Among the candidates for a service that lawyers can do but shouldn’t, what I call quasi-legal work, would be negotiation. When a company needs to hammer out the terms of a contract, an acquisition agreement or a joint venture, of course there will be legal issues involved; but fundamentally the…
“According to a survey of 2,500 middle managers in the USA conducted by Business Week magazine, legal departments were perceived as containing some of their company’s least competitive employees. Embarrassingly, only the strategy and research departments scored worse, mainly perhaps because no-one really knows what they do.” LSI Newsletter: Ed.…
Laws and statutes bountifully apply to grants of options and restricted stock, legalities govern when insiders and executives may exercise their holdings, and someone who knows the law must tend to the securities acts reporting of both. But most of the tracking and the preparation of Form 4s and Section…
The term “commodity legal work” has much plasticity (See my posts about commodity legal work of Dec. 5, 2005 on the reversal of the pyramid, so commodity legal services go to outside counsel; Oct. 5, 2005 on the likely shift of it to offshore providers; March 13, 2006 with its…
A columnist for Fast Company, Sept. 2006 at 103, bade his farewell with a piece on conversation. Important as healthy conversations are, as crucial as they are to every aspect of managing and working in a law department, genuine conversations face many impediments Among the obstacles, Dr. Kerry Sulkowicz includes…
A sacred cow for sizeable law departments is the committee/team. “We need to improve our system to archive old files: let’s appoint a group of six people that will meet every week and recommend improvements!” The amount of advice on how to unleash a productive team would stagger any of…
An issue of the Nat. L.J. in August 2006 at 8 profiled the general counsel of Mary Kay. Three points caught my eye, two that refer to prior posts on this blog and the headline point. The general counsel, one Mr. Moore, additionally oversees government relations (See my post of…
Robert Half Legal commissioned a survey and reported its findings based on “150 lawyers from among the largest corporations in the United States and Canada.” The survey asked the in-house lawyers, whose levels are not identified, “Of the following, which would you say is your legal department’s single greatest business…
According to Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Harvard University Press 2001) at 151, “the optimal number of errors is not zero but is a number derived from minimizing the sum of error costs and error-avoidance costs.” An error cost might be a default judgment entered for…
How a law department handles contract drafting and reviewing has undeniable importance. Importance, but not all-determinative because you need to look at what happens regarding contracts before they reach the law department as well as after the law department finishes its stint. At the starting point, some clients use master…