One unheralded piece of the contract suite, by which I mean the array of software and processes that let a company get its contracts executed, is the approval matrix. It guides lawyers and clients regarding the level of manager who must sign off on a non-standard change to a contract.…
A computer scientist named Maurice Halstead devised a measure of software complexity and the mental effort required to create it. As explained in IEEE Spectrum, Oct. 2010 at 34, the quantitative measurements, later called Halstead metrics, “counted the number of unique operators and operands as well as the number of…
A post on the blog of Emptoris relates some of the comments made by Steve Harmon, Cisco’s Senior Director of Legal Services at the Emptoris Empower 2010 conference. I highlight two points. “As a best practice, Harmon emphasized the importance of streamlining the number of approvals necessary for contract implementation,…
According to the American Intellectual Property Law Association’s Rep. of the Ec. Survey 2005, at 17, corporate IP department attorneys (not including heads of departments) spent one-third of their time on IP prosecution work directly (See my post of Sept. 28, 2010: new-age patent lawyers should move beyond prosecution work.).…
In-house staff like to put off undesirable tasks. Everyone does. So a simple technique described in Law Practice, Sept./Oct. 2010 at 12, appeals to me, Set a wind-up egg timer to ring at 25 minutes: a chunk of time called a pomodoro.” While it ticks away work on one and…
An article in Law Practice, Sept./Oct. 2010 at 12, recommends that law firms develop “quick-reference guides for how the various jobs in the firm are done, and by whom.” Let’s transplant the constructive suggestion to our domain. “Start by having all current employees outline the major tasks they perform regularly,…
Kevin Potts, VP of Product Management and Marketing at Emptoris, a leading provider of contract management software, left a hefty comment on one of my recent posts. His lessons learned deserve wider play and I couldn’t resist some editorial remarks. Note also that Kevin hosts a blog. “Not being a…
It would be an easy matter, technically, to log all calls made by a lawyer to a client within the company and all intra-company calls from clients to the lawyer. This recording would disregard all content, storing and aggregating only the people at either end and the duration of the…
The General Counsel of LG Electronics spoke at the InsideCounsel Super Conference on May 25 th. The subsidiary he serves racks up $6 billion in sales yet has only five lawyers. He said there was no headquarters legal group so they are actually stand alone. It was his outline of…
“Organizational routines can be defined as repetitive, recognizable patterns of interdependent actions, carried out by multiple actors.” This definition, from Admin. Sci. Q., March 2003 at 95, seems very close to the ones I have fashioned for the term “processes” (See my post of April 27, 2006: “A process is…