In Exec.Counsel, June/July 2012 at 31, author Mark Klapow of Crowell & Moring discusses intellectual property. At one point he refers to how much companies spend on their internal IP groups. “The average annual budget for the intellectual property departments for large companies, which are typically the most dedicated to…
A pair of professors at Boston University’s School of Law have calculated a price tag for the direct costs stemming from patent troll activity: about $29 billion. The $29 billion figure excludes a host of indirect costs to the defendants’ business, “such as diversion of resources, delays in new products,…
The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals ranks what it defines as the global outsourcing 100 leaders. Listed in Fortune, July 23, 2012 at 55, a few of them have some involvement with legal outsourcing. I noted on a quick glance Donnelley Global Outsourcing and SPI Global. More interesting was…
doeLEGAL supports not only its ASCENT matter management product for legal departments but also its discovery-document processing capabilities. As to the latter, the company announced late last year that it had passed a Standards for Attestation Engagements 16 (SSAE 16) Type II audit completed during the first nine months of…
Amounts initially awarded by juries do not reflect any reductions or offsets subsequently granted by judges or appellate courts, but they do represent data points regarding corporate legal costs. So, let’s start with data for the top 100 verdicts in United States as published in Corp. Counsel, May 2012 at…
The settlements that reach the press, those covered by 8K filings or news releases, may well account for the largest part of corporate settlements paid (See my post of April 15, 2007: confidentiality of settlement amounts.). I presume this to be true since a single blockbuster settlement easily overshadows lots…
Dr. Silvia Hodges combines teaching at Fordham Law School with her work at CT TyMetrix. As an academic, she has researched and spoken about procurement practices related to law departments. In a recent e-mail to me she explained her efforts to bring together procurement professionals who want to understand better…
Those who follow the field of alternative dispute resolution can find a trove of recent empirical research described in Alternatives, the newsletter of the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution, May, 2012 at 118. The issue summarizes four research programs and their findings regarding corporate legal practice and ADR.…
Comprehensive legal spending by companies should include settlement, judgments, fines and awards. Data rarely appear on those outlays, but one source found that those “legal resolution costs” amount to about one quarter of internal and external legal costs. That ratio puts those costs at 20% of the total (See my…
The New York Times, May 1, 2012 at B3, ran a piece on litigation financing. It mentions BlackRobe Capital, Fulbrook Management, and Bentham Capital, all of which investment funds started in 2011. BlackRobe’s founder is John Coffey, formerly a litigation partner at Bernstein Litowitz. Further, the litigation finance team at…