An article in Law Firm Inc. (Vol. 3, Sept./Oct. 2005 at 18) by the General Counsel of ACC (Susan Hackett) dropped in a provocative sentence. “Our surveys suggest that in-house counsel are increasingly concerned about the amount of time they spend on their management duties (relative to the time they…
In the press, the bugaboo of litigation expense, class action lawsuits, looms all the time, yet how often do companies of $1 billion in revenue or larger face them? Fulbright & Jaworski’s Second Annual Litigation Trends Survey offers some data (at 24, 25, and 27). In the previous year, “nearly…
“Each US corporate counsel handles an average of 10.2 litigation matters,” proclaims Fulbright & Jaworski’s Second Annual Litigation Trends Survey (at 19). lawsuits a year. The F&J report claims that “companies with revenues of $1 billion-plus have an average of over [litigation management] 10 lawyers.” (id). That may be the…
For six types of matters, Fulbright & Jaworski’s Second Annual Litigation Trends Survey provides estimated “median average number of days to resolution (2005 at 11; but note that 45% of the respondents never track resolution time). Listed in increasing duration for US matters, they were contracts (138 days to resolution),…
From about 103 companies with revenues greater than $1 billion, as reported in Fulbright & Jaworski’s Second Annual Litigation Trends Survey (2005, full report at 30-35), the average number of lawsuits brought against them in the last year was 64.6 (median 20, which probably means no asbestos defendants), arbitrations started…
From a group of about 103 companies with revenues greater than $1 billion (of which 20 or so were based in the UK), 26 percent did not file a single lawsuit in the previous year. This astonishing metric came from Fulbright & Jaworski’s Second Annual Litigation Trends Survey (2005 at…
Fulbright & Jaworski’s Second Annual Litigation Trends Survey states (2005 at 3): “The average $1 billion-per-year company faces more than 140 cases in the US at one time.” To be more precise, the underlying data is for companies with $1.5 billion or more of revenue and the average was 142…
I have not heard of a law department that sent a paralegal to work in a law firm for a period so that the paralegal picks up enough to carry on back in the department. We might call that practice a “reverse secondment.” An investment by the law department, an…
Describing his “legal team structure,” at ACCA’s 2001 Annual Meeting, the General Counsel of FMC Technologies (Jeffrey Carr) put up a slide that reads “4 lawyers currently working in non-legal capacities as contract managers will be more closely aligned with legal function.” Having 7-8 lawyers in the law department at…
LaVern Pritchard, in a post dated Sept. 12, 2005 at Minnesota Lawyer, referred to Fair Isaac Corporation and its 20-lawyer department. A senior lawyer in that department explained that they are currently considering “enterprise contract management software.” In his words, “Contract automation has the potential to positively affect this business…