An executive of the Association of Corporate Counsel compiles 75 tips for saving money in-house in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, March 2009 at 39. Number 7 goes a bit over the top I would say: “The single greatest tool inside counsel can use to reduce costs [!!] is to…
According to an e-mail I received, a US telecommunications company needed over twelve thousand documents to be reviewed and filtered for pre-identified contractual issues and verified against certain online information. The law department asked Corplo, a legal support service (LSS) provider based in New Delhi, India, to review, extract and…
This is the fourth in a series of five postings by Jeff Kaplan on compliance and ethics (C&E) programs and cost (See my post of March 8, 2009: embedding risk assessment into codes of conduct.). Here, I address the topic of training. Training is generally the most costly part of…
The Financial Times included this tantalizing snippet in its Oct. 17, 2008 issue where an article discusses law department innovation (by Michael Peel). “Another in-house lawyer who was seen as an original thinker was Dirk Tirez, whose work centred on trying to make Belgian Post’s approach to litigation more efficient.…
A throwaway line for general counsel who want to demonstrate their striving to reduce legal costs is “We’re going to bring more work inside” (See my post of Aug. 4, 2008: BAE Systems.). The intention really boils down to “We’re going to remove work from law firms.” A general counsel…
Here’s an item for the “go-figure” bucket: a general fired for processing legal fees late? As reported in the Fin. Times, Oct. 17, 2008, Michael Mocniak, was the general counsel of Calgon Carbon during 2005. The Financial Times reports that “Mr. Mocniak left Calgon in 2006 after an internal audit…
Since my last metapost on what it costs a company to support each hour of its internal attorneys (See my post of Aug. 27, 2008: fully-loaded cost per lawyer hour with 31 references.), I have accumulated several more posts (See my post of Sept. 9, 2008: opportunity cost can be…
This is the third in a series of postings by Jeff Kaplan on compliance and ethics (C&E) programs and cost. In the second I examined one cost-effective approach to C&E risk assessment, which is to embed risk assessment into training of senior managers. In today’s post I address a related…
If law departments lack software to track external expenses, they may rely on accounts payable to generate whatever figures they need. This point struck me after I read astute blogger Ron Friedmann and his lament about the lack of technology in many law departments. On that point, he heard from…
Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (Penguin Press 2008) at 135, refers to “what economists call network externalities, the benefit of pooling information between multiple employees and agents.” As when fax machines became common and increased the value of each one that joined the…