Many commentators about law department management speak of “legal risk.” They use the term as if its meaning were self evident. It is not, and therefore I want to draw on a discussion paper by Roger S. McCormick, dated February 2004, about the management of legal risk by financial institutions.…
Visualize a tall ladder, with each rung one of your law department’s lawyers. Where the rung is on the ladder summarizes its lawyer’s unique collection of skills, seniority, motivation, EQ, experience, training and other attributes. Now visualize a second ladder, but for this one each rung represents a set of…
Relatively few law departments track their lawyers’ time and charge it back to clients, like a law firm (See my post of Jan. 13, 2006 about disadvantages and April 27, 2005 about Kodak’s practices.) Those departments that do typically use the same billing rate for all their lawyers. That is…
I hadn’t appreciated the number of my entries that pound on the notion that in-house lawyers, especially senior lawyers, must grasp their company’s business if they are to succeed. Legal skills are assumed at that level; hence the differentiator is the JD-to-MBA shift (Meta post: See my posts in 2005…
Do clients, alone, determine the value of work done by lawyers? In other words, if a client wants it done, is it prima-facie valuable (See my post of May 1, 2006 on “value-added.”). One school of thought has it that if clients value the task that inside counsel does, there…
When the general counsel of Nestle USA, Kristin Adrian, named the most important skills of the top lawyer, she started with legal knowledge and experience, and then added, “the ability to listen.” Friends, Romans, and lawyers, lend me your lawyEARS! To listen successfully is to overcome several traits in-house counsel…
One difference in the law department between different practice areas is whether they have a client. Is there someone in the company who cares about the efforts of the inside lawyer? Personnel staff go to Human Resource’s lawyers; clients under the CFO turn to finance lawyers, as environmental workers look…
A “contract general counsel” is neither fish nor fowl. They are neither employees of the company – because there may not be enough legal work to keep someone busy or no one can competently handle the expansive variety of legal issues – nor are they in private practice and retained…
(1) “They want us to return the widgets, which don’t work.” (2) “They want us to return the widgets which don’t work.” If none of the widgets work properly, (1) makes the point. If some of them work and some of them don’t, and we only want to return the…
Nat Slavin, the thoughtful editor of InsideCounsel, urges general counsel to keep their ear to the clients’ ground, InsideCounsel, March 2006 at 6. With that prescription, as the author of Client Satisfaction for Law Departments I have no quarrel. I do push back, however, on Slavin’s exhortation to “create a…