Think of experience and learning as a lawyer’s income – they work and they get paid in knowledge – and then think of efforts to harvest and give away that knowledge as a tax. This analogy occurred to me when an interviewee in a consulting project offered an explanation for…
According to this London-based company’s website and ads, GTDTonline provides in-house counsel with summaries of laws and regulations in 43 practice areas and more than 120 jurisdictions. The summaries explain “the most important legal and regulatory matters that arise in business deals and disputes worldwide.” In-house counsel are eligible for…
A well-known consultant in Austria to law departments, Dr. Franz Brandstetter, has published a book on law department management. He provided me with this short description of his book. “The objective of Rechtsabteilung & Unternehmenserfolg – a management book – is to provide support for in house lawyers and legal…
All of us who care about management in legal departments are grateful to learn what specific departments have done to address specific issues. From “YYY Company hired partners who are twins because it is easier to figure them out,” to “ZZZ Company put shredders next to each paralegal’s desk to…
After I noticed several visitors who reached this blog from Linex Systems, I looked at its website. A law department case study caught my eye and gives some background on a productivity tool for law departments. David Byrne is Head of Knowledge Management for BT Group’s legal department. Working with…
Informal get-togethers at lunch, sometimes known as brown bag lunches and sometimes referred to as lunch-and-learns, can serve a variety of purposes. Low cost, convivial, flexible, they offer many pluses, although they also impinge on people’s personal time. My previous posts have touched on them in terms of improving morale,…
Amy Fox holds the title of Lead Knowledge Management Counsel in the Legal and Corporate Affairs department at Intel. We learn that because Fox will be speaking at an upcoming Ark conference, Knowledge Management in the Legal Profession on October 26-27 in New York City. Four observations result. One: Fox…
Let’s not be economic determinists when we think of law department management A framework or model consists of a set of concepts, while a theory explains how, why, and when the concepts are related. A useful theory explains and predicts. One framework to explain law departments and how they operate…
To this point I have located 33 books about law department management (See my post of Nov. 16, 2009: approximately 32 books about law departments with 8 references; and March 29, 2010: Trevor Faure’s The Smarter Legal Model.). Two more have recently come to my attention. Leadership and Management Challenges…
A corporate lawyer at Brown Brothers Harriman, Florian Feder, has created a legal wiki,Standardforms.org. It provides a free depository of sophisticated legal documents. According to Robert Ambrogi, who wrote about this resource on June 3, 2011, “Notably, the site is not intended to serve as a cache of ready-to-use legal…