Let’s apply activity based costing (ABC) to an innocent little e-mail that squirts out to all the lawyers in a 50-lawyer department. The secretary who sent it – a short note about the upcoming departure party for someone – spent all of five minutes dashing it off, but 50 lawyers,…
Almost three years ago, the law department of Cargill announced that it had deployed a “fingerprint authentication solution.” According to the release by DigitalPersona, dated July 22, 2003, the “biometric recognition system creates a fully secure, end-to-end authentication system that offers secure and convenient network user authentication while eliminating the…
At Honeywell, a $27.7 billion conglomerate, the law department once had 140 lawyers, but half the revenue of today. Now it has doubled in revenue but riffed 30 percent of its lawyers! The article in GC Mid-Atlantic, May 2006 at 26 that offers this data mentions several contributors to the…
A survey of 1,501 Canadian employees found that “twenty-one percent of workers experienced physical health problems because of stress or depression in the past year that were bad enough to make them want to call in sick,” according to the Globe and Mail, June 2, 2006 at C2. The health…
Working from home has much appeal in the war for talent, and law departments succumb at times (See my posts of Oct. 19, 2005 on obstacles to telecommuting; Sept. 25, 2005 and Oct. 18, 2005 on survey data; Dec. 4, 2005 on ways to bend the work rules; and Dec.…
What do you think of the opening proclamation of Bob Kirtley, a technology consultant to law departments, in a profile by the Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 14, May 2006 at 22? “Technology has dramatically improved efficiency in legal departments during the last 20 years.” He goes on to describe the…
An important metric for law department managers is fully-loaded cost per lawyer hour (See my post of May 14, 2006 with links.). To calculate that number, a general counsel needs to know the average number of hours that the lawyers in the department charge (or might charge if they tracked…
Although I criticize in-house counsel who are sucked into doing quasi-legal tasks (See my post of Feb. 23, 2006 and my article cited there.), I came across a possible exception. In-House Corporate Counsel Barometer 2006, Canadian Corp. Counsel Assoc. at 24 reported that about one third of 780 Canadian corporate…
All law departments extol collaboration. Equally commonly, they bemoan the inadequacies of their internal communication. Are collaboration and communication not the same? Emphatically not. Communication can be a one-way transmission of information; collaboration could theoretically be completely silent while two or more people work together toward a common end. Communication…
As reported in In-House Corporate Counsel Barometer 2006, Canadian Corp. Counsel Assoc. at 12, these are the results from 780 Canadian corporate counsel who ranked 11 attributes as 1 (most important), 2 or 3. The percentage of the respondents who gave the attribute one of the three top ranks follows…