Hans Peter Frick has been group general counsel at Nestlé for 17 years. An article by him in Legal Strat. Rev., Spring 2009 at 18, offers four tasty morsels. Trust the work of your external counsel. He writes that “we focused on reducing the amount of duplication in the work…
Sainsbury’s general counsel Nick Grant has challenged the eleven firms on his legal panel to compete against each other in a novel way. He asked the firms introduce their other clients to Grant so they can pitch a new product or service to be sold on the supermarket’s shelves. Five…
We need a sniglet (a made up word for a common situation) for the idea that specialist lawyers can usually find one of their arcane issues tucked into any set of facts. A knowledgeable tax lawyer can find subtle tax implications in any business transaction; an anti-trust specialist spots collusions…
During interviews in a consulting project, I heard about “legal audits” conducted at a US company that brings in roughly 50 percent of its revenue from overseas, Every year or two a team of senior lawyers visits a country where the company does significant business. The team kicks the legal…
Inspired by Elliott Hurwitt in Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, May 2009 at 102, who spoofed PR releases by technology vendors, here is my similar approach for general counsel who want to praise their group. When words fail you, don’t fail to use these crunchy words. Simply mix-and-match to fill in…
What will happen to Sun’s hefty legal department, which listed 170 lawyers in 2006 after Oracle acquires it? Consider the axe orgy after Oracle’s acquisition of BEA in April 2008. Of the 20 or so lawyers and eight legal staffers that worked in the BEA legal department, only two staffers…
“Lawyers, as a group, have a higher aversion to change than business people.” This adamant quote comes from Janet Langford Kelly, Susan Sneider and Kelly Fox, “The Relationship Between the Legal Department and the Corporation,” in Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (Robert Haig, Ed.) Vol. 1, Chapter 16…
Some legal departments seem to get into the klieg lights of favorable publicity more than others, perhaps because they have on retainer their own PR firm (See my post of Jan. 30, 2008: publicity by law departments with 12 references; and June 11, 2007: publicity with 12 references.) One such…
Neither my heart nor my head support the idea that law departments should strive to be a profit center (See my post of April 27, 2008: profit center with 18 references.). Law departments should focus on productivity, quality and legal risk management (See my post of April 8, 2009: the…
What is the goal of management in a law department? To improve productivity, to increase the quality of legal advice, or to reduce legal risk? Clearly, we need operational definitions of these slithery PQR terms and some way to measure progress toward achieving these objectives (See my post of Oct.…