Tired of clients asking you the same question? Write the question and a response that instructs lay readers, put them both on your legal department or corporate internal website where they are easy to find, and wait for the next time someone asks the question. Then, either tell the client…
The quote comes from a list of lessons learned by a general counsel who served for a time as the President of a major operating unit. The admonition has much merit. Consider these four corollaries. What interests a specialist lawyer professionally about a situation may be the farthest thing from…
I am a lawyer but I do not claim that lawyers are more moral than non-lawyers. That view would likely irritate and offend many people. What says lawyers are any holier than thou? Yet general counsel, or some of them at least, let it be known that they should have…
DuPont Legal’s operational budget is what it submits as one of the company’s functional units. Based on it, the legal team distributes its in-house costs as well as its outside counsel costs, spend on patents and trademarks, and regional costs. The operational budget forecasts spend for the coming year and…
At Colt Telecom, its 45 lawyers pride themselves on being embedded in the business operations they support: “senior lawyers do not even have the word ‘lawyer’ in their job titles.” Presumably, also, no synonym such as “counselor,” “legal advisor,” or “attorney.” The strained effort is pointed out in the Financial…
At Catholic Healthcare West, a system of 41 hospitals and medical centers, the legal staff work on more than 5,000 contracts every year. They use at least 100 templates for physician contracts alone. To cope, they installed Contract Express, software supplied by Business Integrity, as explained in Met. Corp. Counsel,…
Before taking on work from a client group that has constant legal needs, it may be useful to have a person in that group be a gatekeeper, a triager, someone to determine as a first step whether your department is needed. Legal Strat. Rev., Winter 2009/10 at 24, mentions that…
What your internal clients think of you is the essence of your department’s “brand.” One somewhat far-fetched way to burnish that brand is to seek professional help. A lawyer writing in Int’l In-House Counsel J., Vol 2, Summer 2009 at 1190, tells us that “I heard about a legal department…
All law firms working for The Body Shop propose a budget for their matters before they start. “Proposals that vary significantly from the legal department and business client’s value assessments are rejected.” Gracious me! Do clients review budgets of law firms? It is hard enough to get budgets, let alone…
“At one time, three days was a reasonable response time. With the advent of e-mail, it was shortened to something more on the order of three hours and now with wireless connectivity it may be 30 minutes.” I ran across this quote but regrettably am unable to give its provenance.…