Having just published a post on the financial blow to general counsels’ budgets of electronic discovery (See my post of Sept. 8, 2010: costs of e-discovery.), I busied myself with finding posts on electronically stored information (ESI) that do not bash the cash, as it were, as well as metaposts.…
This statement, which I summarized from remarks by Richard Susskind at last week’s conference, Generals of the Revolution, embodies much wisdom. The choice by a legal department of which law firm or other provider – the sourcing decision – should handle some piece of work determines the total cost much…
Speaking at the Datacert conference, Generals of the Revolution, last week, Richard Susskind, the author of The End Of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services (Oxford 2008), referred to an interesting event. British Telecomm assembled its own team of lawyers and others in India to provide LPO services. Without…
A ten-year-old article said that the median costs of wrongful-termination awards reached $151,800 for men and $75,000 for women (based on 1,700 verdicts rendered between 1988 and 1995). The article is in Admin. Sciences Quarterly, 2000 at 557. Even in 1988 the average cost to defendants of those types of…
An advertising supplement by CT Tymetrix in Corp. Counsel, Sept. 2010 at 3, reels off 11 methods by which legal departments manage external legal costs. Experienced, managers of departments know about all of them and will find nothing new, except one: “trial date management.” Trials are so rare that it…
A piece in Met. Corp. Counsel, Sept. 2010 at 28, offers a stunning metric about the number of invoices Novartis AG’s legal and intellectual property groups cope with annually. The groups work with more than 300 law firms, legal vendors, and IP agents, who collectively snow each year a blizzard…
Among the 25 most influential people in IP singled out by Intell. Prop., Fall 2010 at 13, three of them loom large in the controversial domain of what some refer to as patent trolls. John Amster, the CEO of RPX Corporation; Nathan Myhrvold, CEO of Intellectual Ventures; and Paul Ryan,…
It bothers me that the common refrain goes like this: “Pressure from the CEO or the CFO forces the general counsel to cut costs.” Beyond cavil, the two top executives often mandate budget cuts and what functional head voluntarily signs up for headcount reductions or a lower spending limit? Pressure…
To value a corporation’s patent portfolio is one of the inter-disciplinary contributions of in-house patent counsel. Inter-disciplinary because technology professionals, commercial managers, and finance specialists have to combine their talents. Partnering Perspectives, Summer 2010, at 5, by Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, states that “Many businesses use an ‘opportunity matrix’ to…
Of the Fortune Global 500 companies, 165 are based in 10 vast cities. I presume that their legal departments staff many of their lawyers in those megalopolises. Here are the leaders from Foreign Policy, Sept./Oct. 2010 at 125: Tokyo (51 Global 500 companies and probably law departments), Paris (34), New…