Fast Co., July/August 2007 at 46, reports that Capital One has put thousands of its staff through a workshop that teaches how to improve their email practices. “Capital One estimates that it saves the equivalent of 11 workdays per employee per year thanks to the program.” If a law department…
A gaggle of companies provide custom legal research for law departments. Among the better known ones are LRN and Legal Research Center (LRC). Previous entries have referred to these companies and the niche in general (See my posts of Jan. 16, 2006 on some dubious cost-saving data; Sept. 27, 2005…
As one method to encourage delegation to paralegals, to provide paralegals with challenging work, and to make everyone in a department aware of the capabilities of its paralegals, consider the approach of a 24-lawyer department in the health-care industry. The administrator of the department “put together a comprehensive list of…
Few members of law departments are able to take advantage of more than a fraction of the capabilities of the powerful applications they use, notably the staples: word processing and email. People don’t know what they don’t know, they fall in to bad habits, and they fail to learn many…
We all decide in different ways what we will work and in what order. Here are several methods that in-house lawyers use to make the call. I put these roughly in descending order of frequency, and my tongues gets a bit cheeky. 1. Respond to the loudest voice (the squeaky…
Workaholism is not the same as just working hard. Many in-house attorneys routinely log far more than 50 hours a week at their desk or traveling (See my post of Dec. 12, 2006 on “extreme jobs.”). Yet just because someone doesn’t leave until late or doesn’t take full vacation time…
An article in Sloan Mgt. Rev., Summer 2006 at 85, explores how management innovation happens and disperses (See my post of June 25, 2007 with some comments on the article.). The final stage of dispersion the authors call “internal and external validation.” They discuss four common sources of external validation,…
An article in Sloan Mgt. Rev., Summer 2006 at 85 explores how management innovation happens. After the triggering stage of dissatisfaction comes the stage of “inspiration from other sources.” The authors reach the conclusion that “Inspiration for new management innovation is unlikely to come from within a company’s current industry.”…
The General Counsel Americas of NACCO Materials Handling Group, Meredith B. Stone, explains in a document I have some metrics that her department tracks. One of them is the “number of contracts reviewed in a particular time period.” That is certainly a crude measure of productivity, as it says nothing…
When law departments prepare periodic client status reports, the reports help to market the activity of the law departments (See my posts of Sept. 22, 2006 about consequences of a law department marketing its services; May 10, 2006 on no good deed going unpunished; and June 30, 2006 on law…