This is an oscillating best practice, with supporters of in-house patent groups as well as supporters of “send the work out.” On one side are those IP lawyers who see ample value when they prepare and prosecute patents in the United States (See my post of Nov. 13, 2005: Motorola…
In a previous post, I commented on the frequency with which convergence and off-shoring showed up among the innovative law departments honored in the past month by the Financial Times (See my post of Dec. 3, 2010: seven law departments and two focused initiatives.). A careful reading also discloses among…
A company that has been in business twenty years or more has often accumulated barnacles of legal problems – companies or assets sold with long-term liabilities retained, past mistakes with legal tails such as environmental cleanups, products sold or installed years before that are now class action magnets. New companies…
Just before the Thanksgiving break, InsideCounsel Exclusives published my column on risks and metrics. In essence, the two words do not go together. The coupling of risk and measurement is oxymoronic, much to the disappointment of those who manage law departments and want desperately to quantify their value. Click on…
In the course of explaining to the law department a set of fundamental beliefs, a well respected general counsel included the injunction in the header. Some of the attendees at the conference were not familiar with the phrase “making sausage.” To the general counsel it meant that lawyers should present…
A core competency of a law department has to do with its outputs, what it delivers not how it produces it. So, with this definition of the term, it does not include characteristics of the legal team, a mistake I have made several times (See my post of March 15,…
The yin-yang of in-house legal counsel appeals to me as a metaphor, and there are others (See my post of Nov. 7, 2010: metaphors with 25 references.). Law departments slash with a “sword” that asserts the rights of the company while they brandish a “shield” that protects the company from…
The excellent movie about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Social Network, has a couple of fleeting references to a corporate lawyer. The “rowing twins” who eventually sued Zuckerberg call their wealthy father’s in-house lawyer for legal advice when they believe Zuckerberg has stolen their idea. Later, Zuckerberg and Eduard Severin, his sort-of…
Intell. Prop., Fall 2010 at 13, honors “the 25 most influential people in IP.” Of that esteemed group, seven in-house lawyers appear. They include Robert Armitage, the General Counsel of Eli Lilly; Terri Chen, Chief Trademark Counsel at Google; Daniel Dougherty, Associate General Counsel and the top IP lawyer at…
In-house managers of law firms should shift to law firms part of the burden to show whether they are cost effective. How might firms do this? That I leave to the ingenuity of law firm partners but it could start with a quarterly report on value-added activities. Even if a…