Observers of the legal industry make much about the gap between the costs per hour of inside lawyers and the cost per hour of outside counsel. This blogger, indeed, has raised his pen in that debate (See my post of Aug. 27, 2008: fully-loaded cost per lawyer hour with 31…
According to a summary of compliance-related findings from the 2008 ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey, “For the fourth year in a row, ‘keeping apprised of company activities that have legal implications’ was the top concern of the in-house counsel (81.4% of hundreds of respondents).” That concern sounds defensive and a…
I defend in-house counsel from their detractors. One set of critics are those who say that if you are an employee lawyer you can’t be as objective as a partner in a law firm. They say that in-house lawyers know their jobs are on the line and that pressure weakens…
LyondellBasell’s legal team has “recovered several hundred million dollars on the company’s affirmative claims against third parties,” according to an article in the ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Nov. 2008 at 34. Some people, who believe litigation is wasteful and unproductive (merely a costly redistribution of wealth), might feel that those…
The Career Development Office at Yale Law School has posted online a guide for its law students who may be interested in working in a business setting. One chapter talks about in-house practice. Toward the end of the discussion about the advantages of working in a law department, the author…
“Thematic pairs” is the term introduced in Michael Shermer, Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown (Time Books 2005) at 258, to describe five deep themes that appear ubiquitously in the hundreds of articles and essays written by the polymath paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould. Each of the thematic pairs…
“How do I measure the productivity of my department?” “How do I measure the value I add?” If I could tell general counsel how to quantify their answers to these two vital questions, which would mean I could tell them how to do better on both, I would be, as…
A survey published in the ABA J., Vol. 95, Jan. 2009 at 12, drew responses from an astonishing 14,307 attorneys – “more than 1.3 percent of the nation’s 1.1 million lawyers.” The survey results about predictions for the economic future don’t matter for this blog, but always read the footnotes!…
How well do inside lawyers stand up to misconduct by their clients? Do partners at firms gatekeep more effectively? That is the topic of a column in ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Nov. 2008 at 22, where Ron Pol distills the framework used by an academic to answer the questions. The…
Shortly after finding a patent application by the Legal Group of General Electric (See my post of Dec. 23, 2008: web-based Legal Management System.), I found another application, this one filed on March 21, 2005 on behalf of the law department of Chevron Texaco (Charles James, the general counsel, is…