The new top gun at Lockheed Martin’s legal department, Maryanne Lavan, put her sights on the general counsel position with a two-decade career that included significant stints outside the legal department. Among her posts she served as vice president of ethics and business conduct and – since 2007 – as…
An article in the Admin. Sci. Quarterly, March 2000, at 81, explores age of companies and their pace of innovation. Its discussion bears on law departments, I believe. Apparently there are two schools of management thought. Organizational ecologists find the liability of newness, others find the liability of senescence. What…
Vendors see trends that might surprise the rest of us. In Met. Corp. Counsel, Sept. 2010 at 28, a software provider, WorkShare, promotes its applications that assure the integrity of documents – the original has not been altered – and that remove metadata from documents. They then add a zinger.…
Here is a new role for a general counsel: Twitter reporter. I read in LinkedIn that “The FT’s [Financial Times] general counsel Tim Bratton will be providing live Twitter updates from next week’s Corporate Counsel Forum Europe.” The Financial Times sponsors the Forum so this unusual undertaking actually makes some…
One panelist at the InsideCounsel SuperConference was the General Counsel of Johnson Controls, Jerry Okarma. His 55-lawyer legal department has a standardized on-boarding process for lawyers around the world. Otherwise, he said, there would be lots of different understandings. There is a schedule set for what newcomers should do and…
An article several years ago laid out an organizing framework for knowledge in the form of a basic four-cell matrix. Visualize theory and practice as labels for the two rows and content and process as labels for the two columns. This useful table comes from Admin. Sci. Q., March 2003…
It would be an easy matter, technically, to log all calls made by a lawyer to a client within the company and all intra-company calls from clients to the lawyer. This recording would disregard all content, storing and aggregating only the people at either end and the duration of the…
A trend may be a healthy movement to adopt something new, such as more para-professionals in legal departments, matter management software, benchmark metrics, or management by objectives. A trend simply says that increasing numbers of legal departments are adopting a practice, but not necessarily that it is a good practice…
For all kinds of material on law department intranets, it would be good to accumulate comments and improvements by members of the department. An example of a tool that would make this easy is Google’s Sidewiki. With it you can “View other people’s perspectives on any webpage or contribute your…
“Does your law department have a formal knowledge management system or practice?” In answer to this poll on the Association of Corporate Counsel website as of the afternoon of July 25th, 7 people had answered “Yes” and 32 had answered “No.” htt Managers of law departments need metrics. That is…