I do not believe that the half-life of legal knowledge possessed by in-house counsel is all that short, indeed if the notion of steady brain drain has any reality. Nothing erodes the value of what a lawyer knows along the lines of “you lose half the value of what you…
“The CBS Legal Department has created a new intranet, which is populated with substantive content designed to benefit CBS law Department’s in-house lawyers. This information, which is provided by both CBS’ in-house lawyers, as well as CBS’ retained outside law firms, includes breaking and new developments in the law and…
Books are conversations. I write in them, underline copiously, dog-ear pages, and note ideas for possible blog postings. Books feed this blog (See my post of Feb. 1, 2009: thirteen books cited on this blog.). The latest sources include these ten books. Among them I have assembled a handful of…
An example of how a SharePoint application helps a legal department appears in E. Leigh Dance, Bright Ideas: Insights from Legal Luminaries Worldwide (Mill City Press 2009) at 19. Tim Glassett, the former general counsel of Hilton Hotels and its 40 in-house lawyers, used SharePoint “lists” for each of the…
Robert Ambrogi, the prolific host of LegalLine.com and other activities internetal (to coin a term), points out a useful resource for in-house attorneys. In-house lawyers may want to learn from the published work product of law firms, but how do they find the needle in the haystack of “thousands of…
In the legal department of FMC Technologies, the lawyer responsible for a matter may not close it until he or she completes the “Lessons Learned” section. This method to encourage lawyers to record post mortem insights is more than a nudge; the elapsed time between opening and closing of a…
The champion of legal blogging, Kevin O’Keefe, published a wonderfuly informative post on June 16, 2009 about the number of blogs maintained by the US’s largest firms, the AmLaw 200. Having just written about one firm that monitors blogs and circulates references to itself (ironically, Wachtell is not listed by…
Many of my 400-500 visitors a day come from a search on Google, bing or other engines (See my post of Feb. 11, 2007: “About 65 percent of my readers look at a post that came up on a search engine, mostly Google. About 20 percent come to the site…
Blog posts, the short-and-to the point way I write most of them, compress information significantly. In two or three paragraphs – my self-imposed limit – it is admittedly hard to do justice to complex topics, such as Poisson distributions, post-modernism, McKinsey’s 7S system, or ethnography, to pick some at random…
“[B]ased on our research, we know 60 percent of legal professionals already use online social networks regularly,” according to an article in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, May 2009 at 72. I was dubious so I wrote one of the co-authors, Michael Walsh, the CEO of US Legal Markets And…