Here’s a real corker. The NY Times, March 4, 2007 at BU 2, opened this one up. UST, which makes smokeless tobacco products as well as wine, disclosed in a regulatory filing that it provided its general counsel, Richard A. Kohlberger, a $4,764 allowance “specifically for buying wine.” New disclosure…
Charles Volkert III, executive director of Robert Half Legal, cites in InsideCounsel, Feb. 2007 at 56, an example of a huge company that “hired 40 contract professionals for six months to review” discovery documents in concert with a law firm. Compared to what the firm would have charged, that decision…
In the words of George Socha, a consultant who works with e-discovery systems, “Pfizer was the first company to hire a lawyer to build such a system from the ground up,” Corp. Counsel, Vol. 13, Dec. 2006 at 80. That’s a distinction! And, note that the lawyer — Laura Kibbe,…
In the summer of 2006, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York’s Committee on Professional and Judicial Ethics weighed in with a formal opinion on the ethics of overseas legal outsourcing. LegalEase Solutions distributed a summary of that opinion, http://www.nycbar.org/ which found the use of lawyers…
When the expenses of a vendor such as a litigation support group or an expert witness are significant (greater than $5,000 perhaps), it is often advantageous for law firms and for law departments to have the vendor directly bill the law department. Direct billing means the law firm does not…
If a law department does not have a matter management system for tracking external spending, it may have to rely on the company’s accounting system – or systems (See my post of Sept. 14, 2005 about the attorney-client privilege and transfers of invoice information to accounts payable.). The vexations start…
A proposal by the European Commission for a single Europe-wide community patent enforced by a central court in Luxembourg has been bogged down for years, but the Fin. Times, Nov. 8, 2006 at 6 points out some reasons why the initiative has gotten a fresh impetus. One is that “Patent…
The litigation group of Schering-Plough has begun to conduct early case assessments of its major disputes. “Within the first 60 days our outside counsel is charged with giving us an early assessment of the case. The firms are charged with looking at documents, interviewing witnesses, examining pleadings, preparing a damages…
On Dec. 3, 2003 Associate Attorney General Robert D. McCallum remarked that at the Department of Justice, for every civil case taken to trial, about one hundred others are resolved before they go to trial. Many of those settled cases relied on some form of alternative dispute resolution. To evaluate…
The incoming general counsel of Daimler-Chrysler AG, Gerd Becht, intends to scrutinize the approximately 240 lawyers who will report to him from the United States and Germany. According to Corp. Counsel, Vol.14, Jan. 2007 at 49, “after Becht’s consolidation, the number [of lawyers] should drop to 200 by spring 2007.”…