Britain’s National Health Service analyzes particular drugs, at a known cost per patient per year, to decide whether they provide sufficient benefit, measured in terms of additional “quality-adjusted life years” (QALY). For example, as described in the Wall St. J., Vol. 246, Nov. 23, 2005 at A1, an Alzheimer’s drug…
If your company does not want to invest in a full-time employee lawyer, it nevertheless might want to have an experienced generalist work on site one-to-three days a week as a rent-a-GC, an outsourced general counsel. A number of former in-house lawyers or veteran law firm partners offer this service.…
Panelist at a recent conference of general counsel compared practices on the disbursement of monies obtained by the law department’s actions. At one company, the law department can recoup from the settlement, judgment, royalties, or license fees recovered, the expenses it incurred in the effort (and sometimes even gets a…
Finance departments sometimes tell law departments their aggregate budget for the coming year, which is “top-down budgeting.” Other law departments figure out their spend for the coming year and tell finance, a reverse practice referred to as “bottom-up budgeting.” Most common might be “golden-spike budgets,” where law and finance come…
Managers of law firms undoubtedly feel pressure to keep their firms profitable, enjoying juicy and increasing profits per partner. Realistically, large firms are “publicly traded” in the sense that their comparative profits-per-partner are splashed all over the trade journals. If the collective cost-cutting of corporate clients threatens that take-home, should…
A previous post admired Cisco’s investment in technology for handling discovery documents (Sept. 21, 2005 about the investment and possibly licensing it). A fuller, very informative description of that company’s efforts appeared in Law.com’s In-House Counsel. One of the points that struck me was the statement that when electronic discovery…
The Salary Wizard shows 25th quartile, median, and 75th quartile data for base, bonus, and benefits of in-house lawyers. For example, I looked at figures for the “top litigation executive,”, with data prepared using the Salary Wizard’s “Certified Compensation Professionals’ analysis of survey data collected from thousands of HR departments…
The website of HR AnswerLink (OFDA) announces that “the average [employment] litigation cost is $50,000 per case,” and that “the average settlement is $200,000 per case.” As to legal intensiveness of the HR field, the site points out that there “are 7,000 federal code sections, and more than 40,000 pages…
Yes, 12 year old data, but it made me wonder why more law departments have not followed this path. In 1992, the insurance company USF&G evaluated its 250 law firms and dropped 100 of them. It replaced those firms, not with more $80 average an hour firms but with national…
The 1996 Watson Wyatt Directors’ & Officers Liability Survey pulled together some data which even now, if one increased the dollar figures nine years later for inflation, probably provides some boundaries for thinking about D&O claims. According to that report, summarized in the Babcock White Paper Series, the average litigation…