Law department benchmark metrics show that law departments face at the median, say, 20-40 lawsuits per lawyer. Metrics disclose cycle time for lawsuits, whether they are as plaintiff or defendant, cases per outside counsel, and what the department spends on them. No metrics capture complexity of cases (although spending per…
“The State of Canadian Judicial Statistics: Trends in Canadian Civil Justice,” by The Fraser Institute [info@fraserinstitute.ca] presents results of a 1995 survey from about 50 members of the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association. The respondents handled an average of 58 lawsuits each year during the previous five years. “Most (38) of…
The Office of the General Counsel for the National Labor Relations Board spends much of its time investigating and making preliminary determinations on charges of unfair labor practices (ULPs). In 1995, the Office studied how it handled the 3,000 charges it received each month. [www.lawmemo.com/nlrb/gchighlights.htm] Moving from a first-in, first-out…
How much legal work for in-house IP lawyers does SOX mandate? I have paraphrased from a recent Metropolitan Corp. Counsel article by Marc Friedman, a partner at Sills Cummis Epstein & Gross: All publicly held companies must conduct regular audits – at least annually – of their IP assets, and…
Departments with lawyers spread around the globe confront obvious problems with time zones; someone has to be on the call at midnight while others are munching bagels. Offices of global law departments face language barriers, diverse legal systems, and different ways of actually getting things done. Managers who try to…
To be a corporate lawyer is to belong to teams – product development, lobbying, large-scale litigation, acquisitions, strategic planning, IP review, and many others. What commonly trips up teams? Here are seven ways teams stumble, according to Interaction Associates: Not knowing what the team is supposed to accomplish Having unclear…
“The Law Department must review and initial all contracts!” More likely, the bureaucrat announcing this retrograde edict would lurk behind the passive: “All contracts shall be reviewed and initialed by the Law Department!” Regardless of writing style, the mandate perverts the role of the in-house lawyers. It casts them as…
I am a sucker for metrics, but hopefully not a sucker. When I read in Law Practice (April/May 2005 at pg. 5) that “[b]ehavioral experts say that your chances of accomplishing something increase by 70 percent if you write it down,” my “magic metrics” meter jumped into the red. So…
Several conference rooms that I have sat in include a placard with rules. The rules, which are guidelines and suggestions really, help those who use the conference rooms make their time more effective and preserve the room for others’ use. Those departments that use cubicles (see my earlier post on…
In April 2003, a consortium of six major US tech companies set up the Information Work Productivity Institute (www.iwproductivity.org). The institute has developed a methodology for measuring the five dimensions of productivity. These are Consistency of execution; Leverage of resources; Efficiency of operating; Alignment of capabilities and business goals; and…