Fast Co., Iss. 132, Feb. 2009 at 50, cites research on email volume that the “average worker receives 200 a day.” Regardless of your inflow, these six programs sound useful to some in-house lawyers. The article praises ClearContext, a free Outlook add-on that scans your traffic and uses what it…
Yale Law School’s Career Development Office posts online a guide for its law students who may be interested in working in a business setting, one of which is to practice in a law department. The high-level description of corporate practice is good, but one comment about obstacles to pro bono…
As reported in the NY Times, Jan. 15, 2009, at B9, researchers “recently asked office workers to perform several common tasks using various monitor configurations. They found that people who used two 20-inch monitors were 44 percent more productive at certain text editing operations than people using a single 18-inch…
“How do I measure the productivity of my department?” “How do I measure the value I add?” If I could tell general counsel how to quantify their answers to these two vital questions, which would mean I could tell them how to do better on both, I would be, as…
To grapple with “legal complexity” is not for the simple minded (See my post of May 15, 2005: complexity of legal services generally; and June 28, 2005: legal complexity.), so a small item intrigued me. Inventors, it said, require ever-increasing effort to absorb what is known and go beyond that…
I have predicted that lawyers inside and outside corporations will increasingly use brain-enhancing drugs to sharpen their mental faculties (See my post of June 22, 2008: neuroscience with 32 references.). Pills for performance is probably happening already, and drugs taken in the near future will make the mental rush of…
Ziggurats were pyramidal structures of the Babylonians. Each level moving upward was indented by terraces but the basic appearance was triangular. Hershey Kisses, by contrast, have broad bases but their width shrinks dramatically and unevenly toward their pointy top. Many people describe the distribution of work done in-house as, well,…
Here are six techniques that you should consider asking your mediator to incorporate. They come from Dispute Res. Mag., Vol. 14, Spring/Summer 2008, and are listed in declining order of value as determined by a survey of 109 participants in focus groups on mediation conducted in 2006-2007. Suggest possible ways…
The seven lawyers who work for Synnex, the $7 billion IT information provider, have one support person. Hence, in the words of Simon Leung, the general counsel, who spoke to 8-K, Vol. 4, Fall 2008 at 12, “Most of my [department’s] attorneys do all the work themselves – type their…
A press release from Exari Group announces that Linde, Inc., a member of The Linde Group, has licensed Exari to automate North American sales contracts for three of its business units. Those units use approximately 20 different documents covering the different products and geographies and will use the document assembly…