Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) recently surveyed 48 law departments (about a quarter of the respondents were general counsel) representing midmarket organizations (500 to 999 employees, 17%), larger companies (1,000 to 2,499 employees, 10%) and enterprise-class (2,500 employees or more, the remainder). ESG was dismayed to find that in 2010 almost…
Any comments by me on insurance coverage tread dangerously close to a topic where my total ignorance almost outweighs my desire to write about topics of law department management. Almost. In Executive Counsel, Dec. 2011/Jan. 2012 at 20, Peter Selvin pselvin@rainselaw.com describes a number of ways that comprehensive general liability…
Sophie Ross of FTI wrote recently that “many analysts estimate that the cost of legal review comprises about 70 to 80 percent of total e-discovery costs.” This is from Met. Corp. Counsel, Dec. 2011 at 15. sophie.ross@fticonsulting.com Earlier, she states that Fulbright & Jaworski found recently that “on average a…
Marsh & McClennan’s Michael Caplan, who manages the finances for that company’s legal team, spoke at length recently about accruals: “Technology to manage un-billed fee estimate accruals from law firms is critical and we put a process in place to capture un-billed fees monthly from our top 50 firms. We…
The size of the U.S. legal services industry, the term used in a Rand report just released, “Innovations in the Provision of Legal Services in the United States,” remains undecided. Rand’s study has more data that might clarify the number. Rand cites the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis…
Jeff Hodge, Executive Director, Corporate of matter management and e-discovery vendor doeLEGAL, wrote December 13th on the company blog about the growth of the electronic document discovery (EDD) market. “Starting at about $40 million in revenues in 1999, the market appears to have grown to approximately $70 million in 2000,…
A cloud of companies surround law departments and seek business from them. Here is an illuminating slice of the cottage industry. For the Council on Litigation Management’s annual conference, 3 premium, 14 platinum, 19 gold, and 20 silver sponsors signed on. Nine of them are law firms. The remaining 47…
Fronterion’s recently released Top Ten Trends for Legal Outsourcing in 2012 is worth reading. One point it makes relates to the increasing frequency with which law departments will retain LPOs and insist that their law firms rely on the work of the LPO. Law departments will butt into their law…
An informative article co-authored by the general counsel of Alfa Laval appears in the ACC Docket, Nov. 2011 at 39. One portion discusses “risk tolerance,” and gives the edge in risk tolerance to companies that (1) have the money to absorb the worst-possible outcome and (2) encounter the situation repeatedly,…
In 2010, a major division of Royal Dutch Shell decided to use zero-based budgeting to reset its cost structure (See my post of July 16, 2007: zero-based budgets; Jan. 2, 2009: advantages of zero-based budgets; March 29, 2009: five steps toward more reality in budgets; April 22, 2009: zero-based staffing…