Law Department Management: In-House Counsel

Home -> Law Blog Directory -> In-House Counsel Blogs

OR PHONE (866) 635-1838 for Bankruptcy Help, (866) 635-6190 for Divorce,
(866) 635-2689 for Personal Injury or (866) 635-9402 for Criminal Defense

Find a Local Lawyer

Bankruptcy (866) 635-1838
Divorce (866) 635-6190
Personal Injury (866) 635-2689
Criminal Defense (866) 635-9402

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

Data on listed companies, and therefore the number of law departments: for every 1 million in population, 10-35 companies (and thus law departments)

Posted on January 14, 2011
Ten years or so ago, 18 countries deemed to operate under a common law system boasted 35 companies listed on a stock exchange for every million people in the country. Thus, if the United States had about 250 million residents...

WIBGI software wish lists ? ?wouldn?t it be great if ?? ? might stimulate improvements in legal department software

Posted on January 14, 2011
WIBGI as an acronym for ?wouldn?t it be great if ?.? appears in stimulating article by Nathan Myhrvold in the Harvard Bus. Rev., March 2010 at 47. The acronym set me to thinking that its application could power some productive...

With patent litigation, average costs might rise even while total industry costs decline

Posted on January 14, 2011
Nathan Myhrvold wrote a fascinating article about what he calls invention capital. The former chief technology officer at Microsoft and now the CEO of Intellectual Vendors, a company based on patents and invention, lays out a remarkable agenda for change...

Objections to compliance reporting to the general counsel

Posted on January 14, 2011
Two weeks ago Ben Heineman published a blog post about how compliance officers should co-report to the general counsel and to the chief financial officer. Roy Snell, the CEO of the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics, disagreed with the...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

We are not happier with many law firms to choose from: retainer?s regret and inflated expectations

Posted on January 14, 2011
Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood in Superconnect: Harnessing the power of networks and the strength of weak links (Norton 2010) at 80, refer to psychological studies that find that ?we are less satisfied when we have more choices than when...

If inside lawyers are perceived as less objective than outside counsel, a questionable proposition, their value shrivels

Posted on January 13, 2011
In a comment to a Ben Heineman blog post last week about how compliance officers should co-report to the general counsel and the chief financial officer, one person raised yet again the fundamental criticism that in-house lawyers, beholden for their....

MySalary.com and Associate General Counsel base salary

Posted on January 13, 2011
The website of MySalary.com presents compensation data for in-house lawyers in the United States. For example, it states that $199,361 is the median base salary for Associate General Counsel. The bell curve chart on the same webpage shows that the...

An interesting argument that general counsel agree more readily to report to a COO if promoted

Posted on January 13, 2011
I read online that Morgan Stanley?s chief legal officer was to report to the company?s chief operating officer. The writer contrasted the situation with Thomas Russo who insisted on reporting to the CEO when he took the top legal role...

An unusual distribution of lawyers and non-lawyers at Harrah?s, plus thoughts on compliance benchmarks and commuting GCs

Posted on January 12, 2011
The legal department of Harrah?s Entertainment, profiled in Corp. Counsel, Jan. 2011 at 82, has 62 people, of which 22 are lawyers. That means 40 of them are not lawyers, a quite high distribution. Very typically US law departments of...

Multivariable testing as a method of systematically taking decisions

Posted on January 12, 2011
More than a decade ago, the Economist wrote about a man, Art Hammer, and his deductive methodology for number crunching, multivariable testing (MVT). It is a mathematical way to sort through many variables in a decision and determine which are...

Three causes of stress for in-house lawyers: ignorance, in the dark, and in a hurry

Posted on January 12, 2011
Stress levels of corporate lawyers were asked about in a survey of Dutch law departments by the Dutch law firm Houthoff Buruma. As reported in the European Lawyer, Sept. 2010 at 34, the respondents fingered three main causes of pressure:...

A three-way division of lawyers at Spain?s Indra: corporate governance, businesses, and corporate specialties

Posted on January 11, 2011
A profile of Indra, a $3 billion IT services company headquartered in Spain, lays out broadly how its 50 lawyers are organized. Iberian Lawyer, July/Aug. 2010 at 27, describes one group as ?Secretariat, supporting the Board?s needs and the regulatory,...

Three reactions to an Economist article about offshoring legal services

Posted on January 11, 2011
The Economist, Dec. 18, 2010 at 132, predicts increasing use of legal offshore providers. Three points deserve mention. ?Of the $180 billion that Americans spend on lawyers each year, only about $1 billion goes to outsourcers. If the $180 billion...

If there is a dispute over a bill, you as the inside lawyer should set the amount

Posted on January 11, 2011
A piece in Corp. Counsel, Jan. 2011 at A2, expresses the views of a partner with the Butler Rubin firm. Under ?fairness and integrity in billing? he describes and approves a rule that a mentor of his espoused. ?If a...

Indices, synthetic and natural, as a benchmark tool

Posted on January 11, 2011
?Synthetic indices,? as explained by the Economist, Jan. 8, 2011 at 60, are ?indices combining several related measures into a single number which are often used to back broad claims.? For example, an index of corporate IP prowess might be...

By one rule of thumb, inside counsel are far too costly in relation to outside counsel

Posted on January 11, 2011
A supplement to Chapter 4 of Robert Haig?s Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (West) at 4.3 note 1, quotes an article from GC California Magazine (May 14, 2008). The article?s author, a former general counsel, wrote that ?[s]ome...

Close to half of Dutch in-house lawyers never practiced at a law firm

Posted on January 10, 2011
It is hard for this blogger to escape US-centrism, given my background and primarily domestic consulting history. Aside from whatever blinders I wear, I do believe that law departments outside the United States have the same management concerns, perspectives, tools,...

A missing benchmark: R&D inventors per in-house patent lawyer or staff member

Posted on January 10, 2011
Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs employs 1,000 researchers and has produced a portfolio of 27,600 active patents; it added 2,100 as registered in 2009. These figures come from 2010 Intelligence Report & Directory Series of Leaders League at 82, which gave me...

Competitive monitoring could be done by inside patent lawyers or by the R&D function

Posted on January 10, 2011
Monitoring competitive moves in the intellectual property space could fall to in-house patent lawyers or it could fall to the R&D department. A French intellectual property consultancy, OPI, has found that 70 percent of the time in French companies the...

Dutch in-house counsel show a steady shift to female lawyers

Posted on January 10, 2011
A study of Dutch law departments by Dutch law firm Houthoff Buruma found a steady increase by age cohort in the percentage of in-house lawyers who are women. Above age 51, only 15 percent are women; 30 percent ? double...

To convey managerial direction, the notions of exploitation or exploration

Posted on January 10, 2011
A clever and useful distinction for managers uses the terms exploration and exploitation as a way to describes search modes. These concepts for how to find new ideas and improvements make sense for general counsel. General counsel need to push...

Seven essential practices of personal productivity

Posted on January 06, 2011
The website of Time Savvy Attorneys refers to all lawyers and notes that ?Our productivity is a function of the choices we make and the approach we take to making those choices.? It then lists ?seven essential practices [that] provide...

You can benefit from tracking your own time, after your own fashion

Posted on January 05, 2011
Time tracking by in-house counsel as a department-wide obligation does not appeal to me, I will admit, but I feel differently about an individual lawyer who keeps a personal record of what that lawyer does. Once you recognize that you...

Data about base salaries of Brazilian and Latin American senior lawyers of multinationals

Posted on January 05, 2011
The good people at Laurence Simons, the global executive search firm, sent me data about compensation among Brazilian and other Latin American in-house lawyers. If you are interested in the entire PowerPoint, email Berta Papp. In mid-2010, the median base...

An effective law department: a common notion but it lacks construct validity

Posted on January 04, 2011
A previous post defined construct validity (See my post of Dec. 15, 2010: Meyers Briggs claimed to lack construct validity.). Initially, we would need a consensual construct for effective law departments. ?A construct is research-based and its meaning is agreed...

Tension between dispassionate dissections of management and our deeper needs for popular memory or beliefs

Posted on January 04, 2011
A review in the NY Rev. of Books, Jan. 13, 2011 at 40, contrasts critical history and popular memory. Critical historians debunk common but mistaken images of what happened. George Washington never cut down the cherry tree; Soujourner Truth didn?t...

Wealth of articles about legal operations in the footnotes to leading treatise

Posted on January 04, 2011
As I read through the latest supplement to Robert Haig?s Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (West) I marveled at the large number of articles cited in the various update chapters. True, some of them go back to 2006...

Yesterday, for 806 law departments the fifth report from General Counsel Metrics issued

Posted on January 04, 2011
Whew! It?s been a whirlwind of a year, and so deeply gratifying to consider that close to a thousand general counsel have benefited from the largest benchmark survey ever conducted ? twice as large as all the others last year...

Simply to compare your department?s size to others doesn?t amount to a benchmark

Posted on January 03, 2011
A footnote in the 2010 Supplement to Robert Haig?s Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (West) in Chapter 17 at 17, refers to a listing of the 200 largest legal departments. That list, it says, ?has provided general counsel...

Ten more very important concepts for those who manage in-house lawyers

Posted on January 03, 2011
The hot-stove league of law department management ? would that there were one! ? could jaw forever about the All-Stars of concepts. Here I nominate a third group: accountability, competency, competition, expectations (perceptions), diminishing returns, experience curve, power, satisfaction, scope...

Previous | Next

Related Law Bulletins

Insurance Department Issues Second Annual Ohio Medical Liability Closed Claim Report
COLUMBUS — The Ohio Department of Insurance has issued its secon...

Injury Verdict Upheld in Chicago Police Department Auto Accident
A verdict awarded from a personal injury case in Chicago against t...

Department Of State Update on Implementation of E3 Visas for Australians
Our office receives many questions about when the new E-3 visa cat...