A financial services company, whose lawyers are essentially allocated by client business group, has three coordinators who orchestrate practice groups in securities, real estate and broker/deal law. A multinational bank I have worked with also has communities of interest for such topics as anti-money laundering. If many of your lawyers…
Although lawyers, paralegals, and administrative assistants probably constitute well over 95 percent of all staff in law departments, one runs across a plethora of specialist roles. Here are some that I have encountered, which is by no means comprehensive. Please email me with roles I have overlooked (Rees Morrison) •…
Inside counsel do not want to track their time, for many reasons. They do not want to have their performance based on how many hours they report, since competitive pressures and ethical distortions can inflate the hours written down. They do not want to rob lawyering time to jot down…
Pro bono services by in-house counsel get relatively little publicity (with the notable exception of periodic issues of the Metropolitan Corporate Counsel). Without much experience with pro-bono programs, my ruminations ran to these: (1) Should in-house counsel be expected to contribute free services in the same proportion that private practitioners…
As discussed in another post today, time tracking is for in-house counsel what Roe v. Wade is for conservatives. At the same time, many law departments have instituted time tracking. I just read that a large pharmaceutical company’s legal function selectively charges lawyer time, with the basis for selection being…
This 80-lawyer department, serving a financial services giant, worked five months in 2004 to develop a Lotus Notes system where lawyers can track new statutory and regulatory requirements. The system also identifies the lawyer responsible for tracking the law and the date it will go into effect. The lawyer making…
In-house lawyers who do not track their time detest, abhor and revile the thought of doing so. “If I wanted to record 10ths of an hour, I’d have stayed at a law firm!!” I smiled, therefore, when I read that the Corporation Counsel of NYC’s accomplishments included “implementing, over significant…
Leases, sub-leases and appurtenant legal documents weigh heavily on the law department of a 1200-store supermarket chain. At Food Lion, lease documents had to be reviewed by several groups and physically routed during a process that was manual and could consume two crucial weeks. Its inside lawyers, however, working with…
The legal group in Canada of Schering-Plough developed a checklist of key points and made them mandatory in employment contracts. They settled on provisions for parties, terms of the agreement, position and responsibilities, compensation, vacation entitlement/benefits, policies, and restrictive covenants. (Counsel to Counsel, July 2005 at pg. 5) Nothing surprising,…
Many in-house counsel have difficulty delegating work to their paralegals. Reasons for this, other than the lack of a capable paralegal, of course, include mistrust of others’ work, ignorance of how to effectively manage someone else, a hoarding mentality based on “I am the only one capable of doing this…