An interview in the New York Times, Sept. 27, 2009 at BU2, of Larry Kellner, CEO of Continental Airlines, has some of the usual CEO-talk that urges general counsel to do such things as hire good people, listen a lot, encourage quiet people to contribute, don’t slay the carrier of…
A recent study found “There was a 50/50 split between those [law departments] choosing to retain the volume-based work and those choosing to send out the volume work and retain the more complex work in-house,” reports Legal Strat. Rev., Summer 2009 at III. Your typical in-house attorney wants good work…
Estimates have put the percentage of commodity work handled by legal departments as high as a third of all they do. Whatever the proportion, where general counsel identify blocks of relatively routine work, they can choose from a set of actions how best to handle the services. Standardize processes and…
The Economist, Sept. 12, 2009 at 84, explores the emergent field of investments in patent portfolios. Citing Coller Capital, Intellectual Ventures, and Fortress, as active purchasers of patents, the article foresees patent investments as entering the financial mainstream. Brokers such as iPotential and ICAP Ocean Tomo help investors value, acquire…
It had to happen. A post on the humble chair, where in-house attorneys often spend more time than with their loved ones (See my post of July 29, 2007: to goose meetings, do away with chairs; and Feb. 7, 2008: infrastructure includes chairs.). Donna Payne writes about chairs in LTN…
Each of these terms deserves lengthy treatment for the reason that they are crucial to the effective management of work in a law department. I think I ran across this list in material from the General Counsel Roundtable, but the exact provenance is now lost. Here I loosely define the…
So much of what many in-house lawyers do has some connection to contracts that I quailed at the thought of wading through all my posts that pertain (See my post of May 16, 2006: misperception that all in-house lawyers do is review contracts; and June 24, 2007: 50-60% of work…
A drawback of internal time tracking that asks lawyers to enter how many hours they worked on a matter is padding. Inevitably and inexorably, unless a client is charged for the time and therefore brings some market discipline to the exercise, lawyers are seduced into bulking up their hour totals.…
Tired from compiling e-mail tips (See my post of Aug. 26, 2009: 30 e-mail suggestions.), I staggered on and found some more. These come from the Harv. Bus. Rev., Sept. 2009 at 88. “To eliminate the need for recipients to open very short messages, put the entire contents in the…
A study commissioned by Hewlett-Packard a few years ago noted declines in IQ scores when knowledge workers were distracted by e-mail and phone calls. The decline, chronicled in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Sept. 2009 at 84, was an average of 10 points (See my post of July 14, 2005: cites…