The official bestowal on a general counsel of corporate powers is known in the United States as a “delegation of authority.” The Board of Directors, in theory and often in practice, assigns to the CEO a broad set of powers, and the CEO in turn sub-delegates a portion of those…
PwC U.S.’s Annual Corporate Directors Survey assembled the views of 1,110 directors on which topics they would like their board to devote more time to in 2010. Nine of the choices as topics are listed in Corp. Bd. Mbr., First Quarter 2011 at 10. Strategic planning occupies the top spot…
The General Counsel of Nationwide Building Society, the UK’s largest building society (the US equivalent of a savings and loan), believes in measurements and feedback. Liz Kelly encourages here team members to “circulate e-feedback foms across the business seeking view on the quality of their service.” That sort of client…
A piece entitled Ten ’In-house Secrets For Reducing Your Company’s Legal Costs” appeared on Jan. 8, 2010 on the WikiCFO site. The author is, I believe, a lawyer with the Phillips Law Group. I don’t think much of the article, but one of its ten secrets pushed me to write.…
The legal department of the Financial Times recently introduced a practice that, taken at face value, I would question: “the introduction of questionnaires for internal clients to fill out upon completion of a job.” (Corp. Counsel, April 2011 at 26) I question that effort because it imposes too much on…
It is quite conceivable that lawyers in a law department can estimate how promptly a client called them on a new matter. When a matter first becomes recognized, the responsible lawyer could give it a number that reflects how timely the lawyer was brought in. A scale would suffice from…
Mark Harris, the CEO of Axiom, referred to a surprising finding from one of his company’s projects. Speaking at Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession conference on March 9th, Harris referred to long-term contracts and their “revenue leakage.” One company, he said, spent more than $100…
Surveys find that richer people report higher satisfaction with life than poorer people. Data on this oft-found result comes from Eduardo Porter, The Price of Everything: Solving the mystery of why we pay what we do (Portfolio/Penguin 2011) at 62, 69. Analogously, it seems likely that higher-ranking managers give better…
A recent post quoted someone on the view that in-house lawyers have less objectivity than external lawyers (See my post of Jan. 13, 2011: less independence inside.). This “less-objective” rationale parallels the deplorable reasoning of the European court in the Akzo Nobel decision that rejected in-house attorney client privilege. It…
Information spillover as an advantage that grows with increasing size of law departments From my various consulting projects, here are some practices of legal departments, listed in no particular order, that help them keep in touch with their clients’ business activities and legal concerns. Send a bi-monthly “update” to key…