Why do corporate lawyers recoil when urged to contribute to knowledge management systems (See my post of June 15, 2006 on obstacles to knowledge contribution.)? At least 11 reasons explain the reluctance, and I have listed them roughly in decreasing order of importance. Time. To put anything into a knowledge…
Lawyers in-house balk when asked to add information to a matter management system, to submit budgets on matters or for their practice group, to evaluate those who report to them, to do status reports, to evaluate outside counsel, to add material to a knowledge management system. They are reluctant to…
A German professor, Reinhart Koselleck, published a remarkable lexicon of 115 fundamental sociological concepts. The multi-volume work tracks origins, usage and meaning over time of those core ideas. Concepts such as “revolution,” “state,” “civil society,” “democracy,” and “crisis,” are discussed at length, according to an article in the Journal of…
In a piece that describes the convergence program of Schering-Plough, Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 14, May 2006 at 45, the company’s general counsel (Tom Sabatino) explains his expectation of work product sharing. Sabatino looks to his “Core Team,” which will “get somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of all Schering-Plough’s…
I have previously written about post mortems, aka after-action reviews (See my posts of Dec. 10, 2005 and April 2, 2005.). Some law departments reflect back on major matters to see what they can glean from them that will help them handle similar matters. Some departments use post mortems to…
A 10-page screed by the executive search firm BCG aimed at law firm lawyers, as it exposes “several little known facts about going in house that may not necessarily make it the best decision for you.” One of the five plagues unleashed by a move from a law firm to…
A law department that has its matter management system produce graphics and analyses relies on what is called “business intelligence” software. “BI software extracts data from databases and turns them into human-readable reports,” according to an expert quoted in the Financial Times, Jan. 25, 2006 at S5. BI software uses…
I have a bone to pick, and two other bones, with those who expect their law department intranet site to include a directory of resident experts in various areas of law. “If you have a bankruptcy question, call our guru, Rees,” and that kind of listing. Much like many lawyers…
The law departments of many mature, large companies may well rely on lawyers whose age averages 48 or more. At that age, retirement beckons only a few years away. According to an Accenture study in 2005 of 1,400 workers aged between 40 and 50, companies have woefully failed to memorialize…
According to E. Leigh Dance and Deborah McMurray, “10 Things We’ve Learned from In-House Counsel in the US and Europe,” one senior counsel handles virtually all litigation himself, regardless of jurisdiction or substantive area. He states that the results are more consistently good, because no one knows better than he…