarized at a recent panel four cost-management steps she has taken lately. I quote from the ACC Docket, Vol. 30, Dec. 2008 at 27. The Gap is ?asking its outside firms...

Another issue with outside counsel guidelines: copyright on works made for hire

Posted on January 22, 2009
Christian Liipfert wrote me about another contentious topic for outside counsel guidelines (See my post of Dec. 31, 2008: five hot buttons and a link to my article.): who owns the work product the lawyer creates? I quote from his...

The top ranking of ?keeping apprised? suggests law department frailties

Posted on January 22, 2009
According to a summary of compliance-related findings from the 2008 ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey, "For the fourth year in a row, ?keeping apprised of company activities that have legal implications? was the top concern of the in-house counsel (81...

Goal at Ernst & Young?s law department to respond to all calls or messages within two hours

Posted on January 22, 2009
The 2005 issue of Robert Half Legal?s Future Law Office report, ?Client Service: Challenges and Strategies,? at 13, quotes a senior lawyer in the legal department of Ernst & Young. When a client satisfaction survey revealed that clients wanted faster...

In 2005, what did law firms and law departments use offshore resources to accomplish?

Posted on January 22, 2009
A survey of 200 attorneys in 2005, ?from the largest law firms and corporations in the United States and Canada,? asked about offshore services. Robert Half Legal?s Future Law Office report, ?Client Service: Challenges and Strategies,? at 14, gave the...

A contracts expert disagrees with the notion that free, online contracts will amount to much

Posted on January 22, 2009
Ken Adams, who knows all there is to know about contracts and agreements, doesn?t think that my projection about contracts available for free online is, well, presciently drafted. Ken writes on his blog, Adams Drafting,?YourFreeLegalForms.com is another docstoc...

Six Sigma and pro bono at Caterpillar

Posted on January 22, 2009
Starting in early 2006, the General Counsel of Caterpillar (James Buda) asked a senior lawyer to put together a Six Sigma team to focus on a pro bono program for the Legal Services Division (See my post of Feb. 13,...

Cannibalization and its discontents ? consultants and lawyers give away knowledge on the Net

Posted on January 22, 2009
If you build the knowledge, will they come? My field of dreams has been that this blog will attract consulting clients. ?Hey, here?s a guy who knows a lot about how to manage things in legal departments, an attorney by...

In-house attorneys can be as objective as outside counsel

Posted on January 22, 2009
I defend in-house counsel from their detractors. One set of critics are those who say that if you are an employee lawyer you can?t be as objective as a partner in a law firm. They say that in-house lawyers know...

A law department that wants law firms to submit fees and expenses promptly

Posted on January 21, 2009
One of the conditions JDS Uniphase mandates for its law firms are that they submit invoices every month "and should include all fees and expenses incurred through the 15th day prior to the date of the invoice." On that schedule,...

A detailed annual operating plan and quarterly rolling updates

Posted on January 21, 2009
JDS Uniphase explains in its Guidelines For Professional Service Providers that Its Legal Department creates an Annual Operating Plan. The plan tracks ?well over 200 separate line items and forecasts spending on them each quarter.? That budget is immensely detailed,...

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