“On average, in-house corporate counsel are working 50 hours a week, and for a majority (63%) of them, this amount has stayed the same over the past two years.” From the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association survey of its members for the 2007 In-House Corporate Counsel Barometer, at 3, this finding…
The 1,225-attorney law department of General Electric has a budget hovering around $1 billion, according to Corp. Counsel, Vol. 14, May 2007 at 92. The $163 billion company’s department has its own dedicated legal IT team, which includes 10 full-time staff and one attorney. The article makes the point that…
According to Corp. Counsel, Vol. 14, May 2007 at 90, General Electric’s law department pushes to reduce its cases’ cycle time (how quickly they are resolved). The law department during the period from 2002 to 2005 has reduced its average case cycle time from 19 months to 9.2 months (at…
At a recent conference, a thoughtful law department manager linked the quality of work lawyers can handle and the quantity of that work. She said that workload, even if heavy, doesn’t seem as draining or morale busting if the work is of fairly consistently of high quality. If you like…
The British academic, C.P. Snow, distinguished between the intellectual cultures of scientists and humanists. Snow could have extended that distinction, perhaps, to law department managers. Managers in law departments who think primarily in terms of economic concepts, metrics, processes and structure – all devoid of humans and their passions and…
A law department that has tracked practice-area benchmarks over a period of three or more years can present that data on a series of comparative charts (See my posts of Sept. 3, 2006 on such benchmarks, and references cited; and Jan. 6, 2007 for other data.). Each chart shows one…
A successful blogger must enjoy writing. I certainly do. So it gives me special pleasure to recognize some of the writing instructors I know who have at various times helped lawyers in law departments write more effectively. Stephen Armstrong Bryan Garner at Law Prose Susan McCloskey Prof. George Gopen (See…
By contributing author Brad Blickstein, Blickstein Group, on legal service providers: Any law department considering outsourcing legal work overseas—and any vendor considering adding this to their slate of offerings—should check out “Guidelines for Outsourcing Growth” in the May 3, 2007 issue of National Law Journal, which discusses guidelines that have…
“One study suggests that the number of meetings attended by the average executive doubled between the 1960s and the 1980s.” According to other researchers, “Senior managers attend nearly 23 hours of meetings every week, and people working for large organizations tend to have more meetings than those in smaller ones.”…
A profile in the Nat. Law J., April 10, 2007 of Gregory Bower, the general counsel of the US’s Government Printing Office touched on the difference between a departmentally sanctioned form of pro bono and forms that a lawyer takes on personally. “As a federal agency, the GPO doesn’t engage…