At a major bank, Vice Presidents have authority to approve vendor bills up to $10,000. The law department, however, with all its lawyers at the VP level or higher, gained a special dispensation increasing the approval level to $50,000. As a consequence, no invoice during the past year required more…
Overall, patenting has been slowing down since the beginning of the decade, according to a report by a U.S. IP boutique, Finnegan Henderson. The report also notes that biotech and pharmaceutical patentees are winning an increasing number of cases in US district courts. Between 2000 and 2003, the percent of…
Of course, almost all requests for services from the law department come from clients, but there are certain client groups that have a strong flavoring of law. The claims department, for example, or contracts administration, or environmental audit. Others of these groups – can we call them as “pre-law groups?”…
Sometimes there is a three-way battle in a law department over who manages litigation. If a patent infringement dispute boils over into a lawsuit, should the patent lawyer pull the trigger; should a litigation lawyer lead the charge; should the business unit lawyer whose unit relies most on the patent…
Speaking with the general counsel of a $9 billion chemical company, it came out that the law department has a pool of three “word processors,” available to all the lawyers. One of the word processors works evening hours, so work left at night will be done by morning. Many lawyers…
General Electric’s law department sprawls – 1,000+ in-house lawyers – but still it amazed me to read that “each of the 11 GE divisions has its own general counsel and specialists in fields such as litigation, mergers, employment, government and intellectual property.” (Financial Times, May 12, 2005 at 9). Not,…
I use the term quasi-lawyering to describe the tasks that a lawyer inside can do well, but shouldn’t do. It’s not simply lower value legal work; it’s work that the client should do, and I describe many forms of it in my recent article in Legal Times. In that same…
An article by Marcia Pennington Shannon in Law Practice (June 2005 at 46) [www.shannnonand manch.com] cited a 2003 study done by a Univ. of Michigan professor. “The study results indicate that individuals actually lose somewhere between 20 to 40 percent efficiency – or two to three hours per day –…
A study in Britain of 80 workers announced that technological distractions (such as e-mail, instant messaging, and the telephone (!)) make workers temporarily dumber by 10 IQ points – that is, more than two times dumber than if they were smoking pot. Tech. Rev., July 2005 at 18, citing a…
A law department in Boston has had several lawyers leave the department, for reasons unrelated to the merit of their work, yet not accept other job offers.. Since those departures, the general counsel has several times retained the lawyers to handle spill over work, specialized work that would have forced…