IP Review, Iss. 24, Winter 2008/2009 at 22, describes insurance policies of SAMIAN Underwriting Agencies, working with CPA Global, that offer clients “insurance for up to 10 patent families when clients are renewing patents. This allows clients to enforce their rights through legal expense insurance” (See my post of Oct.…
Little is known by me about the cost to a company of processing a law firm invoice (See my post of Nov. 5, 2006: “processing invoices”; Sept. 14, 2005: estimate of costs; April 6, 2008: multiple payment destinations.). Yet the cost to the company can probably be significant. After all,…
Government agencies use budgets instead of revenue for their basic comparative metric. For example, the FBI has a $6 billion budget, according to Diversity & The Bar, Jan./Feb. 2009 at 42. Its office of the general counsel, headed by Valerie Caproni, has 180 attorneys, which means its lawyers per billion…
An ad in Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, Feb. 2009 at A2, with text by John Augustyn, a shareholder in Leydig, Voit & Mayer, refers to how “Companies obtain opinions of patent counsel with respect to specific patents and products for several reasons, including the potential use of the opinion in…
Almost 90 percent of 1,400 lawyers who responded to a recent survey said “e-discovery is too costly and is increasing litigation costs, causing cases to be settled on cost rather than merit.” This conclusion, from a study conducted by the American College of Trial Lawyers (ACTL) and the Institute for…
We hear all the time about e-discovery, but what proportion of all document discovery does it constitute? It sounds like 60 percent might be a rule of thumb. These findings come from a survey of 235 mostly-US companies by the IT Policy Compliance Group (IT PCG) as reported in Info.…
These findings about litigation holds come from a survey of 235 mostly-US companies by the IT Policy Compliance Group (IT PCG) as reported in Info. Mgt., Vol. 43, Jan./Feb. 2009 at 10. Several posts refer to this survey (See my post of Feb. 6, 2009: savings from the various practices;…
The findings discussed below come from a survey of 235 mostly-US companies by the IT Policy Compliance Group (IT PCG) as reported in Info. Mgt., Vol. 43, Jan./Feb. 2009 at 10 (See my post of Feb. 6, 2009: savings from the various practices.). The author of the survey, Jim Hurley,explained…
A recent survey found that, “regardless of size, companies following best practices when it comes to compliance issues spent a smaller amount on legal fees than those following the worst practices.” Companies that follow what the survey describes as “normative” practices [the middle state between poor practices and excellent practices]…
Some people use the term “total legal expenses” to stand for what I refer to as “total legal spending.” I define total legal spending as the sum of a law department’s internal expenditures and what it pays outside counsel and other vendors (See my post of Aug. 21, 2008: total…