Enlightenment thinkers understood that knowledge only brings benefits if it enables useful change and if those who can bring about the changes can learn of it. Access to knowledge counts for as much as creation for without the means to find out, lest the candle flicker under the bushel. Akin…
Intriguingly, at various points Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (Yale Univ. 2009), describes various monetary rewards that were posted in England in the 18th century for successful innovations. The incentives succeeded. One of the best-known was a huge prize for the person who solved…
A multidisciplinary body of research studies so-called networks. Numerous books have been written about social network theory and other derivatives. The properties of networks apply to many aspects of law department operation so my latest article weaves in definitions of key terms from network theory as it explains some of…
At one point I worried I might exhaust candidates for metaposts. Now I realize that the more posts crowd this blog, the more opportunities arise for collections of them (metaposts) as well as second and even third generation metaposts on topics covered earlier. Here are the ten latest. CLE II…
Steadily my LinkedIn group has attracted members from all around the world. The pace of comments has picked up and the group has reached critical mass in terms of vitality and continued growth. As these things go on the Internet, you need quite a few participants to sustain discussions and…
The book by Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood, Superconnect: Harnessing the power of networks and the strength of weak links (Norton 2010) triggered enough posts on this blog to warrant a blook review (a blog book review). I did not particularly like the book because it is much too heavy…
To use a term often employed by Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From – The Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead 2010), his book was germinative. Many ideas for this blog came to me from his discussion of the lessons we can draw from nature about how new ideas arise…
“Writing maketh the blogger,” a little known line from Shakespeare’s lost masterpiece Hamblog and Julionline, often comes to my mind. Not just those who scribble for WordPress and TypePad and the like, but all in-house lawyers need prose ability. So I ran across Raymond Ward’s the (new) legal writer and…
A company that provides help-desk support, Intelliteach, analyzed 600,000 helpdesk tickets from numerous law firms over a nine-month period. Graphically displayed in ILTA’s quarterly PeertoPeer, Dec. 2010 at 65, the categories where problems arose probably map well to the problems that arise for members of law departments. The largest set…
Symantec, the $6 billion software company, employs in its Legal and Public Affairs (LPA) Department approximately 150 worldwide, about half of which are attorneys. According to the “European Briefings” supplement to ACC Docket, Dec. 2010 at 11, in 2006 the LPA created an intranet site visible only to its members.…