Ironically, what lawyers in companies view as commodity, routine work – just another contract, yet again a lease, here we go with another non-disclosure agreement, the fifth agreement of this kind this week – embodies in fact the life blood of the company. Every day the company buys what it…
A wonderful idea found its way to the innovators issue of InsideCounsel, Sept. 2006 at 65. BMO Financial, a unit of the Bank of Montreal, originally created a legal intranet site in the mid-1990s. Traffic on the site by internal clients of the unit was not as large as some…
Were law departments and law firms to have a commonly accepted definition of a complex law suit (or transactional work, for that matter), it would be easier to develop different approaches to valuing the legal services, charging for them, setting incentives, assessing performance, staffing them, and investing in technology for…
“In mid-2003 one in ten Internet users had registered at a social network, and one in five had visited such a network.” This quote comes from John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (Penguin Group 2005) at 308, FN…
E. Norman Veasey and Christine T. Di Guglielmo, in “The Tensions, Stresses, and Professional Responsibilities of the Lawyer for the Corporation,” Bus. Lawyer, Vol. 62, Nov. 2006 at 1, discuss compartmentalization and decentralization of legal departments (at 33). The authors introduced a new idea for me: compartmentalization of legal work.…
One of the most intractable issues in the management of in-house lawyers concerns the line between their rendering legal advice and their rendering business advice. That divide, which may be an omelet that can’t be reversed to eggs, implicates client expectations of in-house counsel, attorney-client privilege, workloads, training and professional…
According to Corp. Counsel, Vol. 13, Dec. 2006 at 80, among the 62 lawyers and 14 paralegals in Exelon’s law department, half of them worked on pro bono projects in 2005 and logged in all more than 800 hours. That averages approximately 20 hours per person. Exelon’s “participation rate tops…
Other items have commented on Indian providers of off-shore law-related services (See my posts of June 15, 2005, which mentions Imaging & Abstract International; Nov. 14, 2005, which mentions Xania; and Jan. 6, 2006, which provides more detail on the report referred to here.). A report, issued in late 2005,…
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Harvard Bus. School Press 2006) at 110-111 make the point that trying to increase a person’s motivation – say, with the carrot of a large bonus if some goal is achieved – can’t…
In a retrospective spanning 1981 to 2006, Canadian Lawyer Inhouse, Vol. 2, Feb. 2007 at 7, found that during that 25-year span, “the number of lawyers employed in the corporate sector has tripled.” The study did not include government lawyers or lawyers of Canadian corporations hired outside of Canada. Rising…