Previous posts mentioned Faegre & Benson’s Client Technology Services (Oct. 21, 2005), Nextra’s discovery specialty (Sept. 13, 2005), British law firms’ on-line offerings (Oct. 17, 2005), and ADR/CMS’s litigation management assistance (Sept. 13, 2005) – all specialized departures from traditional law firm offerings and economic models. Computer Patent Annuities Limited…
To assist their clients, law departments might want to keep in the back of their mind the possibility of offering R&D work, patents, and trademarks for sale on the internet. A company called Global Commerce & Communications has set up a web site as a forum for buying and selling…
When someone in a law department tries to describe a lawyer’s powers of cerebration, the vocabulary likely foils everyone. We know it when we experience it, but we can’t define with discrimination the level of a person’s mental faculties. A recent article (Historically Speaking, Sept./Oct. 2005 at 14) presented a…
If I had my druthers, I druther not blather on about “culture.” It’s just not something you can measure, evaluated, even describe. “The way we do things around here” leaves me cold. Yet, everyone talks about transforming the culture of a company or department? How, other than over a long…
That i-ful means that law department which tinker and try and retool will fare better than law departments that go for the homerun of the dramatic and new. Kaizen, the Japanese word for continuous improvement, has the value of compounded interest: keep at it and you will have a wealth…
A law department has identified 102 kinds of legal issues, and assigned a lawyer to each one (sometimes two or three), and for many of them a “primary client contact.” Furthermore, for these hundred-plus types of matters – such as privacy, trust, treasury, derivatives, leases and all the rest –…
A review of Thomas H. Davenport’s, Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers (Harvard Bus. School Press, 2005) offered some tidbits, and a main course idea (Economist, Oct. 15, 2005 at 91). No one has devised means of measuring the output of lawyers…
When the dotcom boom busted, Motorola shrank and reorganized its 150-patent lawyer group and how it handled its portfolio of 25, 000 patents (Corp. Legal Times, Vol. 15, Nov. 2005 at 27). One step managers of the patent department took was to form a “preparation and prosecution” group, in which…
The calculus of what to do in-house (what to make) and what to send to outside counsel (what to buy) has many, many solutions. Usually one hears about keeping “strategic” work inside and sending “commodity” work outside. (I often suspect the opposite holds more truth.) David Krasnostein, the General Counsel…
European Union member states are split over the issue of privilege for corporate lawyers – 13 extend the privilege to them and 12 do not (Legal Week, Oct. 6, 2005 at 8). Surveys show, nonetheless, that lawyers per billion Euro of revenue stand as high in Europe as they do…