For a survey this year, 780 Canadian corporate counsel considered nine skills, as listed below followed by the percentage of the respondents who selected each one. This comes from In-House Corporate Counsel Barometer 2006, Canadian Corp. Counsel Assoc. at 7: “Effective leadership” (21) “Business sector knowledge” (19) “Accounting/financial” (14) “Management”…
Recently, 780 Canadian in-house attorneys ranked 11 choices as 1 (most important), 2 or 3. I list the choices below followed by the percentage of the respondents who ranked it as one of those three, from In-House Corporate Counsel Barometer 2006, Canadian Corp. Counsel Assoc. at 8: “Establishing/maintaining a relationship…
Convergys, a provider of outsourced services, lives and breathes contracts. For that reason, in late 2003 its law department had not only 18 attorneys in its three locations but also eight contract administrators (See my post of Oct. 26, 2005 on FMC having twice as many contract managers as lawyers,…
A piñata term sounds special and hangs there all fancy, attractive, and full of promise – but empty of nutritious or worthwhile content. Let’s whack at the ubiquitous “value-added,” as in “Our law department will incessantly focus on providing value-added services.” “Value-added” is supposed to mean, ultimately, “The in-house lawyers…
For many plaintiffs’ lawyers who sue companies on a contingency-fee basis, the litigation rewards them with Croesusian sums. One scholar has “estimated that contingent fees in tort cases are generating upwards of 22 billion dollars in annual income and are increasing at a substantial rate.” The law professor, Lester Brickman,…
We who care about the effective management of in-house legal functions bandy around the term “processes.” What is a law-department process? A process is a series of related activities repeated to achieve an understood goal. Law departments consist of hundreds of substantive processes: review promotional material; analyze trademark clearance searches;…
Ron Friedmann, on his PrismLegal blog (March 31, 2006) suggests that law departments can look to their firms not just to draft but also to manage contracts. For its law department clients, a firm can keep track of all contracts, including their expiration dates, obligations and rights, renewal options, payments…
Here are some ways that English-speaking general counsel, who do not speak the language of one of their foreign-based lawyers, can more effectively manage that lawyer. More than you do in the United States, you can rely on clients to monitor the work and performance of the lawyer. You can…
I have heard some instances of lawyers and others in law departments developing symptoms like carpal tunnel syndrome from their repetitive use of their computer’s mouse. I also notice more ergonomic keyboards, of the wavy kind or of the kind with wrist supporters. Along with those physical aids there are…
Many law students would leap at the opportunity to work in-house for some number of hours a week at very modest pay. Certainly a second-year law student who comes in 10 hours a week can help a law department catch up on filing documents, organizing the library, indexing precedent documents,…