Whereas a project team can be somewhat informal, a committee in a legal department is duly appointed and has more formally structured delegations (See my post of May 13, 2009: 11 committees in Exelon’s law department.). Also, a committee just keeps meeting, with no lifespan determined by completion of its…
Virtual teams of lawyers, where not all of them are located in one place, occur more and more frequently, either with inside or outside counsel. An article in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Summer 2009 at 65, nicely lays out the benefits and costs of dispersed teams. The opportunities…
More than two years ago I compiled what I had written about the infernal time sponge, meetings (See my post of April 22, 2007: meetings with 9 references.). Since then, in-house attorneys have endured countless more hours in meetings. To honor and console them, I have compiled my posts since…
The legendary Prof. Edward Tufte, interviewed for MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Summer 2009 at 38, argues that meetings are more efficient if members devote much of their time during them to reading.. “I like enforced reading in meetings.” A corollary of reading is that people are pushed to…
To be able to “run a good race” as an in-house lawyer over a period of years, it helps to stay healthy. An assortment of posts on this blog refer to physical health (See my post of Jan. 13, 2006 #2: health is crucial to a person’s overall happiness; Nov.…
This blunt advice, as important as it is difficult, comes from Peter Beshar, the General Counsel of Marsh & McClennan, writing in E. Leigh Dance, Bright Ideas: Insights from Legal Luminaries Worldwide (Mill City Press 2009) at 5. Beshar’s essay about the crisis at Marsh in 2005 lays out this…
Coffee jump starts many of us, but slightly more important than that, longitudinal studies “show that drinking coffee cuts the risky of dying early from a heart attack or stroke,” writes the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, June 2009 at 22. More, “coffee also appears to offer some small protection…
For a retreat that I facilitated, the lawyers of the department suggested several dysfunctional situations that they wanted to improve. All of them evidence failures of teamwork or collegiality. (See my post of April 5, 2009: teamwork and collaboration internally with 16 references.). Lawyers failing to get another lawyer to…
A recent survey of senior in-house attorneys asked them to select the obstacles they face to making effective use of productivity metrics. The survey, by LexisNexis CounselLink entitled “Effects of the Current Economic Downturn on U.S. Law Departments” 2009 at 17, offered respondents six choices. I have listed them in…
I woke up this morning thinking of “To sleep, perchance to dream of law department management effectiveness.” Later, I hunted through my archives to find my posts on slumber (See my post of May 2, 2008: sleep enhances memory; Nov. 7, 2007: sleep relieves stress; Feb. 20, 2007: sleep on…