Philistine that I am, this blog has slighted the importance to the effective operation of a law department of art. This chromatically challenged host has noticed that there is artistic color in the world (See my posts of Dec. 9, 2005 on color-coded maps; Aug. 24, 2006 on dashboards that…
A hullabaloo has erupted this past year about general counsel who are not licensed to practice law in the state where they have an office. This blog has ignored that cause célébre. Even so, being a lawyer in New Jersey, it caught my eye when Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15,…
Andy Hull, a senior legal director for M&A at Yahoo! Inc., wrote a piece for the ACC Docket, Vol. 25, Dec. 2007 at 18, about the transition of lawyers from a law firm to a law department. “A big adjustment to moving in-house is the comparative level of administrative, back-end…
Sapient’s law department, headed by general counsel Jane Owens, has set up “an operations group in our India office that handles worldwide contracts administration.” Further, as described in Top of Mind, Vol. 6, at 2 (K&L Ι Gates), the company has a “deal administration team” in India that tracks contracting…
A short item in the NY Times, Dec. 1, 2007 at C5, summarizes an article that offers four stress fighting tips (nice oxymoron:“stress fighting”). (1) Take off your shoes and massage your feet. If you can, roll a tennis ball under each foot for two minutes. If you roll the…
A number of tips are discussed earlier on this blog (See my posts of Nov. 6, 2006 with three tips; June 16, 2006 and five tips; Dec. 28, 2006 with additional suggestions and comments; July 20, 2007 on Capital One and two tips; and Nov. 7, 2007 with five good…
I ruminated once about how law departments might grant hourly rate increases to law firm lawyers not simply because a year has passed but because the lawyers have gained some demonstrably increased ability (See my post of Nov. 13, 2006 on the rationale to grant requests for rate increases and…
A lawyer’s in box — what a quaint phrase — gets filled in a variety of different ways. But what exactly is the allocation of work by source? Not being burdened or confused by any empirical data on the sources of legal work for in-house counsel, I will proceed resolutely…
Assemble three findings from a survey conducted in 2007 by Corporate Board Magazine and FTI and general counsel appear to have become amazingly more productive last year. Let me explain this striking conclusion. More than 200 general counsel estimated in that survey whether they had spent less, equal or more…
For at least three reasons, few lawyers in-house are bored. From what I observe as a consultant, work is more difficult, there is more of it, and it arrives faster. Legal complexity has increased (See my posts of March 13, 2007 on legal complexity and references cited; and Sept. 5,…