All law departments have warts. Some, to be sure, are more unsightly or even destructive than others. If management problems are bad enough, the department might become in some aspects dysfunctional. A few but by no means all of the management malfunctions I have witnessed and written about are noted…
A speaker at a recent session urged the law department attendees not to have litigation lawyers in their departments who only direct outside counsel (See my post of Aug. 21, 2005 regarding not hiring a head of litigation.). His belief is that those lawyers need to know how to do…
Benchmark data tells us that the tipping point for having a full-time administrator is around 10 to 15 lawyers. In that range, more departments have an administrator than do not have one (See my posts of April 8, 2005 on replacing an administrator with rotating lawyers; Aug. 1, 2006 on…
This blog is flush with posts that touch on law department productivity. Productivity has to do with how much output results from a given amount of input (See my post of April 27, 2006 on 20 economic terms.). For our purposes, it is a measure of how efficiently a law…
Every law department or corporate-secretary function can establish how many corporate entities they maintain around the world. Both can determine, at least approximately, the costs in time – at fully-loaded hourly rates – and other expenses – such as the fees of corporate services companies or specialized software (See my…
Companies have prevailing norms, systems of social control that define appropriate attitudes and behaviors for all employees (See my post of Dec. 17, 2007 for the difference between culture and norms.). As but two examples, do executives have parking privileges; is child care provided? Law departments inhale the norms of…
Have you ever tried this question with your clients who ask you to do work that drains your time from more pressing tasks or tasks that they or others should do: “If we charged you $200 an hour for our time, would you ask us to do it?” It could…
A piece in Bus. Law Today, Vol. 17, Jan./Feb. 2008 at 23, lists 25 “potential disasters” in a table. Other columns of the table encourage planners to use a scale from 0 to 9 to rate the probability of each one striking, the magnitude of the disruption it would cause,…
MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 49, Winter 2007 at 5, has an article about how a company should prudently allocate its IT resources. Law departments do not fare well as recipients of those scarce resources. The author, a Unisys executive, proposes that companies should segment their technology support customers, and…
At a law department where I have done some work, several of the lawyers have two monitors in front of them. They can keep one or more documents open on one and their email and web searches on another, for example. As the price of monitors declines and lawyers facility…