A profile of General Mills’ top lawyer, Rick Palmore, refers to the significant amount of time his 50-lawyer team spends on checking advertisements and other marketing materials. The three-page profile is in SuperLawyers, Bus. Ed. 2011 at 221. The decision whether a claim made for a cereal or other product…
The law departments of companies with famous and valuable brands spend time combating counterfeit products. Actually, to varying degrees all companies protect their key brands and protect them as vigilantly as they believe is warranted. When you’re Procter & Gamble with 350 lawyers, the intellectual property to be guarded of…
“59 per cent of respondents [to the survey referenced below] indicated that the percentage of legal work outsourced to an external law firm has decreased in the past five years.” This quote comes from The In-House Perspective, April 2011 at 13, which cites Deloitte & Touche’s “Forensic Corporate Counsel Survey…
When you rely on someone else’s summary of research, you might be dealing with a bad translation. Even so, this summary statement of a survey finding caught my attention: “82 percent of respondents [to the survey described below] reported an increase in regulatory activity within the past year. The most…
Leaders League 2010 Intelligence Report at 73 tells about the efforts by Pernod Ricard’s law department to discipline the company’s use of domain names and enforce their rights as to others. In 2008 they conducted a global audit of their domain names. “We wrote our own rules designed to correct…
Those who manage in-house lawyers should have a framework for how to assess potential rates of productivity increase. In the August issue of Strategy + Business, at 33, Booz & Company states that during the 20 years from 1987 to 2008, US manufacturers increased productivity at a cumulative annual growth…
“The routines put in place to enhance productivity often hinder the practices that foster learning” This dispiriting trade-off comes from the Acad. Mgt. Rev., 2011, Vol. 36 at 461. Some scholars refer to this as the productivity dilemma: do something with formalized consistently and you retard improvement. Law department managers…
As I thought about the advantages of large law departments, I thought of delegation and assignment. Bigger departments have more lawyers and paralegals, so they can use both to spread the work around to better match the person’s skills. That led me to consider the differences between the two verbs,…
Teams = praise. We extol teams constantly, but we may not have objective evidence to support that widespread belief. When a group of people work together on a project, many times they succeed better than if individuals members went ahead on their own. Other times, however, teams falter for various…
The mantra for managers: if work can be delegated to a lower-cost, capable person, strive to do so. While that sounds good, still I mused about the $200 an hour Associate General Counsel (using a fully-loaded cost per hour that shouldn’t take anyone back) who delegates a task to a…