A post on William Heinze’s blog, I/P Updates, (Dec. 29, 2005) refers to another blog’s explanation of an article by an economist. The economist, Carlos Serrano, used data about patents traded (about 2.5% of all patents at their start, dropping over time) and renewed to estimate values of US patents.…
Deryl Earson, Vice President Legal Services of Environmental Management Corp., part of the BOC Group, spoke at the ACC 2005 Annual Meeting on the subject of law department benchmarks. His slides state that EEOC data indicates one claim per 512 full- and part-time employees (0.2 per 100). By that ratio,…
I have a funny feeling that this clunky term resembles more a bird on the wing than a bird in hand. It “involves applying technology to the contract process from letter of intent through negotiation and execution to performance, amendment and contract renewal (Law Tech. News, Vol. 12, Dec. 2005…
I referred to my recent article, describing 30 techniques for improving contract activities (Legal Times, Nov. 21, 2005), and added three more ideas in my post of Dec. 3, 2005. In 2003, according to a piece in Corp. Legal Times, Vol. 13, July 2003, that cited Lawrence Kaplan, the general…
A lawyer I know, responsible for mergers and acquisitions at a growing financial services company, offered some comments that deserve passing on. This lawyer has concluded that international M&A deals, compared to domestic US deals, take three times as much time and five times as much money. The linguistic, cultural,…
Industries vary in the degree to which they face regulation (See my post of Dec. 14, 2005 on McKinsey’s rough cut at regulatory intensity.) For companies operating in a highly-regulated industry, some sizeable chunk of their general counsel’s time must go to developing relationships with regulators, staying abreast of regulatory…
The eight inside lawyers of Ascential Software, according to a summary in top of mind, Vol. 4, at 13, combine geographic coverage and substantive coverage. Each one serves as the general lawyer for a business unit or region – you can think of it as their “major” – and also…
Companies that spend proportionately greater sums than their industry peers on R&D don’t enjoy greater revenue gains or better profits. Since IP lawyers and spending probably paces R&D spending, this counter-intuitive – and controversial – finding by Booz Allen Hamilton, as reported in the Wall. St. J., Vol. 246, Oct.…
Lawyers should participate on crisis-management teams, but they should not be put in charge. Corporate traumas – think Tylenol, Exxon-Valdes, Vioxx – always spawn legal risks, but the gashes in a company’s reputation are much broader than those suffered judicially. Lawyers too often resort to words, and carefully crafted words.…
Without the benefit of any survey metrics, but based on my 18 years of consulting to law departments, I believe general counsel, as a group; devote their time to four areas. Here are my estimates of the allocation of their time by area. Providing counsel to the Board, CEO, and…