The inboxes of many corporate counsel are filled with contracts to be reviewed and negotiated. How efficiently those lawyers plow through the pile makes a big difference in their productivity. For this reason, when I read about Rule 4.2 of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct I thought of the…
An article in Legal IT, July 14, 2006 gives three instances of law departments that have embraced software that helps them with documents. Cisco Systems uses to DealBuilder document assembly system (See my post of Feb. 6, 2007 about other users of that software.). With that software, an estimated 500…
A thoughtful piece by Don Cohen in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol 84 December 2006, at 28 doncohen@rcn.com starts by acknowledging that “businesses have been trying — and mainly failing — to calculate the return on knowledge-management investments for more than a decade.” The short piece discusses why the measurement…
A post on a blog of Legal Week, reprinted in Legal Week, Vol. 9, May 24, 2007, at 20, reminds us of four ways to improve conference calls. The first: call in on time. “More often than not, the first 15 minutes of any call are spent waiting for other…
The following quote, from the ACC Docket, Vol. 25, June 2007, at 83, may have been a general counsel wishing out loud, joshing the interviewer, or announcing a breakthrough metric. “One CLO said he intended to develop a metric based on ‘the cost of failure’ with failure being defined as…
Paul Paton, an assistant professor at Queen’s University Faculty of Law in Kingston, writes in CCCA Mag., Vol. 1, March 2007, at 14, about corporate governance scandals and what to do to address them. He foresees that law departments will be called upon increasingly to act properly. Accordingly, “Codes of…
Here are four admirable and humane principles out of seven shared by Rachel Taknint, the Vice President – Law Department Planning and Operations & Associate General Counsel of Northwestern Mutual, at a recent ALIC conference. The four especially appeal to me because they differentiate a law department perspective on work…
Aside from the ubiquitous Word and WordPerfect, or the equally omnipresent Outlook and kindred email programs, my candidate for the software that in-house lawyers use most intimately and frequently is the law department’s shared drive. Everyone can access it. Everyone can create a directory sub-structure on it that makes sense…
James A. Nortz, the senior compliance lawyer for Kraton Polymers, offers his views in the ACC Docket, Vol. 24, Oct. 2006 at 112, on the role of the legal department with regard to corporate policy statements. He recommends five steps the department must take to put the company’s policies to…
From the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association survey of its members for the 2007 In-House Corporate Counsel Barometer, at 17, comes a surprising finding. Over the past year, 16% of the 722 responding corporate counsel reported that their company did not have a single “legal dispute” filed against it. Since this…