In the battle of the forms, a weapon I had not heard about is new software that says it can show where the other side’s contract differs from yours. Its creator, a company called kiiac, claims to help: “Where your task is not preparing the initial contract, but rather reviewing…
Ninety-three of the responses to last year’s State of the IP Industry Survey, conducted by CPA Global, were from companies. Of that group, 63 percent were heads of IP or senior managers within the department, while the remainder were general counsel (9%) or “IP support (27%).” Much more important, however,…
Some people argue that productivity gains in companies arise primarily from improved organizational capital: improved management practices and operational processes. That claim rests on the assumption that human capital is roughly equally distributed so a competitive advantage accrues to those who focus on organizational capital. Further, it discounts the benefits…
A recent article by my friend Marc Lauritsen, of Capstone Practice Systems marc@capstonepractice.com, discusses “practice system authoring software.” Some people refer to such software as document assembly software, some as automated drafting software, but Marc covers the basics of whatever its appellation. And whatever you call it, it can be…
A presenter at a conference shared his company’s emphasis on the use of “plain English” in the drafting of contracts and other documents. The general counsel itemized his company’s basic rules of contract drafting: No embedded definitions Keep definitions in the same place and be sure they make sense No…
The worth of academic psychology studies varies widely, but when I read that “people in a bad mood performed tasks better than those in a good mood” I hardly cheered up. My basic style is cheerful; life is full and good. But as revealed in Sci. Am. Mind, March/April 2010…
An article about King & Spalding’s 150-person Discovery Center describes the history and attributes of that Center. They use project attorneys and staff attorneys for document review. But what stood out for me was a sentence about the productivity returns from big screens. I appreciate data that supports claims, so…
Matter management systems lack the capability to judge the importance of a matter. Fees alone don’t determine a matter’s strategic importance or legal depth. More specifically, the burn rate on a matter may indicate some measure of its legal intensity, but not enough (See my post of May 3, 2009:…
“In 1988, we had approximately 55,000 law firms (sic) producing 2% of our country’s gross domestic product. Twenty years on we had approximately 130,000 lawyers producing that same 2%.” This confusing quote comes from Law Bus. Rev., Winter 2009 at 54 with data from the United Kingdom, where I assume…
A recent book extols checklists as a commonsense way to help us manage the complexity of our activities. A reviewer, writing in the NY Times Bk. Rev., Jan. 24, 2010 at 7, says that the author argues that in many tasks failure “results not so much from ignorance (not knowing…