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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

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #84 ? additions to earlier posts

Posted on November 30, 2008
Offers of judgment under FRCP 68. Warning: I stopped practicing law years ago, so take the following comment as a lay understanding. If a party offers to pay an amount to the other side in settlement, and the other side...

Difference between ?general compliance? and ?regulatory compliance?

Posted on November 30, 2008
During a Counsel to Counsel forum held in Madrid, Spain on Feb. 26, 2008, one of the attendees spoke about two kinds of compliance functions. I quote a summary of the meeting from the Martindale-Hubble website. ?Here, one speaker recalled...

Jekyll counselors but should we Hyde litigators?

Posted on November 30, 2008
Should you have your employment lawyer, who advises clients on how to minimize litigation, also handle employment lawsuits? Should your patent lawyers prosecute in the morning and litigate in the afternoon? How about your environmental lawyers likewise playing offense and...

At the end of a competitive bid, keep more than one service provider on the line

Posted on November 30, 2008
It seems extravagant (of time) and duplicitous (of integrity) at the end of a competitive bid to negotiate simultaneously with more than one law firm. Yet the ACC Docket, Vol. 25, Sept. 2007 at 43, offers some language to enable...

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Blawgs listed on the ABA site related to law department management

Posted on November 30, 2008
Tracing a visit to this blog from the ABA?s website and its compendium of blawgs, I took a few minutes to see how many of its categories pertain to law department management. Amidst the surfeit of substantive law blogs, here...

Offshoring should mean not just cheaper costs but also improved processes and handoffs

Posted on November 30, 2008
My friend Ron Friedmann, of Integreon, was talking about offshoring legal services. He stressed that cost economies are not the only benefits of using resources in lower-cost locales to handle legal-related services. Ron made the point that when a competent...

RFP processes can get out of control

Posted on November 30, 2008
General counsel can legitimately fret that a process to select outside counsel through their responses to a Request for Proposal can careen off the tracks. The team that develops the RFP has a tendency to Christmas-tree it with lots of...

A prediction that HQ legal groups will shrink

Posted on November 30, 2008
The Economist, Nov. 15, 2008 at 78, speculates that with the current torrent of downsizing will come trimming of headquarters staff. It cites Nortel, which is ?handing over activities such as marketing and R&D, which were previously run from the...

Balanced scorecards for law departments available from AKS-Labs

Posted on November 29, 2008
Bob Elliott, President of AKS-Labs in Raleigh, NC, sent me examples of his company?s balanced scorecards for legal departments. AKS-Labs offers software, Balanced Scorecard Designer, that automates the development of a scorecard:. The AKS-Labs litigation scorecard looks at lawsuits from...

Management acronyms that should be on your GTKL (got to know list)

Posted on November 29, 2008
PDQ learn these (See my post of Nov. 27, 2005: acronyms, jargon and corp-speak.): EMEA (See my post of Nov. 13, 2007: Europe, Middle East and Africa) CAGR (See my post of Nov. 26, 2006: compound annual growth rate.) FAQ...

Assembled posts on the Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES)

Posted on November 26, 2008
Several posts have discussed aspects of the Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard (LEDES) (See my post of April 14, 2005: European law departments; Sept. 18, 2006: electronic legal invoice delivery; Sept. 18, 2006: LEDES files for budgets; Feb. 21, 2007:...

Short cut for an RFP process ? direct talks with a qualified firm or two

Posted on November 24, 2008
Rather than wading through a full RFP process, consider an abbreviated method. Explain to an experienced service provider the outlines of what you are seeking. Provide them with as much detail as you can and ask them to share with...

Interim-jurists in the Netherlands as a resource for legal departments

Posted on November 24, 2008
Paul Elst, one of my readers, wrote me. He is an attorney in the Netherlands and has an interesting story that probably has counterparts in many countries of the world. I work as legal counsel on a freelance basis. In...

Five continua on which to place every law department

Posted on November 24, 2008
Our industry needs a framework to describe the essentials of any law department. Specialists in many fields have created such taxonomies for their subjects, such astronomers and botanists (See my post of Nov. 24, 2008: botany and its lessons.). As...

Botany and its lessons for law department management ? morphology and classification

Posted on November 24, 2008
The London Rev. of Books, Vol. 30, Nov. 20, 2008 at 21, reviews a study of the pre-eminent botanist of the 19th century, Joseph Hooker. The travails of Hooker and other botanists as they struggled to find a system to...

A RACI chart on roles for information technology contracts

Posted on November 23, 2008
RACI refers to four labels for each individual or group involved in a decision process: Responsible, Accountable, Consulting, and Informed. From the ACC Docket, Vol. 25, Sept. 2007 at 44, we learn the application of RACI by the Law Group...

Lawyers can drop pounds at work through thermogenesis

Posted on November 23, 2008
Still unconvinced about the benefits of exercise? Weigh in your mind this heavy term: nonexercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). From an item in Bus. Law Today, Vol. 17, Nov./Dec. 2008 at 7, it means calorie consumption from slightly increased activity levels...

Set deadlines for law firms to respond to RFPs according to their needs for time?

Posted on November 23, 2008
Ron Pol, recommends a radical concept for your RFP process in terms of setting deadlines for law firms to reply. Writing in ACC Docket, Vol. 25, Sept. 2007 at 23, Pol urges law department managers to ?ask how long they...

A different view: let competing firms do what they want to find out information for their bid

Posted on November 23, 2008
In an RFP process, a consultant recommends to tell all of the law firms the same thing: "Talk with anyone you'd like to discover how best to meet our needs, and we will answer questions in confidence." Ron Pol, writing...

How difficult it is to prove how hard your lawyers are working

Posted on November 23, 2008
General counsel uniformly tell me, ?My lawyers are almost all working pretty hard.? How do they know and how can they prove it? Let me offer some strawpersons, in declining order of usefulness, and then torch them. Time tracking. Few...

Contract management software for law departments

Posted on November 22, 2008
Databases that track information about contracts, often called contract management software, has earned the respect of many general counsel. It helps control the flow of contract development, obligations under executed contracts, key milestones, and responsible parties...

Six Sigma analysis of a contracting process

Posted on November 22, 2008
ACC Docket, Vol. 25, Sept. 2007 at 42, describes a Six Sigma project conducted by the Law Group at Becton Dickinson (BD). A team tackled the information-technology contracts process. During the define phase, the team ?drew a process map reflecting...

Contract negotiation guides as distinct from contract templates

Posted on November 22, 2008
A legal department I am familiar with has prepared a guide for non-lawyers to the negotiation of contracts. It makes sense for in-house counsel to articulate negotiation strategies and tactics, both for themselves and for their clients. Much time in....

The debate on whether to track and charge-back time to clients

Posted on November 22, 2008
I oppose tracking time in legal departments at the level of detail found in law firms (See my post of Nov. 22, 2008: internal time tracking.). Even more I question the value of charging clients for the hours worked by...

Internal (or infernal) tracking of time

Posted on November 22, 2008
Although in-house lawyers uniformly despise tracking their time ? ?That?s why we left law firms!!? ? the practice has its supporters and detractors (See my post of Sept. 10, 2005: why in-house attorneys loath tracking time; Jan. 13, 2006: pros...

Two rationale for what should report to the general counsel ? ?control functions? and independence

Posted on November 22, 2008
?When I was general counsel of Salomon, Inc., compliance, internal audit and credit reported to me. The idea was to put the General Counsel in charge of the control functions, except for risk management." This explanation came from Robert Mundheim,...

If a firm takes on a chunk of work, consider having some inside staff move to the firm

Posted on November 22, 2008
According to an Incisive Media article, Greenberg Traurig worked hard in 2006 to win Alcoa?s original contract for patent work. The firm went through several interviews and submitted a lengthy written proposal with biographies of its key IP attorneys...

A concordance analysis of of the first 3,700 headers on LawDepartmentManagementblog

Posted on November 22, 2008
Using a program called Concordance, I analyzed the headers of my first 3,700 posts, all 23,607 ?tokens? ? which includes entries such as ?#45? ? resulting from 6,064 different words (?types?). Linguists will note immediately the type/token ratio of 3...

Irrational assumptions based on perceptions of worth, regardless of factual support

Posted on November 21, 2008
Value attribution, according to Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior (Doubleday 2008) at 48, is ?our tendency to imbue someone or something with certain qualities based on perceived value, rather than on objective data...

180 degree views on 360 degree evaluations

Posted on November 21, 2008
Having written approvingly about so-called 360? assessments, where managers, peers, and reports complete assessments of a lawyer, I think of them as useful (See my post of Dec. 26, 2007: 360? instruments with 5 references.) What a person learns from....

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