A consultant I know argues that a law department can’t just hire Robin, a partner at a firm, because Robin (or the firm) will insist that the entourage of junior partners and associates who orbit and serve Robin also work on Robin’s matters. I disagree. The inside lawyer who manages…
Several years ago, a very large law department appointed one of its lawyers to serve as the conflicts maven. Enough issues arose with firms seeking waivers or encountering potential conflicts that the general counsel thought it best to concentrate the department’s learning and to coordinate its responses. Not that the…
Several years ago, a very large law department appointed one of its lawyers to serve as the conflicts maven. Enough issues arose with firms seeking waivers or encountering potential conflicts that the general counsel thought it best to concentrate the department’s learning and to coordinate its responses. Not that the…
Back in the day, outside counsel made in-house calls. They came to the offices of corporate clients. Back then they plied calling cards in pay phones, admired correcto-type on Selectrics, smoked in offices, and licked stamps on envelopes. Proximity mattered in the kindler, gentler and slower eras gone by. Today,…
Liking law firm partners for quality of work, cost-effectiveness, and results can blur into liking partners personally, or degenerate to liking them because of reasons not related to their merits. Rewarding friends, doling out fees for benefits, indulging in favoritism: it happens. How might a general counsel guard against selections…
One of the speakers at the DataCert conference, J. L. Novak, General Counsel of AOL Paid Services, devoted a few impassioned minutes to explaining why vendor accruals and their accuracy are important to him. Evidently, if he misses an accrual, he is forced to walk through the CFO’s hot coals,…
The peripatetic Richard Susskind keynoted the recent DataCert conference, Generals of the Revolution. During his remarks he said that Thames Water had outsourced its entire legal department this year to the UK firm Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP). The law firm agreed to provide the utility with all its legal services…
Rich Baer, the general counsel of Quest, spoke last week at DataCert’s Generals of the Revolution. He explained that he had organized a group of general counsel in the Denver area to meet and discuss best practices regarding reserve setting. That was innovative, simply to pull together the experience of…
Richard Susskind, the author of The End Of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services (Oxford 2008), spoke recently at the DataCert conference, Generals of the Revolution. As he sees it, law departments under pressure to control costs and spending have two basic choices. They can follow an efficiency strategy…
A veteran in-house lawyer ruminated on the importance of law firms accumulating familiarity with their clients business, strategies, and employees. In his view, for one-off major law suits such background history and knowledge may have almost nothing to add. The fact of the case have to be learned so previous…