However much law departments can responsibly offload to their clients, or never see in the first place, means the department can attend more to activities of higher value (See my post of Sept. 14, 2005 about Cisco’s self-service model.) Law firms can lend a hand, as Eversheds appears to have…
Increasing recoveries from an average of about $50 million per year to $108 million in 2004, DuPont’s law department had recovered over $100 million by the fall of 2005 (Inside Litigation, Winter 2006 at 8). The department oversaw 88 recovery matters in 2004, with intellectual property (30 matters) and insurance…
A former Cravath partner is quoted in the American Lawyer, Vol. 28, Jan. 2006 at 15, about a change he has observed from ten or 15 years ago. “It was corporate partners who had the close relationships with clients. But these days, it’s the litigation partners who are developing the…
Consider a charming idea, one that sweeps away lists of questions asking about attributes of a law department, which lists are lengthened with invitations to clients to give examples and explain themselves. Replace all that with one simple question: “On a scale of zero to 10, how likely is it…
As a reaction to ongoing cost and headcount pressures from senior management, one of our clients asked us to assess titles within the Corporate Secretary’s function. Many law departments may find, like this one did, that titles, adopted long ago for various historical or political reasons, no longer serve. The…
The Conference Board and Marsh Inc. recently surveyed 271 North American and European senior executives about their companies‘ ERM programs Of five risk categories, the one the most respondents were “not at all” or “slightly” willing to tolerate risk, was “legal.” Seventy percent (70%) took that position, as compared to…
Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton professor of psychology and Nobel Laureate, makes the point that reported levels of happiness do not rise with increases in income. Instead, like people on a treadmill who walk faster but go nowhere, having more money does not boost satisfaction. Analogously, as law departments perform better,…
A piece in the McKinsey Quarterly, 2005, No. 4 at 9 explains that some IT managers, striving to have executives understand and accept the costs of technology, roll out “cost transparency programs.” I don’t know what that phrase means, but that hardly deters me from translating it to law departments,…
“Culture” seems such a woolly word, grandiloquence without ground. Yet, consider the law department of Phillips Electronics North America, molding itself to its company’s three “pillars”: (1) Designed around the customer, (2) easy to experience, and (3) advanced (top of mind, Vol. 4, at 4). The Vice President, Corporate &…
To the extent law departments train clients, it is almost entirely educating them about substantive legal developments and how to respond to them. Rare is the department that helps clients understand the roles of lawyers, the limits of certainty in the law, the time it takes to produce good legal…