The appreciation executive managers have that patents can generate business-enhancing value was brought home in a presentation at Consero’s conference last month. Keith Chanroo, Chief IP Counsel at TSMC, spoke about what he calls the new paradigm for intellectual property. One of his slides offers this provocative projection: “Commercialization (monetization)…
The General Counsel of Polycom, Sayed Darwish, spoke at Consero’s conference last month. One of his charts gave the number of pages in various historic statutes regarding financial services. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 took a mere 31 pages; Glass-Steagall of 1933 had 37 pages; the Interstate Banking Efficiency…
If your company operates in a regulated industry and also has unregulated businesses, you may need to track your time so that the allocation of your lawyer’s time is fair to the public. When rate applications go to the regulatory agency, costs of providing the utilities service, for example, are…
Speaking at the InsideCounsel SuperConference, a lawyer from Aerojet described his “Buyer’s Handbook.” It weighs in at 150 pages. The left-hand page shows a particular clause in Aerojet’s procurement contracts and the right-hand page provides both commentary on that clause and alternative language that its buyers might resort to. For…
Our word ostracize comes from votes in Athens written on broken pieces of pottery called ostrakon. The politician named most often on the pottery pieces was barred from the city for ten years — ostracized. This shard of history and etymology comes from Len Fisher, The Perfect Swarm: The science…
A number of law department initiatives stumble because the lawyers don’t do their part. Whether the initiative be to contribute documents to a repository, write FAQs for an intranet, run a Center of Excellence, reduce outside counsel fees, take advantage of software, hire diverse candidates, or put evaluations into a…
To manage is to be interrupted. Too often, however, we are distracted, a minor detour such as the ping of incoming emails, or interrupted, which suggests a more important break in your attention such as someone at your door. Either way, a writer in the NY Times recently suggested keeping…
Little Bets: How breakthrough ideas emerge from small discoveries, by Peter Sims (Free Press 2011), has much to stimulate entrepreneurs and business people. Its theme also pertain to general counsel. Sims creates a compelling argument for “little bets,” which are “concrete actions taken to discover, test, and develop ideas that…
An equation known as a progress curve “describes how productivity improves in a range of human activities from manufacturing to cancer surgery.” Having read that brief enticement in the Economist, April 2, 2011 at 76, I tried, probably unsuccessfully, to apply the equation to law departments. The formidable equation Tn…
A law department I recently read about boasted this strategy explicitly, which set me to wondering about its advisability. My conclusion: a bad idea. Extended very far this logic would push a general counsel to in-source as much as possible and therefore balloon the headcount. Some lawyers would not have…