A general counsel’s compensation may be included not in the law department’s budget but on the executive group’s budget. How often that happens is unknown to me, but it means that the inside budgets of some law departments understate the company’s total legal spending. Given that lawyer compensation quite often…
(1) “Management wants this deal to close before the end of the quarter so that we can book the revenue this fiscal year.” (2a) “Before the end of the quarter is when management wants this deal to close so that we can book the revenue this fiscal year.” (2b) “So…
Yes, all you doubters, it’s true, and beyond a cavil strategically crucial. Abbott, Langer’s survey of 111 law departments, published December 2005, unveils the earth-shaking profundity that legal secretaries who use shorthand boast a median total income 15.3 percent greater than that of their compadres who “transcribe from dictation equipment…
An article published four years ago reports how Deloitte & Touche verified a Six Sigma project at DuPont. Deloitte looked at 18 employment cases concluded during a seven-year period. The project and Deloitte’s review evaluated whether ECA benefited DuPont (Gardner Courson and Thomas Sager, “Metrics for Success in DuPont’s Legal…
A recent survey gave law department respondents four choices to select from for their definition of “low stakes matter,” as summarized by LexisNexis Martindale-Hubble based on responses from hundreds of in-house counsel (Counsel to Counsel, March 2006 at 15). “Limited exposure/risk to company” garnered 91 percent; “simple, predictable process,” had…
General counsel need to be conversant with one of the terms – and key concepts – of economics. Nominal concepts apply to the company as well as to the law department. Nominal figures for outside counsel rate increases, for example, or for increases in the legal department’s budget, do not…
As a result of a Six Sigma analysis in 2001, the law department of NCR “decided to move most of its legal work to outside counsel to save money (emphasis added).” Would that more details were included! Instead, the piece that breezed across this provocative and contrarian view in Corp.…
No data has come my way that compares the pay of promoted general counsels to the pay of newly hired general counsel. It makes sense, however, to me that the outsiders would make more. If no lawyer within the company is good enough to fill an open general counsel position,…
For a typical law department, the difference between its fully-loaded cost per lawyer hour and the blended billing rate of its outside lawyers is around 40 percent. For example, the cost inside is $170 an hour while the cost outside is $240 an hour. As opposed to this favorable cost…
Net Income Per Partner (NIPP) depends mostly on hourly rates and hours billed (Richard Gary, Law Firm Inc., Vol. 4, Jan./Feb. 2006 at 25). Law firms seek to increase both; law departments ought to worry about increases, and indeed, some would say, ought to take a tuck out of them.…