Sociometers are small sensors that lawyers could wear at a retreat (See my post of Sept. 28, 2007: electronic name tags.). They record data about face-to-face interactions such as who is near whom and the location and duration of the interaction. Research based on sociometers, as described in the Harv.…
As reported in the Fin. Times, Oct. 17, 2008 by Rod Newing, the UK firm, Allen & Overy, has created Diligence, an online database of legal memoranda prepared by its local offices or commissioned from local counsel. Law departments may subscribe to this service for a fixed annual fee of…
It makes sense to me that lawyers in large departments tend to specialize more. They see more examples of any given issue than do Jill-of-all-trades generalists in small departments. The more experience you accumulate, the quicker and more skillfully you can handle a new variant, which is another way of…
Feedburner showed on Feb. 28, 2009 that LawDepartmentManagementBlog.com had about 440 subscribers. The top ten aggregators were the following with the number of subscribers they handle shown in parenthesis. The descriptions come from Feedburner. What amazes me is that another 39 aggregators also are feeding my posts to their readers.…
My friend Ruth Balkin told me about the Private Law Librarians Special Interest Section of the American Association of Law Libraries (PLL/SIS), and more specifically its Corporate Law Librarians’ Group. The Group hosts a webpage. Johanna Bizub of Prudential and Paula Carroll Schwindt of Manulife/John Hancock are the Group’s current…
The general counsel of Rockwell Automation, Doug Hagerman, has graciously allowed me to excerpt his description of a learning project he undertook. Every law department could try a variation on this technique. “Faced with the challenge of wanting key members ready to become GC, either here or at another company,…
In the past week, at least 50 people have visited this site from a very large pharmaceutical company. As I reconstruct what happened, somebody senior notified the law department that a particular post on this blog ought to be read. That set in train the large number of visits from…
Social scientists have discovered that “who you know” has much to do with “what you know.” According to research cited in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Winter 2009 at 36, “engineers and scientists looking for information were roughly five times more likely to turn to friends or colleagues than…
As the online world inexorably proves that information wants to be free, in-house counsel will increasingly have more forms of agreements available online, and at no cost. One example of the genre is YourFreeLegalForms.com. According to an email exchange I had with a business developer for the JACI Group, jack@thejacigroup.com…
The Am. Lawyer, Dec. 2008, at 110, discusses topic forums on Paul Lippe’s Legal OnRamp. The forum with the most members is “Effective Management of Law Departments,” which I proudly moderate. It has more than 110 members. If in-house counsel want to join Legal OnRamp and take part, I welcome…