Most lawyers start their careers being trained to miss nothing, look at everything, and be very wide-ranging. They wallow in complexity, for that rack up lots of billable hours, and become quite enamored with creating and dealing with complications. Once lawyers reach management levels, however, they need a very different…
Here are some of my candidates, in alphabetical order. I welcome other nominations of general counsel of this stature who deserve extraordinary recognition for their managerial contributions. Bob Banks, one-time GC of Xerox and a founding father of what is now the ACC Mark Chandler, Cisco’s outspoken and innovative GC,…
One of the questions on the Third Annual Law Department Operations Survey asked respondents to “rank the top three challenges of managing law department operations.” Where three points went to a first place choice, two points to second, and one to third, “Driving/Implementing change” led the pack. It collected 95…
Federal regulations “already fill 150,000 pages of fine-print text and cost Americans $1.7 trillion a year.” This claim, controversial at the least regarding the cost, appears in Met. Corp. Counsel, March 2011 at 5, from Thomas Donohue, President and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. If someone can come…
One way to establish the relative importance of legislation quantifies its impact either in costs imposed or benefits obtained. Researchers at Georgetown University, under Susan Dudley, Director of its Regulatory Studies Center, deem an “economically significant” consequence of a regulatory rule to mean that either the rule’s costs, or its…
“The fundamental goal for legal departments today is to validate the legal budget as a business enabler driving greater profits.” That pugnacious start of a recent article contains more theater than reality. I strongly disagree with its premise. General counsel spend their budgets to try to manage legal risks wisely…
A previous post defined construct validity (See my post of Dec. 15, 2010: Meyers Briggs claimed to lack construct validity.). Initially, we would need a consensual construct for effective law departments. “A construct is research-based and its meaning is agreed upon by a consensus of professionals qualified in the appropriate…
Very little, I believe. Others disagree with me. In her discussion of offshore legal outsourcing, Cassandra Burke Robertson, A Collaborative Model of Offshore Legal Outsourcing, Case Western School of Law Working Paper 2010-35 (Nov. 2010) at 14, discusses the lack of publicity by law departments surrounding offshoring. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1705505 Robertson writes…
The Economist, Dec. 18, 2010 at 134, contrasts the transaction-cost view of the business world with the resource-based view. Management theorists who champion the resource-based view “argue that activities are conducted within firms not only because markets fail, but also because firms succeed: they can marshal a wide range of…
Ladbrokes, the UK gaming company with four lawyers on its inside legal team, tied with TI Automotive for the smallest department to make this year’s the Financial Times list of innovative law departments. Surprisingly, David has embarked on a software development and marketing initiative in a Goliath market. As summarized…