Mark Roellig, the general counsel of Mass Mutual, has published several thoughtful articles recently about law department management. His latest appears in the ACC Docket, March 2012 at 53. Deep in the piece he mentions something a few readers might have encountered and offers some advice. If a company selects…
The slugfest of patent litigation unleashed by Apple related to Google’s Android operating system has proved to be frightfully expensive. Samsung, HTC and other companies are up in arms. Quoting Prof. Mark Lemley of Stanford Law School, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, April 2, 2012 at 63 said “these companies have paid their…
A.C. Grayling, Ideas that Matter: the concepts that shape the 21st century (Basic Books 2010) at 63 discusses business ethics. Grayling states, matter of factly, that “the boundaries of legal permission in all capitalist economies lie outside those of moral acceptability.” If that statement is correct, that what lawyers can…
Office locations of in-house lawyers spring up alongside business units and executives. As the latter go global, so will their counselors. One management challenge arises from those foreign locations that this blog has discussed: the absence of attorney-client privilege (See my post of Feb. 16, 2008: attorney-client privilege with 18…
My writings on over-hyped “bet the company” litigation mostly has made the point that they are black swans (See my post of Oct. 27, 2011: bet-the-company with 8 references.). Which rare lawsuits fall into that cataclysmic category, where expense management flees, general counsel quake, and corporate futures hang in the…
This blog has referred to hotlines a moderate number of times (See my post of Sept. 21, 2011: hotlines with 6 references.). Those anonymous reporting tools would seem to account for many of the disclosures of potential wrongs. Nevertheless, an article in Met. Corp. Counsel, Dec. 2011 at 38, draws…
This question, asked of the chief legal officer of the Mayo Clinic, John Oviatt, elicited an interesting reply: “Very much so. Legal services are just one more of many shared services within an organization. That’s how the C-suite views it, and so I think having a close working relationship with…
Having put another notch in my belt of legal risk posts (See my post of Dec. 5, 2011: three observations on legal risk.), I looked for other risk-related metaposts. As my previous one covered through mid-August of 2009 and yesterday’s covered from mid-2010 through now, I updated my posts during…
Economists would distill the corporate legal market into the DEMAND by corporations for legal services and the SUPPLY of those services. Demand, what drives legal services, has been a topic returned to more than a few time on this blog (See my post of July 2, 2007: what drives a…
In Charles Seife, Proofiness: How you’re being fooled by the numbers (Penguin 2010) at 108, a point is made that has bearing on the survey instruments in the header and their findings. “When surveys and polls depend on voluntary response, it’s almost always the case that people with strong opinions…