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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

The accumulation of metaposts posts on this blog about RFPs and competitive

Posted on October 12, 2010
Examples have appeared in the past two years of specific legal departments and how they handled aspects of their RFP processes (See my post of May 5, 2008: NEC NA; June 10, 2008: Exelon?s multiple RFPs; June 10, 2008: RFP...

More muscle on law firms to alter their policies and practices, this time flextime

Posted on October 12, 2010
As reported in Corp. Counsel, Oct. 2010 at 15, Wal-Mart has started to track its law firms ?to make sure that the promotions and pay of flex-time lawyers are proportional to those who work full-time.? The retail giant also requires...

Good ideas on how to defend your good ideas from the inevitable attacks

Posted on October 12, 2010
I very much liked the interview of Prof. John Kotter in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Oct. 2010, at 129. He outlines lessons from his latest book about why good ideas suffer withering attacks and often succumb. The short piece made...

Combine statistical data with experienced analysis for the best risk predictions

Posted on October 11, 2010
An article in the Sloan Mgt. Rev., Fall 2010 at 51, contrasts what it calls the ?frequentist? method for risk management (also called ?objectivist?) with the Bayesian method (also called ?subjectivist?). Frequentists predict risks based on probabilities obtained from repetitive...

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On this blog, RFP could also stand for Really Frequent Posts!

Posted on October 11, 2010
One of the most popular topics on this blog in the past two years has been competitive bid projects and the Requests for Proposal at their core. The format and content of the RFP have enjoyed ample attention (See my...

Part LXII of a collection of embedded metaposts

Posted on October 11, 2010
Back references of six or more collected on a topic (See my post of Sept. 16, 2010: Part LXI.). 1. Accruals (See my post of Oct. 5, 2010: accruals with 6 references.). 2. Complacent firms (See my post of Sept....

Even if you take no action, benchmark metrics might serve several purposes

Posted on October 11, 2010
Benchmark metrics give directional guidance for where you should pay attention and perhaps take action. They highlight your relative strengths and weaknesses in certain quantifiable areas. Some people, however, maintain that mere presentation of the law department?s numbers, let alone...

Convergence continues and so do my doubts about its effectiveness rise

Posted on October 10, 2010
I increasingly believe that a sounder approach than reduction of the numbers of firms used is to increase the number so that the firm retained better matches the matter?s risk and complexity (See my post of Oct. 19, 2009: dozen...

Success in assignments outside the legal department burnishes a resume for the top legal spot

Posted on October 10, 2010
The new top gun at Lockheed Martin?s legal department, Maryanne Lavan, put her sights on the general counsel position with a two-decade career that included significant stints outside the legal department. Among her posts she served as vice president of...

The gems of August ? my nominations for the ten most interesting posts

Posted on October 10, 2010
18 lists on Twitter that include this blog and an analysis of their reach (Aug. 3, 2010) My tweets on 18 lists that follow 4,150 Twitterers but have 470 people following them. Will the numbers reported on alternative fees please...

ConocoPhillips reduced document-related discovery costs by 60 percent by creating a coordinator

Posted on October 07, 2010
Ron Denton, Manager of Legal Businesses Services at ConocoPhilips, explained one of the steps his law department had taken to reduce discovery costs. Speaking at a DataCert conference (Generals of the Revolution), Denton said that they had created the position...

Three steps that help you clamber to the top of a law department, and one to cling to the top

Posted on October 07, 2010
Well, in the interests of full disclosure, these ideas in the Economist, Sept. 11, 2010 at 80 for gaining power were not quite that specific. To amass power, it is not enough to be good at your job. ?The relationship...

Rees Morrison?s Morsels #139: posts longa, morsels breva

Posted on October 07, 2010
Number of legal departments in the US. According to Intellectual Prop., Fall 2010 at 48, ?There are 30,000 companies in the United States that have at least 100 employees.? If so, it is very hard to imagine as many as...

Accounting and internal audit may have qualms about AFAs with law firms

Posted on October 07, 2010
One of the panelists at the IBA annual conference this week stated that the accounting functions of some companies have problems with arrangements struck between the law department and law firms that vary from traditional hourly billing. The reason is...

I didn?t think availability of the partner was such a big deal for in-house counsel

Posted on October 07, 2010
One of the panelists at the IBA annual conference this week showed the results of a survey of what law departments in Latin America want from their law firms. Norm Clarke, the speaker, showed that ?unavailability of partners? was the...

How many trees for paper did your legal department destroy this year?

Posted on October 07, 2010
One generic estimate for the number of sheets of paper produced per tree is 8,333 (meaning paper without a significant amount of recycled content). This statistic comes from the J. Assoc. Legal Writing Dirs., Fall 2010 at 195. For dramatic...

It is hard for me to decide when to reference back to earlier posts

Posted on October 07, 2010
Every post I write summons to mind earlier posts that touch on its topic. With 5,800 prior posts looking over my shoulder, I have to decide all the time what they are and whether to find and refer back to...

Benchmarks of 700+ legal departments; fourth release early November; add your data now!

Posted on October 06, 2010
You still have time to learn from the most comprehensive benchmark study ever done, and at no cost. If you would like to see a mini-version of the report, write me from your corporate address. Take part in the survey,...

An inquiry whether older legal departments surpass younger ones in innovation

Posted on October 06, 2010
An article in the Admin. Sci. Quarterly, March 2000, at 81, explores age of companies and their pace of innovation. Its discussion bears on law departments, I believe. Apparently there are two schools of management thought. Organizational ecologists find the...

No partner has to be retained with an entourage of timekeepers

Posted on October 06, 2010
A consultant I know argues that a law department can?t just hire Robin, a partner at a firm, because Robin (or the firm) will insist that the entourage of junior partners and associates who orbit and serve Robin also work...

A designated lawyer to handle issues about conflicts of interest

Posted on October 05, 2010
Several years ago, a very large law department appointed one of its lawyers to serve as the conflicts maven. Enough issues arose with firms seeking waivers or encountering potential conflicts that the general counsel thought it best to concentrate the...

My latest article explains ten ways law firms can take advantage of law department benchmarks

Posted on October 05, 2010
My friend and colleague, Bruce Heintz, who helps law firms serve their corporate clients better, teamed up with me to describe ways that firms can use benchmarks from surveys of their clients. Our article appeared in the National Law Journal...

A law firm?s proximity ranks up there with its fax speed, quality of bound volumes, and mainframe power

Posted on October 05, 2010
Back in the day, outside counsel made in-house calls. They came to the offices of corporate clients. Back then they plied calling cards in pay phones, admired correcto-type on Selectrics, smoked in offices, and licked stamps on envelopes. Proximity mattered...

Always a risk of some favoritism when lawyers hire firms, but a few ways to nip the practice

Posted on October 05, 2010
Liking law firm partners for quality of work, cost-effectiveness, and results can blur into liking partners personally, or degenerate to liking them because of reasons not related to their merits. Rewarding friends, doling out fees for benefits, indulging in favoritism:...

By accrual twist of fate, general counsel should strive to submit correct accruals

Posted on October 05, 2010
One of the speakers at the DataCert conference, J. L. Novak, General Counsel of AOL Paid Services, devoted a few impassioned minutes to explaining why vendor accruals and their accuracy are important to him. Evidently, if he misses an accrual,...

Update on blog posts regarding e-discovery other than cost

Posted on October 05, 2010
Having just published a post on the financial blow to general counsels? budgets of electronic discovery (See my post of Sept. 8, 2010: costs of e-discovery.), I busied myself with finding posts on electronically stored information (ESI) that do not...

In terms of reducing costs, innovative sourcing easily bests innovative pricing

Posted on October 04, 2010
This statement, which I summarized from remarks by Richard Susskind at last week?s conference, Generals of the Revolution, embodies much wisdom. The choice by a legal department of which law firm or other provider ? the sourcing decision ? should...

Shut down your legal department and decamp to a law firm?

Posted on October 04, 2010
The peripatetic Richard Susskind keynoted the recent DataCert conference, Generals of the Revolution. During his remarks he said that Thames Water had outsourced its entire legal department this year to the UK firm Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP). The law firm...

Get into the practice of thinking in terms of practice-area benchmarks

Posted on October 04, 2010
During the coming years, as benchmark surveys and their methodology improve, we will see a shift toward metrics that pertain to specific practice areas or industries (See my post of Feb. 8, 2010: industry-specific measures; and of Feb. 25, 2008:...

A neat collective legal department action combined with law firms

Posted on October 04, 2010
Rich Baer, the general counsel of Quest, spoke last week at DataCert?s Generals of the Revolution. He explained that he had organized a group of general counsel in the Denver area to meet and discuss best practices regarding reserve setting....

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