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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

My first BLOOK ? blog book ? on outside counsel management!

Posted on January 07, 2009
I have arduously compiled, organized, commented on, indexed, and back-referenced 471 of my posts on outside counsel management. The 290-page PDF blook, which you can find much more about here, costs $75. The six chapters cover (1) when do you...

Retainer agreements to let your lawyers call a firm whenever they want

Posted on January 07, 2009
Harvard Pilgrim's general counsel, Laura Peabody, explained her law department?s retainer agreements. Speaking at a panel covered by the Nat?l Law J., Dec. 12, 2008, Peabodyexplains that ?she has a labor and employment boutique and an Employee Retirement Income Security...

Dramatic US and UK compensation differentials for the top in-house lawyer

Posted on January 07, 2009
Corp. Counsel, Vol.16, Jan. 2008, at 57, which cites compensation data from Incomes Data Services Ltd. Based on data from 83 organizations (more than 900 in-house lawyers) the average base pay for a U.K. head of legal is now roughly...

Seek budgets even for general advice, not just individual matters

Posted on January 07, 2009
Law departments may establish budgets for specific matters handled by outside counsel. However, many times in-house counsel call a partner for short or general advice. Those calls can mount up to significant bills and it makes sense to budget them....

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Top three reasons executive coaches are engaged

Posted on January 07, 2009
No one knows the frequency with which general counsel, or lawyers who report to them, avail themselves of executive coaches. My impression is that most general counsel in large companies can retain a personal coach with no one thinking twice...

XING and its law department members and group

Posted on January 07, 2009
I joined XING months ago, and other than one inquiry from a consultant, all has been silent. The social networking site has a huge following in Europe, but I have found little in the way of legal management material (See...

Five behaviors highly correlated with failure among newly-promoted lawyers

Posted on January 07, 2009
Actually, Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 87, Jan. 2009 at 56, says that these are traps that befall managers who take on new leadership roles and go after ?quick wins.? The managerial mistakes, however, sound all too familiar in law departments....

Legal metrics haven?t been correlated to indicators of corporate financial performance

Posted on January 07, 2009
As explained in strategy + bus., Iss. 53, Winter 2008 at 52, more global dispersal of a company?s research and development spending correlates to better financial performance. The performance indicators include operating margin, total shareholder return, market cap growth, and...

Mind mapping to help recognize and pursue priorities, and generally organize thoughts

Posted on January 06, 2009
Picture this. Some lawyers think visually, so software that graphically depicts ideas and their relationships to each other might be useful. I ran across an example on a blog called ?Tools for Thought.? All kinds of concepts would become clearer...

Entrepreneurial litigation financing, a nightmare of more big and better-funded lawsuits

Posted on January 06, 2009
An article in Corp. Counsel, Vol.16, Jan. 2008, at A2, describes a world that should frighten general counsel: aggressive investors capitalizing massive lawsuits as business ventures. For example, the article mentions briefly a public company listed on the UK?s AIM...

Two online forums for law department management (Legal OnRamp and LinkedIn)

Posted on January 06, 2009
The Am. Lawyer, Dec. 2008, at 110, discusses topic forums on Paul Lippe?s Legal OnRamp. The forum with the most members is ?Effective Management of Law Departments,? which I proudly moderate. It has more than 110 members. If in-house counsel...

Spearman?s g, the general intelligence of in-house lawyers, and high g?s are healthier

Posted on January 06, 2009
"General intelligence (the extent to which specific, measurable aspects of intelligence, such as linguistic facility, mathematical aptitude and spatial awareness are correlated in a given individual) is measured by psychologists using a value called Spearman?s g...

Oblique discounts by law firms ? a rebuttal to a misreading of my post

Posted on January 06, 2009
Jane Genova a writer/marketer and host of the blog Law and More, misconstrued a recent post by me (See my post of Jan. 2, 2009: oblique discounts.). There I cited a study that suggested quality brand companies might be reluctant...

Knowledge management should privilege tacit knowledge and not stick to an IT perspective

Posted on January 06, 2009
Tacit knowledge ?includes the unspoken knowledge that people draw from within themselves: observations, ingrained habits, inspirations, hunches, and other forms of awareness that are typically not written down or codified, but that live in people's minds and bodies, and give...

The cost advantage of offshoring to lower-cost countries is shrinking

Posted on January 04, 2009
A general counsel may countenance offshoring because if promises cost savings. The literature that promotes legal process outsourcing (LPO) speaks of costs being 50 percent or less to provide similar services. That advantage may have been true, and may still...

General counsel may inadvertently discourage bad news and overlook their chilling effect

Posted on January 04, 2009
?In 360-degree surveys, managers typically rate themselves higher than their colleagues do on most measures of performance." We all flatter ourselves. More specifically, based on a survey of over 4,000 US managers reported in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol...

Four ways a group or team can make decisions

Posted on January 04, 2009
To accomplish its tasks with efficiency, a group ought to agree on how it makes decisions. A facilitator can explain that there are four processes to reach a decision. Consensus is one, where everyone agrees that they can accept the...

Big general practice firms for patent litigation, IP specialists for patent prosecution

Posted on January 04, 2009
According to IP Law & Business? research last year, ?IP specialty firms accounted for only four of the 31 firms that handled three or more IP litigation matters in the U.S. for the world's 50 most innovative companies.? Research this...

Electronic brainstorming with decision-support software

Posted on January 04, 2009
Another stimulating idea from David Sibbet, Best Practices for Facilitation (Grove 2007) at 71, is electronic brainstorming. Have participants at an off-site bring their laptops and install simple group decision-support software. The book mentions software from CoVision and Catalyst Consulting...

Caf� conversations as a productive activity at retreats

Posted on January 04, 2009
Try this at your next retreat. "Caf� conversations structure small groups of five or six around the host who stays with the table after the rest rotate to new tables to pick up on other conversations, deepen the chosen topics,...

Thematic pairs that sum up the deepest tensions of law department management

Posted on January 04, 2009
?Thematic pairs? is the term introduced in Michael Shermer, Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown (Time Books 2005) at 258, to describe five deep themes that appear ubiquitously in the hundreds of articles and essays written by the...

Multiple cost centers in law departments

Posted on January 04, 2009
Not every law department operates under a single cost center. For example, some law departments have a separate cost center for the Corporate Secretary function or indeed for other functions that report to the general counsel, such as government affairs,...

Advantages and disadvantages of internal zero-based budgeting

Posted on January 02, 2009
Some law departments attempt to create their internal budgets from the ground up each year (See my post of July 6, 2007: an example of zero-based budgeting.). Advantages of zero-based budgets are that they challenge received wisdom. Social passing of...

Thoughts on the title ?Head of Dispute Resolution and Risk Management?

Posted on January 02, 2009
In July 2008 BAE Systems? general counsel chose a law firm partner to head its ?Dispute Resolution and Risk Management? group. According to Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, Dec. 2008 at 96, this is the title of the group. I have...

The two hardest questions for general counsel to measure and answer: productivity and value

Posted on January 02, 2009
?How do I measure the productivity of my department?? ?How do I measure the value I add?? If I could tell general counsel how to quantify their answers to these two vital questions, which would mean I could tell them...

Grass roots knowledge management, not the forest and below even the trees

Posted on January 02, 2009
Most knowledge-management initiatives imposed from the top down fail to take hold. The big picture forest wilts. Better to plant some trees: tools, initial encourage, and ongoing recognition, and then let lawyers below them devise their own ways to circulate...

Trends that general counsel spot and some risks associated with bandwagons

Posted on January 02, 2009
The corner offices of law departments are hardly immune to trends. Fashionable management ideas such as competitive bids, bill auditing, convergence, offshoring and global spread of offices deluge general counsel (See my post of May 14, 2005: Bain survey of...

Four dangers of leadership competency models

Posted on January 02, 2009
We admire law departments that describe the attributes of leadership. After all, doing so helps institutionalize the behaviors and values expected of leaders and introduces common terminology. Problems exist, however, with leadership competency programs, as outlined in the Harv...

Law departments might see rates hold but discounts offered in other ways by firms

Posted on January 02, 2009
?The price of something is often an important determinant of its perceived value, as Dan Ariely points out in Predictably Irrational.? Two writers add in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol., Vol. 86, Dec. 2008 at 31, ?If you discount prices...

Hyperpost on billing by law firms ? eight collected metaposts with URLs and two articles

Posted on January 02, 2009
Regular visitors to this blog know that I periodically collect posts on a similar topic into what I call metaposts. With some 220 of them in hand, I venture here to raise mere metaposts to hyperposts level. Is the blogging...

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