A short item about Serco, the U.K. contract and facilities management company, praised Mark Duckworth, its general counsel, for “decentralizing” 10 of its 12 lawyers to business units. He also redid the company’s panel of external counsel, leaving a prominent firm, Allen & Overy, off the panel. Legal Week, Nov.…
“According to the survey, when general counsel have more than 20 years’ experience, 35 percent of CEOs will get involved in evaluating outside counsel, and 31 percent of CEOs are involved in choosing the outside attorney to handle a high stakes matter.” (A survey sponsored by LexisNexis Martindale-Hubble summarized in…
David Krasnostein, the General Counsel of Australia’s National Australia Bank, discussed risk management and the role of lawyers in helping to make risk-reward decisions. He said that his in-house lawyers “aim to break risks and rewards into units that can be measured so that when a risk is taken, it…
David Krasnostein, the General Counsel of Australia’s 120+ lawyer National Australia Bank, explained in an interview that “when you brought in really good lawyers, your internal clients understood the value that they offered and they had to open their purse strings to pay for more.” Dream on. For many legal…
In a recent interview, David Krasnostein, the General Counsel of Australia’s National Australia Bank, explained this point: “If I’ve got a lawyer who’s got a 9/10 understanding of a particular area of law and a 3/10 understanding of the client’s business and they’re going to put in 50 hours in…
Clients might rate an attribute, such as training, low on their relative scale of importance, yet that rating may be dragged down because the law department trained poorly . If so, clients might not understand how valuable and important training can be. If management of outside counsel expenses comes back…
Many law departments only ask clients for ratings on the department’s performance. They should take the more useful step of asking clients about the relative importance of performance attributes. Otherwise, they may fall for a myth: high scores mean the department is doing well. A legal department can pat itself…
On the Greatest American Lawyer (Sept. 12, 2005), I read a plausible idea, albeit one written for lawyers in private practice educating their clients. Consider this: “I’ve decided to develop a presentation for my client which discusses in general the high cost of litigation, the alternatives to litigation and budget…
Combine the results from three questions in Corporate Legal Times and Dickstein Shapiro’s “Survey of CEOs,” (Oct. 2005 at 52) and a message shouts out: the CLO should act more as a business strategist who knows some law than as a lawyer who manages the law department. One question asked…
Thanks to the October 2005 newsletter of Laurence Simons, the international law department recruiters, we can all add this German term to our vocabularies and recognize its meaning (For another useful Teutonism, see my post of May 20, 2005 on “schadenfreud.”). The term describes the feeling of disappointment one gets…