The first suggestion is to read your e-mail no more than three to four times each day. Frequent interruptions to look at messages degrade your performance (See my post of Oct. 2, 2006 on multi-tasking’s drawbacks.). The second is to respond immediately to an e-mail if you can answer it…
As law departments add staff, they lose the ability and agility to decide speedily. Bureaucracy in all its forms strangles initiative and decisiveness – more people have to be consulted as more levels of approval are necessary, endless meetings take place inside and outside the law department, more PowerPoint decks…
A number of posts have discussed quasi-legal work, which are tasks that law departments are able to do but ought to be done elsewhere in the company (See my posts of July 21, 2005 with definitions and Feb. 23, 2006 on how to snag these activities.). Law departments with a…
Picture a corporate lawyer as a huge sponge. As much legal water as the lawyer touches will be absorbed, until saturated (over-worked). The unexpressed outpouring of need for legal guidance in a company is infinite, and that’s not accounting for unrecognized legal needs. If the lawyer-as-sponge metaphor holds true, well-managed…
If in-house counsel are besieged by e-mail, instant messages, cell phones, and personal digital assistants, not to mention telephones, walk-ins, meetings, deliveries and radios, their ability to concentrate is severely compromised. It’s a dramatic drop-off, in fact, according to an expert on information technology and its use, Jakob Nielsen, in…
Previously this blog adumbrated three components of a law-department management model (See my posts of June 14, 2006 on models, theories, and narrative descriptions.): processes, tools and productivity (See my posts of April 27, 2006 and June 28, 2006 on processes; Aug. 13, 2006 on the three elements; and Aug.…
Dial Corp. has a multifaceted incentive program for its inventors. Inventors get “monetary awards” where there are “different pay grades at different stages of development,” according to Kate Huffman, intellectual property and patent counsel at Dial, in an article of InsideCounsel, Oct. 2006 at 30. This tantalizing but opaque statement…
Members of a panel, pontificating about technology and law departments, waxed eloquent about software that upgrades “workflow.” To one of them software that improves workflow is a contender for the strongest trend in such technology. Examples were not given – why be granular when you can be grand?, nor was…
Deterred by the requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, shaken by liabilities taken on by other Board members, members of Boards of Directors now require more stroking and educating. That care falls increasingly on the general counsel, who must above all others point the way to proper Board behavior. But that’s not all.…
Not only do law departments have cause to worry about the funds contingency fee firms receive in massive settlements only to invest in further litigation (See my post of Aug. 24, 2005 on the dollars involved). They also can fret now about another litigation financing source: specialized hedge funds. According…