Someday we may find that better run companies – whatever that means and however that is measured – tend to have better run law departments – at least as evidenced by their comparative benchmarks. Among mature companies competing in mature industries, it seems likely that their well-honed HR practices, technology…
Data on high costs to obtain patents of small, high-technology companies A recent article by Gillian Hadfield cited an in-depth empirical study of patent activity by small technology companies. The excellent study compiled data and explanations about patent costs for those companies. “The average out-of-pocket cost for a respondent firm…
A Washington, DC virtual firm called Clearspire has 20 or so lawyers and an unorthodox business model. The Economist, Aug. 13, 2011 at 64, says that its lawyers offer cost estimates for each phase of their work. If the lawyer exceeds the estimate, too bad for the Clearspire lawyer. “But…
Among the arguments in a solid book that disagrees with the current worries about America losing its competitive edge, Amar Bhidé, The Venturesome Economy: how innovation sustains prosperity in a more connected world (Princeton Univ. 2008) at 162-179, puts forth seven concerns with off-shoring. Each of them resonates with some…
The lead story in Met. Corp. Counsel, July 2011, prints an address delivered to the Atlantic Legal Foundation. It slams litigation funders for (1) high interest rates and (2) the “perverse financial incentives funding creates when settlement discussions happen.” The story cites Counsel Financial, which it says is backed by…
IMF (Australia) Ltd. Is a publicly-traded investor in litigation. A long profile from The Asian Lawyer, Summer 2011 at 17, explains how its founder, Hug McLernon started funding cases in 1989 and took his company public in 2001. It currently has around $1.7 billion in active claims under management (See…
The point of this post is the increasing availability at low cost of legal guidance and work product on the Internet. The trend toward even more cloud law is inexorable. Bloomberg Bus. Week, July 11 at 41, describes LawPivot as a Q&A website that allows cash-strapped entrepreneurs to ask questions…
Given the cost and complexity of e-discovery – defined by me as the steps necessary to locate electronic files, preserve them, review them and produce them – some law departments work with their information technology counterparts to do the job internally. They pick which cases to do in-house and turn…
The latest newsletter of executive recruiters Laurence Simons mentioned ProcureLaw.com, “an online tendering platform for legal services.” Misys General Counsel, Tom Kilroy, tells us that he saved around 50 per cent on legal fees after running a tender to select a law firm to carry out an employment law project.…
In Fortune, June 13, 2011 at 69, Roger Parloff plunges deep into the secretive world of third-party litigation financing. Mostly he drills down on the Chevron case in Ecuador and one major financer. What he finds is not pretty and it is certainly far from transparent. Along the way he…