During a teleconference hosted by ACC’s Law Department Management, Litigation and Small Law Department committees, the general counsel of FMC Technologies, Jeff Carr, explained his company’s budget timetable. Carr said that the budget-forecasting process starts in May, but in August his department must submit what is effectively treated as the…
During a teleconference hosted this month by ACC’s Law Department Management, Litigation and Small Law Department committees, a litigation lawyer for American Express Travel Related Services explained that they ask outside litigation counsel to estimate the range of the company’s exposure on a case. The purpose is not to set…
“The brutal logic of risk dictates that it’s cheaper to pay for the aftermath of a single, relatively localized disaster than it is to prepare for the same disaster in every place at every time.” (Wired, Nov. 2005 at 34). Logical, maybe, and financially correct, perhaps, but try to persuade…
An IP blog, hosted by William Heinze, cites a presentation by Peter Detkin, Managing Director, Intellectual Ventures, who defined “trolls” as “non-practicing entities in technology.” Detkin said, according to the Jan. 5, 2006 post, that “’Trolls’ are only about 2 percent of patent litigation.” An article in Fast Company, Jan/Feb.…
An article, NY Times, Jan. 13, 2006, mentioned one method for law department’s to spend less: hire an outside service provider for legal research. Specifically, the article referred to LRN, and quoted Peter Kreindler, general counsel at Honeywell who “thought the company’s spending on legal services had fallen by at…
William Heinze’s blog, I/P Updates, has a full discussion (Jan. 10, 2006) of the upcoming Ocean Tomo Intellectual Capital Equity Live Patent Auction (See my post of Nov. 28, 2005 about another IP auction service.) Ocean Tomo seeks to increase liquidity for patent holders, and as part of that goal,…
Bayer successfully brought an infringement and invalidation suit against an inventor, proved inequitable conduct on the inventor’s part, and applied for reimbursement of approximately $4.5 million in attorneys’ fees, $1 million in expenses, and $.68 million in expert witness fees. A bill auditor, hired as an expert by the inventor,…
I’d like to test this proposition. Assume a corporate generalist six years out of law school. If hired as a full-time lawyer, that lawyer costs the company approximately $150-$170 per hour fully-loaded (See my post of Oct.18, 2005 on calculating a fully-loaded cost per lawyer hour.) The lawyer with the…
A law department is the beneficiary of many shared corporate services, yet never gets billed for them. The largest item would be a rental equivalent, at market rates. Reception areas and receptionists, security personnel, shuttle buses, mail room, IT infrastructure spending, the company holiday party, a subsidized cafeteria, snow removal…
Some numbers cry out for scrutiny. One, pertaining to e-mail, jolted me in the sidebar of an article on electronic discovery, published in September 2005 by Corporate Counsel and in a December advertisement from an electronic discovery vendor. “$4.6 billion. The amount in dollars that U.S. companies will spend internally…