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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

Substantial percentages of in-house lawyers located away from corporate headquarters

Posted on January 16, 2009
Data of close to 100 law departments, from predominantly US companies, show an interesting pattern. The pattern involves the percentage of lawyers located away from corporate headquarters. Approximately one third of the companies had all their lawyers clustered at headquarters...

Hourly cost gap between inside and outside counsel might be about one-third

Posted on January 16, 2009
Earlier I argued that a fully loaded in-house counsel hourly rate of $200, as reported in a survey, might actually be considerably higher if we could dig into its derivation and calculation (See my post of Jan. 16, 2009: attack...

More attacks on the median cost per hour of inside attorneys (~$200)

Posted on January 16, 2009
According to a recent survey that collected 2007 data from several hundred law departments, their median fully-loaded in-house cost was slightly over $200 an hour. The report explains that it calculated this figure by dividing total inside spending per attorney...

Software that has enhanced this blog and my blook on outside counsel

Posted on January 15, 2009
My blook on outside counsel managementcould not have been published without a range of software. Word, the sina qua non software. Every word in the blog and blog owes a debt to Word. Dragon Naturally Speaking for dictation (See my...

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Box-and-whisker plots to compactly display much data

Posted on January 15, 2009
An excellent way to portray data from a collection is the box-and-whisker plot. The box in the middle shows by its top line the third quartile figure in the collection, where 25 percent of the data points in the sample...

Many lawyers in dispersed offices rely on support staff from the business unit

Posted on January 15, 2009
If a law department staffs a lawyer in a foreign country, that lawyer probably concentrates first on the support of the business unit that provides an office (See my post of Jan. 11, 2009: Microsoft?s generalist policy.). That being likely,...

Definitions of terms used by managers of law departments ? Part V

Posted on January 15, 2009
Four times I have attempted to pull together the definitions on this blog of terms that are important for general counsel (See my post of May 3, 2006: 32 definitions; Aug. 26, 2006: ten definitions; and Nov. 26, 2006: 13...

No appreciable increase in overhead when law departments spawn international offices

Posted on January 14, 2009
At first blush it might seem that a law department with several international locations would incur materially higher overhead costs. Conversely, a geographically centralized law department, with nearly all of its lawyers in one location, might enjoy what we can...

Performance metrics differ from benchmark metrics

Posted on January 14, 2009
When I think of benchmark metrics, I think of a sizable number of law departments each contributing similar data, and a presentation visually or with the quartiles and averages of those numbers. Then each participating law department can compare its....

Part XXIII of a collection of embedded metaposts

Posted on January 13, 2009
Here are the most recent embedded metaposts with URL links (See my post of Dec.29, 2008: Part XXII.), each of which shows the number of references cited within them. 1. Benchmarks, historically (See my post of Jan. 12, 2009: benchmarks...

Median benchmarks for comparables stay quite stable over periods of five or more years

Posted on January 12, 2009
Many surveys of law departments ? such as those from Altman Weil, Thomson Hildebrandt, and Empsight ? compare current metrics to the previous year?s metrics. What the survey reports do not do is show how a metric has endured over...

A definition of reporting, and some further reflections

Posted on January 12, 2009
In the simplest meaning of the term "to report to someone," the supervisor whom you report to is the one who can hire you, fire you, decide what your pay is, and decide on promotions. The sound byte is hire,...

In-house official reporting lines are not ambiguous, but whom to keep happy may be

Posted on January 12, 2009
"Unlike in law firms, where the reporting lines are obvious to everyone, there is ambiguity in corporate reporting structures, and they usually do not work in reality as they appear on paper." Not so, say I. Official reporting lines are...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #89 ? additions to earlier posts

Posted on January 12, 2009
R&D spending is seven times total legal spending. For the ?Global Innovation 1000,? as defined in an article from strategy + bus., Iss. 53, Winter 2008 at 60, R&D spending as a percentage of sales amounted to 3.7 percent in...

Praise for Ms. VBA (Laura Miller) and her contributions to this blogs

Posted on January 11, 2009
This blog has accumulated close to 3,900 posts. For me to be able to find, organize and build on the 14.7MB of material I have written, I need software tools. I tried to learn Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming...

Commendable practices regarding staff lawyers in overseas offices

Posted on January 11, 2009
?The first lawyers Microsoft tends to put on the ground overseas are commercial attorneys that negotiate contracts and provide basic legal advice.? To address the meat-and-potatoes of what?s on the in-house table makes good sense. Because of that front-line need,...

Whether it?s good strategically to retain plaintiff?s firms when you sue other companies

Posted on January 11, 2009
In the ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Nov. 2008 at 34, the author states his conviction that his company?s retention of plaintiffs? firms to bring lawsuits against other companies has been groundbreaking. Put modestly, it ?can also be seen as a...

Solid suggestions to help make decisions in teams

Posted on January 11, 2009
An article in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 85, Nov. 2008 at 121, offers a number of techniques that will improve decision-making on law department teams or committees (See my post of Jan. 4, 2009: four ways to make decisions.)....

Good practice to find and engage lawyers who are not actively seeking a job, aka passive job seekers

Posted on January 11, 2009
Not that much hiring is underway during these troubled times, and not that many general counsel want to devote time to potential hires, but an article in talent mgt., Dec. 2008 at 50, discusses attention to ?passive job seekers.? ?[R]esearch...

Six key reasons to hire your own lawyer for an overseas office, plus two more

Posted on January 11, 2009
A sidebar for an article on overseas legal teams, published in the ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Nov. 2008 at 51, pulls together several arguments in favor of adding a lawyer to your staff in a foreign country. 1. ?Language? ?...

Law department uses an online tool to diagnose team effectiveness

Posted on January 11, 2009
The autobiography of Borealis AG?s law department and its spunky general counsel, Ruth Steinholtz, appears in the ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Nov. 2008 at 38. Steinholtz and the coach/consultant she retained embraced wholeheartedly personal and team development activities...

?Fight to win every lawsuit against your company that lacks merit?

Posted on January 11, 2009
A long article in the ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Nov. 2008 at 30, thunders that a law department fares better in litigation if it ?makes winning in an out of court the fundamental priority in dealing with all ? repeat,...

Law departments: a close-knit family or a leave-me-alone workplace

Posted on January 09, 2009
Several posts have commented on the emotional odyssey of Borealis AG?s law department and its deeply-committed general counsel, Ruth Steinholtz, which appears in the ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Nov. 2008 at 38. A small part of her many-pronged approach to...

Fixed-fee arrangements for specified kinds of lawsuits against LyondellBasell

Posted on January 08, 2009
LyondellBasell has agreements with certain outside firms to pay them a ?negotiated annual fee for handling all litigation in specified areas such as toxic tort and personal injury litigation,? as further described in an article in the ACC Docket, Vol...

Do law departments second-guess litigation counsel who try a case?

Posted on January 08, 2009
In the midst of a paean to ?millions for defense, not a penny for tribute,? an article by Joseph Speelman in the ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Nov. 2008 at 34, quotes a litigation partner: The company ensures that he has...

An assertion that settlements are often split among units so none feel accountable

Posted on January 08, 2009
?All too often at many companies, the costs of judgments and settlements are allocated to, and divided between, several corporate departments, therefore diluted effectively enough to relieve everyone of all responsibility or accountability for the total economic impact...

In-house counsel don?t job hop in the UK, so their salaries stagnate!?

Posted on January 08, 2009
?Speaking very generally, private practice lawyers tend to move firms frequently, while their in-house counterparts stay put.? Sapna Bedi FitzGerald, chair of the Commerce & Industry Group and head of legal at LSL Property Services plc made this remark and...

Clustify software analyzes posts on this blog and finds related ones

Posted on January 08, 2009
I keep searching for software that will enhance this blog. Two days ago, Bill Dimm, President of Hot Neuron, showed me one that impressed me. Dimm demonstrated as I watched how his Clustify software organized 354 of my posts on...

A five-year business plan by a law department is a waste of time

Posted on January 08, 2009
The tumultuous saga of Borealis AG?s law department appears in the ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Nov. 2008 at 38. In September 2006, the team had a dozen members, ?a mixture of lawyers, paralegals (contract manager and company secretarial), a law...

Location of in-house counsel will eventually match the global footprint of a company

Posted on January 08, 2009
Strategy + bus., Iss. 53, Winter 2008 at 52, has a thoughtful, metrics-based analysis of how global dispersal of a company?s research and development correlates to its improved financial performance. ?Overall, our analysis suggests that companies taking a more aggressive...

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