Here’s a gedanken experiment (a thought experiment). Take a large group of law departments that have between 20 and 30 lawyers each (to control for differences in size of companies). Figure out the gap between each law department’s fully-loaded cost per lawyer hour and the blended billing rates of all…
A roundtable last year discussed infringement actions where one general counsel, a litigator who had protected the Mercedes brand name for several years, remarked that the “principle was that over time, with damages, actions brought to defend the brand would fund our costs.” . Another lawyer ran over that idea.…
Document discovery, especially electronic document discovery, has exploded in the past few years. Vendors in that space dominated LegalTechs booths. A quantophrenic tally of vendors by categories at LegalTech tells how much the market has reached terminal velocity (See my post of Feb. 8, 2006 defining quantophrenia as metrics mania.)…
An article in Executive Legal Adviser, Nov./Dec. 2005 at 22 (by Michael Maslanka and Theresa Gegen) discusses several ideas that sound pragmatic (or controversial) for when you prepare for mediation. (1) You want the other side to accept and relate to the mediator, so if possible “develop a profile of…
The managing attorney for claims and litigation at Johns Hopkins attributed the hospital’s 30 percent reduction in expense payments for malpractice in 2003 at least in part to the new policy it adopted in 2001. The new policy, as described in Constance E. Bagley, Winning Legally: How to Use the…
Legal Times, Jan. 27, 2006, published my article on different forms of auctions law departments should know about. Meanwhile, I continued to collect ideas. Double auctions. In this auction all the sellers and all the buyers submit bids, which are then ranked highest to lowest to generate demand and supply…
Clobbered by a wave of lawsuits against its key product, OxyContin, and revenue pressure from a generics competitor, the law department of Purdue Pharma turned to contract lawyers. Then, inspired by layoffs the company had made, the law department hired 18 former employees and trained them to do work that…
I worked on the consulting project in 1990 that famously resulted in Continental Bank closing down its 70+ lawyer department and by outsourcing satisfying its legal needs with Mayer, Brown & Platt. That decision was the page-one headline on the inaugural issue of Corporate Legal Times, and it triggered much…
A piece on offshoring, BusinessWeek, Iss. 3969, Jan. 30, 2006 at 56-57, did not specifically concern itself with legal work, but among its many examples of services provided US companies from India, I noted these three: (1) as part of its market research, Evalueserve “will, within a day, assemble a…
In 2003, Accenture’s 30-lawyer UK legal department set up a legal service center in Mauritius. Accenture chose Mauritius because its population speaks Dutch, French and English and its lawyers are schooled in both civil code and common law, Legal Week, Jan. 20, 2006 (Ed Thornton). The article explains that the…