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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

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

Posted on February 03, 2008
This post continues my previous one on metaposts with URL links to this blawg (See my post of Feb. 3, 2008.). For many of them I have added how many posts are referred to in the metapost. Commodity legal work...

Part I of a collection of metaposts: 10 of them

Posted on February 03, 2008
As I write, if I find that this blog has more than five posts on the topic at hand, I try to collect them in what I call ?metaposts? (See my post of May 13, 2007 where I ask if...

A good point in favor of occasional, specialist billers in law firms

Posted on February 02, 2008
David Hobbie posted a thoughtful comment on my blawg. Rather than reply there, which few readers will, I reproduce it below. ?Rees, as a former litigation associate who was sometimes belatedly staffed on very big cases with little awareness of...

An interview of me about convergence memorialized in an article

Posted on February 02, 2008
Modesty should compel me to remain silent, but isn?t a modest blogger an oxymoron? Deborah McMurray of Content Pilot was kind enough to interview me about some trends in how to manage outside counsel and was consummately skilled when she...

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In praise of piles

Posted on February 02, 2008
Hail the powerful and protean pile! As venerated, useful, and overlooked as the pencil, the pile commands an honored, if humble, position of esteem in law department management. The pile is integral to knowledge management. We each know just where...

Expert witness sources

Posted on February 02, 2008
Law departments sometimes need to retain experts to testify on their behalf or to serve as fact experts. Fees of experts in major matters can reach into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. I ran across a service that helps...

Six Sigma efforts earn Textron?s law department public praise by the company?s CEO

Posted on January 30, 2008
Textron launched a major Six Sigma initiative in 2002. USA TODAY recently asked Textron?s CEO, Lewis Campbell, who is himself a Six Sigma green belt, about that initiative. The CEO praised the law department. Mirabile dictu! ?Our legal department has...

Reduce outside counsel fees ? hire female partners

Posted on January 30, 2008
The 2007 ALM Research Survey Report on Billing Rates & Practices summarizes data from 5,058 law-firm respondents. About a third of those respondents were solo practices, 58 percent were from firms of 2 to 39 attorneys (?small firms?) and 10...

Cost per hour of high-level inside lawyers can exceed $280

Posted on January 30, 2008
The received wisdom puts a typical in-house lawyer in the $200 per hour range, with all costs to the company accounted for. That may be a representative figure, but what if we look more closely at a high-ranking lawyer (See...

Norms, the look and feel of a law department

Posted on January 30, 2008
Companies have prevailing norms, systems of social control that define appropriate attitudes and behaviors for all employees (See my post of Dec. 17, 2007 for the difference between culture and norms.). As but two examples, do executives have parking privileges;...

Few law departments consider themselves as part of end-to-end processes

Posted on January 28, 2008
A managerial breakthrough waiting to happen is the recognition by general counsel that an isolationist view of law departments limits our understanding of reality. It is blinkered to focus on how law departments become involved in an issue only at...

Women in e-Discovery as a resource for women who support law department technology

Posted on January 28, 2008
The ALSP Update, Vol. 1, Dec. 2007 at 11, the monthly newsletter of the Association of Litigation Support Professionals (See my post of Jan. 27, 2008 on ALSP.), introduced me to Women in e-Discovery (WiE). Begun in mid-2007, ?it has...

Listservs as a way to exchange information with like-minded people

Posted on January 28, 2008
The ALSP Update, Vol. 1, Dec. 2007 at 9, the monthly newsletter of the Association of Litigation Support Professionals(See my post of Jan. 27, 2008 on ALSP.), talks about the Yahoo Groups LitSupport listserv. A listserv is a way for...

Look at your equipment maintenance agreements as a cost-saving opportunity

Posted on January 28, 2008
The maintenance costs of equipment in a law department can amount to significant sums. Here is a comment from the administrator of a very large government law office. ?Normally, we spend $750,000 on equipment each year. That includes everything from....

Budgets proposed with rounded-off amounts might be less effective in a competition

Posted on January 25, 2008
A small item in Atlantic, Vol. 301 Jan./Feb. 2008, at 26, suggests a technique that both law departments and law firms should be aware of. When houses are priced in specific dollar amounts, rather than in prices that end with...

Smile your way to financial success in the law department

Posted on January 25, 2008
A piece in Atlantic, Jan/Feb 2008, Vol. 301 at 24, adds to our understanding of the many ways that pure legal ability is not the only way we assess in-house lawyers The article explains recent research that shows that the...

Managers should ponder the direction and reality of cause and effect when they make decisions

Posted on January 25, 2008
It is fascinating to mull over what causes what. A few comments on this blog have adverted to cause and effect (See my posts of Nov. 11, 2007 on four contexts that vary by cause and effect; May 14, 2005...

Four sources of information about law firms available from Martindale-Hubble

Posted on January 25, 2008
CounseltoCounsel, Oct. 2007 at 12, describes four online tools from Martindale-Hubble that allow in-house lawyers to find out more about law firms they retain or might retain (See my post of Dec. 10, 2007 with its tips for selection of...

Several unusual sources of information about law departments

Posted on January 23, 2008
When you are deeply interested in how law departments operate and can improve, your quest for insights and bloggable ideas knows no bounds. Autobiographical. No? I have to laugh when I look back and see the oddities that my interests...

The core-team concept carried to an extreme

Posted on January 23, 2008
Since I published my recent article on core teams for matters handled by law firms (Download rees_morrison_core_teams_in_law_firms.pdf), I have come back repeatedly to the fundamental point: law departments should push their firms to limit the number of timekeepers who work...

How to learn more from the invoices your law department processes

Posted on January 23, 2008
Whether your legal department receives invoices from law firms in hard copy or ?soft copy? (e-billing formats or PDFs), you are probably not extracting as much insight from them as you could. My recent article on how to analyze law...

Lessons learned from a secondment

Posted on January 23, 2008
Craighton Goepple, now a senior lawyer with Starbucks, describes his experience as a secondee from Graham & James to the law department in Tokyo of ITOCHU. Starting in 1996, Goepple worked full time at ITOCHU for a year and a...

The power of peer influence in a law department

Posted on January 21, 2008
We are all very susceptible to the actions of our peers when it comes to making a decision. This idea comes from Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 49, Winter 2008 at 84, where an article gives many examples of the powerful...

Fund an internal idea initiative for innovation

Posted on January 21, 2008
If you want to spur new practices in your law department and break out of the mold of accustomed behavior, you might want to adopt an idea from MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 49, Winter 2008 at 48. In this...

Unconvincing difference between brand and reputation of law firms and law departments

Posted on January 21, 2008
An article in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 49, Winter 2008 at 19 defines a brand as a ?customer centric? attribute, a perception by customers, say of a law firm, as to the qualities of that law firm (See my...

Knowledge management efforts have much value as pointers to humans

Posted on January 21, 2008
Typically we think of knowledge management as the collection of documents and other material ? guidelines, checklists, alternative clauses ? that someone might find helpful (See my post of March 5, 2005 on altruistic information sharing.). Another value of knowledge...

The three roles important for any internal e-discovery team, plus one

Posted on January 16, 2008
If a law department takes part in any cross-functional team to address electronic discovery, or if the law department sets up its own team (See my post of Nov. 13, 2007.), the group needs to have representation from three primary...

Proposals in competitive bids tell you market costs, not actual costs

Posted on January 16, 2008
Cal. Mgt. Rev., Vol. 49, Summer 2007 at 56, has an article about strategic sourcing of services. It makes a thoughtful point about law department?s bidding work to law firms (See my post of May 21, 2007 on bids compared...

The disparaging term ?cost center? is not deserved

Posted on January 16, 2008
Law departments cannot escape the slur: ?You?re just a cost center.? Listen to John Lipsey, vice president, corporate counsel services, of LexisNexis: ?Today?s GC has to work within the company?s economic environment and operate the law department as a cost...

Legal spend is on the frontier of procurement?s sourcing control

Posted on January 16, 2008
Cal. Mgt. Rev., Vol. 49, Summer 2007 at 44, has an article about how procurement?s next frontier is managing the supply of services. Figure 1 (at 46) puts legal spending at about 90 percent outsourced and about 15 percent of...

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