A surprising emphasis on technology training appeared in a recent white paper. A chart summarizes the survey responses from 150 lawyers among the largest in the United States and Canada, reported in Future Law Office: Delivering Value-Added Legal Services in Challenging Times (Robert Half Legal 2009) at 6. The question…
By law, it seems, all surveys of legal departments must include a mandatory question: “Which of the following criteria is most important to you when you decide which law firm to retain?” Loopholes in the law allow the survey to fiddle with attributes and wording, but over and over the…
A recent white paper quotes an article by Larry Bodine, who “advises law firms to meet with general counsel at least once a quarter, at the client’s office” to talk about the client’s business. His quote appears in Future Law Office: Delivering Value-Added Legal Services in Challenging Times (Robert Half…
To spur your key law firms, tell them how they compare to their competitors. This idea comes from Inside Counsel, June 2009 at 50, which recounts the tactic of Jim Bencer, the general counsel of Williams Co. His legal group “notifies its law firms of its diversity goals along with…
Jeanne Graham, writing in the Texas Lawyer, July 1, 2009, quotes the managing partner of Beirne Maynard & Parsons. His comments on decision trees are grounded in reality (See my post of June 17, 2009: decision tree software with 6 references.) “The firm uses decision tree analysis when creating budgets…
Dialectics appeal to me; the push and pull of opposing views exists all the time on any practice worth a discussion. So in that spirit let me present both sides of the decision to charge a lawyer in a legal department with responsibility for the department’s non-substantive dealings with a…
The Annual Report & Accounts of Juridica Investments Ltd., a publicly-traded company that finances litigation, cites data from the American Lawyer survey in 2008 of the 200 largest law firms in the US. The group of firms earned aggregate revenues of $81.5 billion. Further, says the Report, “Applying percentages from…
My most recent article, published in the National Law Journal last month, summarizes why incumbent firms have such a strong hold on the legal departments they represent. That is common sense. More originally, the article offers ten ways to combat the bias toward the familiar firms and level the playing…
I learned about another network of law firms, MSI Global Alliance, so I wrote to Giles Brake and asked him for an example of a legal department that uses a member firm. Brake obliged: “Our Buenos Aires law firm member Garcia Menendez Abogados are the lawyers for an Argentine multinational…
“About 280 firms are invited to complete the Vault/MCCA Diversity Survey, and results go into a database that is accessible at no cost to corporate counsel.” This resource of information about law firm diversity, described in Inside Counsel, June 2009 at 48, saves law departments from the effort of collecting…