A gerontologist quoted in the NY Times, Aug. 3, 2008 at BU 10, remarks that “By the time you are in your 50s and 60s, you need 30 percent more light to see clearly than when you were younger, so get a desk lamp or a floor lamp.” Aging in-house…
A pejorative air hangs around the term “plateaued,” as in “Sometimes veteran lawyers plateau.” The term leaves the unsavory impression that those lawyers no longer have any fire in the belly to be promoted or to take on new responsibilities. Some lawyers reach their cognitive limits or their energy constraints…
Dark matter accounts for the bulk of the universe, we can’t see it, don’t understand it and it pushes the universe to expand faster and faster. So too with e-discovery. These days, the ether is filled with almost hysterical talk about the costs of e-discovery (See my posts of Aug.…
GRC 360˚, Fall 2007 at 6, has a sidebar that briefly lists ten of the many processes its publishers maintain are involved in governance, risk and compliance (GRC). One of the ten is “Legal.” All that the sidebar says is that “Processes typically executed by the general counsel and legal…
An article in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 85, July-Aug. 2008 at 60, distinguishes between execution-as-efficiency and execution-as-learning. If law department managers lock into the first set of beliefs –efficient, timely, consistent delivery of legal services, they run the risk that people won’t bring to their attention critical information, won’t…
When lawyers walk down the halls talking on a BlueTooth headset, the scene is surreal. Concerned always about confidentiality and attorney-client privilege, here is a lawyer blabbing for all the world to hear. Yet, the scene is not uncommon. It gives new meaning to “communication in the department” (See my…
When we use the term “productivity,” we should not mean in-house lawyers just churning out lots of work, but rather lawyers completing lots of important legal work. A good lawyer picks out the services that help the client the most. A competency of a good lawyer is the ability to…
“Surveys indicate that lawyers who work 60 hours can probably bill 40 hours to client matters …” That assertion in the NYSBA Journal, June 2008 at 45, got me to thinking along two lines. One direction was that outside counsel, who might take four weeks of vacation a year, will…
The source of this data is a survey by Robert Half Legal, referred to in the ACC Docket, Vol. 30, June 2008 at 52. The data comes from a “survey of 150 lawyers from among the largest corporations in the United States and Canada” (See my post of June 22,…
In his book, Theodore Levitt, Thinking about Management (Free Press 1991) at 64, Levitt writes dramatically that “routinization of anything is self-immolating. It deadens alertness, attentiveness, imagination, energy, and reaction time.” Other than that, I guess, routines are fine. A page later Levitt recommends “periodic euthanasia of the organization’s accustomed…