Some help has arrived for in-house lawyers who are diverted too easily by RSS feeds, instant messages, e-mail, social networks, Twitter, or Google alerts. The Economist, June 12, 2010 at 12, describes more than a dozen software add-ons, packages, or apps that screen out the distractions that plague some users.…
The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) at the University of Denver surveyed law departments regarding litigation. What stunned me about the 485 valid responses to the survey was that “112 respondents (almost one-quarter) indicated that their company had ‘less than 5’ state or federal civil…
Much of me wants to encourage general counsel to try out something new, something that requires training and oversight, change, some amount of effort – and every operational adjustment does. But law departments can get encrusted, overloaded, cluttered, burdened with management initiatives (See my post of May 30, 2005: Shell…
Your next breakthrough idea may already be sitting out there, somewhere in your legal department. This is the principal of innovation through positive deviance. A positive deviance happens when someone breaks the fetters of tradition or proscribed ways of working, tries something unorthodox, and succeeds. The trick is to spot…
Personal privacy advocates (and all lawyers who work in-house) will abhor this idea. I’m not an advocate either, but the idea has First Amendment rights. According to the Economist, May 15, 2010 at 69, a company that provides remote workers – telecommuters by computer – has “developed tools that let…
An article in the Harvard Bus. Rev., May 2010 at 77, discusses practical steps to reduce overhead. Under the first category of incremental savings, what the authors call reductions of 10 percent, is to “reduce spending on department management.” The authors claim that “Most administrative departments (particularly those with more…
Having just touched on workloads and work-life balance (See my post of May 6, 2010: balancing two survey results.), let’s ponder a related finding. Again drawing on the massive survey of satisfaction by InsideCounsel, March 2010 at 51, consider that slightly less than half the respondents reported that on average…
Survey data from 348 in-house lawyers on two subjective states of mind, “work-life balance” and “workload,” left me with some questions. As released in InsideCounsel, March 2010 at 50, the lawyers gave these responses when asked “How satisfied are you with the following:” As to work-life balance 31.4 percent were…
This is the thesis of Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else (Penguin Group 2008). I am convinced by Colvin and we should all feel both liberated and empowered. Liberated because expertise and skill is not so much bestowed as earned; empowered because even…
“Generally speaking, the number of people an organization needs to train in process improvement is the square root of the number of personnel.” That rule of thumb, from the Harv. Bus. Rev., April 2010 at 56, means that a law department with 75 people, perhaps 40 lawyers and 35 non-lawyers,…