Acacia Research Corporation licenses large corporate patent portfolios and makes money by negotiated licenses or litigated settlements. An article in Corp. Counsel, Dec. 2010 at 59, describes some of the publicly traded company’s deals, such as with the Japanese software company Access Co. Ltd., Renesas Electronics Corp., and several others…
Management, of a legal department or of any function, comes down to decisions about priorities. One of those decisions for general counsel ought to concern what the lawyers should do particularly well – the core competencies of the department – and what tasks are secondary. My latest article, published by…
The workload of in-house patent counsel must rise, to some extent, in countries where statutes require companies to compensate their employee inventors. As laid out in an excellent supplement to the ACC Docket, Nov. 2010 at 33, those countries include such large-scale patent companies as China, Japan, Korea and Germany.…
“The world economic downturn has further boosted company in-house lawyers’ power, with cost-cutting giving them the impetus to hire fewer outside lawyers and taken on more and broader-ranging work themselves.” Nothing like gaining strength from weakness! This quote, from the Economist online Oct. 19, 2010 (Michael Peel) is oblivious to…
Whenever someone standardizes a process, ironically, it increases a small class of risks. It increases the chance that the unusual event falls through cracks in the steps, rules, guidelines and process maps. Those are Type II errors where legal risks are present but not spotted. If all subpoena requests move…
Debunking. I love it, but this one hit home. I have written positively about productivity gains for lawyers who use two monitors (See my post of Sept. 30, 2009: monitors with 6 references.). Support for my conclusion came from a study in 2008 that found productivity gains of 30-50 percent…
A handwritten, two-page note arrived by mail a week ago and I was enchanted. It is so rare that anyone, let alone a general counsel, takes the time to write someone by resolutely non-digital pen. Charmed and uplifted by the personal touch, my mind wandered. Nowadays, most in-house counsel hand…
“Studies have shown that the average employee with Internet access spends about one-fourth of the workday on e-mail – not all of which is work related.” This factoid comes from strategy+business, Winter 2010 at 126. If that is an average, in-house counsel might typically spend even more time on e-mail.…
Lifehacking is a grassroots Internet movement begun in 2003 when a British tech writer, frustrated by his own inefficiency, polled many of his productive friends for their tips. As described in Julian Dibbell, ed., The Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale Univ. 2010) at 198 (by Sam Anderson) “lifehacking has snowballed…
Steven Levy commented on my post about metrics that might quantify the complexity of contracts (See my post of Oct. 31, 2010: Halstead metrics translated to law departments.). The problem is that Halstead metrics measure code complexity (sort of) but do not measure either problem complexity, solution elegance (maintainability and…