General Electric’s law department has apparently invested in a document management and document assembly system, an innovation that the department anticipates will save $12 million annually. In the fine print of the article, Corp. Counsel, Vol. 14, Jan. 2007 at 61, the law department mentions outside counsel fees and inside…
Out of a research set of 1,124 US federal district court IP cases – 670 patent, 436 trademark, and 18 both – decided between 1980 and June 2005, “on average since 1983, plaintiffs … are awarded damages approximately 53% of the time” according to the 2006 Patent and Trademark Damages…
Data has yet to come to my attention about how often law departments request from their law firms what US lawyers refer to as “formal opinions.” The law firm’s malpractice insurance backs up a firm’s formal opinion letters. Outside of mergers (See my post of Nov. 9, 2006 on UK…
According to Iain Larkin, group general counsel at DaimlerChrysler UK, in LegalWeek, Sept. 21, 2006 at 18, “Statistics prove that, contrary to popular belief, external legal costs increase rather than decrease with the introduction of a legal department.” I can well believe that, because some clients don’t even know what…
A tidbit from Counsel to Counsel, Nov. 2006 at 10, notes that the in-house lawyers of Golden West Financial Corp. are assigned to and co-located with the bank’s three major business units. The units must include in their annual budgets the costs of the lawyers assigned to them. Because that…
You can’t hear about law departments’ travails of cost control without hearing one of the perennial candidates; alternative dispute resolution (See my post of May 21, 2006 where it is ranked number 6.). Within the ADR quiver, mandatory arbitration is one of the proudest arrows (See my post of Dec.…
In the early 1990s Aviva, a UK-based insurance company, started having its in-house team of lawyers track their time. According to an article in Law Dept. Quarterly, Vol. 2, Sept./Nov. 2006 at 44, they currently use an in-house system to track lawyer time. The article points out three ways Aviva…
A recent Legal Week Intelligence Client Satisfaction Survey garnered responses from 297 UK law departments. The results summary in LegalWeek, Oct. 26, 2006 at 3, has a strange paragraph in it, at least for US law departments. “General counsel identified law firm policies towards liability caps and conflicts as significantly…
The AXA Equitable law department, under General Counsel Richard Silver, used a Six Sigma-based process to drill down systematically on how its 11 litigators practice. “The analysis determined that in-house [litigation] attorneys were doing work that paralegals can handle, while sending out work they can do themselves” according to InsideCounsel,…
Five metrics in the Corporate Legal Standard’s “Top 25 Law Department Operations Metrics” (in its report dated Nov. 10, 2005 at 10) have to do with legal invoice processing. In order, those metrics are “legal invoices processed per accounts payable FTE”; “remittances processed per accounts receivable FTE”; “cost per invoice”;…