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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

Ill-effects of partners shuttling among law firms

Posted on February 17, 2008
Churn among partners in AM Law 200 firms has been significant, and the consequences to law departments can be pernicious. The Client Advisory of Hildebrandt International and Citi Private Bank, Jan. 2008 at 7, states that during the seven-year period...

The Law Department practice group of the International Legal Technology Association

Posted on February 17, 2008
PEER to PEER, Vol. 23, Nov. 2007, the magazine of the International Legal Technology Association describes ILTA?s Law Department practice group. Headed by Sally Letteri of United States Steel, it facilitates the sharing of information by law-department technologists...

In vino veritas: the neurological rush from paying expensive law firms

Posted on February 17, 2008
Some research suggests that our bias toward higher-priced goods may have something to do with the way our brains link price with pleasure -- and thus leads people to make assumptions about expensiveness signaling quality. If it?s pricey it must...

Law departments can choose to use offshore staff or onshore staff of a US firm

Posted on February 17, 2008
The US law firm, Howrey, is ?the first AmLaw 200 firm to open an office in India to handle client work" (Am. Lawyer, Vol. 30, Feb. 2008 at 22). The firm's policy is that clients can choose "whether to use...

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A team at a law firm plans to include academics

Posted on February 17, 2008
An article in the Am. Lawyer, Vol. 30, Feb. 2008 at 16-17, describes the migration of a well-known bankruptcy partner from one law firm to another. At his new firm, Martin Bienenstock will lead a team -- called the Business...

Perhaps the assumption of 1,850 chargeable hours a year per in-house lawyer is too high

Posted on February 17, 2008
The Client Advisory produced jointly by Hildebrandt International and Citi Private Bank, Jan. 2008 at 5, shows ?average annual productivity? by four categories of law-firm lawyers. From a group of large US law firms that were described as ?lower profit...

Costs wasted because of futile searches for emails

Posted on February 17, 2008
A study by IDC concludes, according to Info. Mgt. J., Vol. 42, Jan./Feb. 2008 at 14, that ?a company with 1,000 information workers can expect to lose more than $5 million in annual salary costs because of time spent on...

A law department and a law firm team up to offer a joint program for diverse summer associates

Posted on February 17, 2008
The law department of JPMorgan Chase and the US law firm, Kelley Drye & Warren sreid@kelleydrye.com, have launched a program to promote diversity. Law students from diverse backgrounds who are part of Kelley Drye?s summer associate program will have the...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #65 ? additions to earlier posts

Posted on February 17, 2008
Smaller companies spent much greater percentage of revenues on outside counsel. According to the 2007 ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey, companies up to $100 million in annual revenue spend on average 1.38 percent of their revenues on outside counsel; companies...

A shout-out to those who have posted comments on this blog

Posted on February 16, 2008
Almost at my third anniversary, and with 188 comments collected by this blog, it is seemly for me to thank the readers who have taken the time to leave comments. I have written stand-alone posts in response to several of...

An abundance of posts on decisions, and guidelines for how to decide on the ones you want

Posted on February 16, 2008
You would have a hard time deciding among all the posts on this blog about decisions. A number of them step back from specific tools and techniques to broader aspects of in-house decision-making (See my posts of Aug. 24, 2006:...

Convergence ? a reprise of the topic

Posted on February 16, 2008
About 18 months ago I published a contrarian article [click on the link for the PDF of it] Download put_eggs_in_one_basket.pdf on convergence. In it I challenged the validity of the arguments made in favor of law departments who dramatically reduce...

Auctions conducted by law departments to choose firms for work

Posted on February 16, 2008
Some time back I wrote an article [click to view PDF] Download when_law_departments_auction.pdf about various kinds of auctions that law departments might conduct. That article extended my thinking as expressed in several posts to that date (See my post of...

Top referring domains to this blog, Law Department Management

Posted on February 16, 2008
I am fascinated by the reach of this blawg, and by the tools that tell me something about my readers (See my posts of March 4, 2007: Technorati; March 4, 2007 and Jan. 13, 2008: FeedBurner; and Feb. 20, 2007:...

Part V of a collection of metaposts: 10 more of them

Posted on February 16, 2008
This post continues my previous series on metaposts, my collections of five or more posts on a topic, with URL links (See my posts of Feb. 3, 2008: four with 40 metaposts.). Administrators (Feb. 13, 2008 ? 20 posts) Correlations...

Attorney-client privilege posts on this blog

Posted on February 16, 2008
Many posts on this blog have mentioned actions by a law department?s lawyers that risk loss of the attorney-client privilege (See my posts of April 15, 2007: lawyers who are officers and sign contracts; Jan. 21, 2008: use of IT...

Uses of flow charts and short summaries, including to explain choices to clients

Posted on February 16, 2008
Rather than a long email or memorandum, an in-house lawyer might depict various choice points and possibilities of a complex situation by means of a flow chart. Many people can grasp branching alternatives and complex relationships better from a diagram...

Six Sigma and three times six posts on the topic

Posted on February 13, 2008
Six Sigma is no doubt a tool for law department managers (See my posts of July 31, 2005: general introduction; March 7, 2006: terminology; May 7, 2007: a report on Six Sigma in law departments by KPMG Forensics. A law...

Varied rates for practice areas in legal fees paid compared to settlement costs paid

Posted on February 13, 2008
Practice areas have very different ratios of liability to defense cost, according to research by eLawForum. ?In employment and asbestos litigation, the ratio is approximately one-to-one,? which means that for every dollar the defendant corporation pays in settlement [liability costs]...

More expertise for finding expert witnesses

Posted on February 13, 2008
To find a qualified expert witness quickly and efficiently is no easy task. Moreover, the charges of the experts can run to six figures, not to mention the fees of your lawyers who prepare them for their testimony (See my...

Two multi-day education programs for in-house counsel

Posted on February 13, 2008
Forty attorneys took part in the most recent Association of Corporate Counsel's (ACC) Executive Leadership Institute (ELI). Lectures by Stephen R. Chitwood, director of George Washington University's Center for Law Practice Strategy and Management, focused on "executive leadership and management,...

DuPont?s spending on settlements and judgments ? around $800 million in the past three years

Posted on February 13, 2008
A puzzle of metrics regarding DuPont?s legal spend now fits together. ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Jan./Feb. 2008 at 72, shows a chart prepared by DuPont that has three columns for each of the years 2002 through 2006. The columns depict...

Cultural symbolism of the general counsel?s physical office

Posted on February 13, 2008
On a roll about culture and norms in law departments, I mused about what the physical office of the general counsel signifies to people in the department (See my posts of Nov. 20, 2007 and Dec. 17, 2007 with definitions...

Examples of correlations in law department management

Posted on February 13, 2008
It is a powerful tool to quantify how some amount changes when another number changes, such as to understand how the number of independent claims in a litigated patent influences total outside counsel fees -- to calculate the correlation between...

Administrators, invaluable to help law departments perform well

Posted on February 13, 2008
Well-managed law departments, when they reach double-figures of lawyers, usually have someone who handles budgets, non-lawyer staff, facilities, computers and other administrative tasks (See my post of Aug. 1, 2006: lawyer compared to operations roles...

Survey analysts ought to explore correlations among data, and quantify the relationships

Posted on February 12, 2008
Too many ?analyses? of survey data do no more than regurgitate the findings. ?Twenty percent of all the law departments have receptionists.? That style of factoid reporting has a bit of value, but an analysis that matches the data against...

How can a law department quantify the percentage of work done inside and outside?

Posted on February 12, 2008
"Regression analysis suggests that legal departments will be most efficient when more than half of legal work (55%) is conducted in-house." For the 161 companies in the 2006 GCR Benchmarking Exercise, the average law department said it conducted 37 percent...

The law department is only one player, and a modest one, in a company?s total observance of the laws

Posted on February 12, 2008
Laws permeate the operations of companies, as do regulations, ordinances, agency procedures, judicial decisions, and many other forms of juristic governmental dictates. Let?s just call them all ?laws.? Given the pervasiveness of laws in a company?s operations, what should be...

If law firms hire fewer new associates, won?t senior associates do work not worth their rates?

Posted on February 12, 2008
Aric Press, Editor-In-Chief of the Am. Lawyer, Vol. 30, Feb. 2008 at 9, discusses layoffs by law firms. Rather than pink-slip associates, he speculates that law firms might decide to "sharply reduce the size of first-year classes.? He then notes...

Five ideas for cool things to do on retreats

Posted on February 12, 2008
When you bring your lawyers together for an offsite, you need some fun things for them to do. At one gathering, all the attendees broke into small groups and assembled bikes. At the end of the day, children from the...

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