An entropy index of diversification is an indicator widely employed in management research to quantify relative diversification among companies. It is based on the number and distribution of line-of-business activity in each company, which I think could be comparable to total lawyer-equivalent hours per area of law practice, both internal…
Jeff Kaplan, guest blogger, takes up the ongoing question “whether a company’s compliance and ethics officer should report administratively to the general counsel. (Informational, as opposed to administrative, reporting to boards by C&E officers is now fairly pervasive.) The critique of such reporting relationships is based, in part, on the…
An intriguing article in Legal Strat. Rev., Summer 2010 at 14, describes how IBM’s legal team of 500 people has created a “legal delivery center” in Michigan and one in Dublin, Ireland. I can foresee at some time a center in Asia, but the article does not mention that. Each…
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TMSC) is the world’s largest dedicated semiconductor foundry, with $10 billion in revenue in 2008. An American lawyer, Dr. Richard Thurston, heads its nearly 70 full-and part-time legal department employees, according to Legal Strat. Rev., Summer 2010 at 14. Of that group, 10 are US-based, two…
An article in the Admin. Sci. Q., Sept. 2003 at 401, distinguishes “architecture” from “culture” in organizational design. The architecture of a law department consists of the formal structures for assigning work, such as a litigation group, a business unit group, or an intellectual property group. Hierarchies such as deputies,…
“The first step in managing collaborative communities is to map the relationships within the community and look for patterns.” According to Olivia Parr Rud, Business Intelligence Success Factors (Wiley 2009) at 84, methods to describe these relationship patterns came from organizational network analysis, an approach originated in the 1930s with…
Richard Ogle, Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas (Harv. Bus. School 2007) at 238, introduces the term “space” which he uses “in the mathematical sense of a complex abstract entity characterized by very high dimensionality and therefore connectivity” (See my post of July 25, 2010: network…
Richard Ogle, Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas (Harv. Bus. School 2007) at 20, explains that the promulgation and exploration of network theory evolved from work on complexity theory. This blog has skimmed several concepts from network theory (See my post of May 11, 2010: network…
My friend, Jeff Kaplan, offers some good ideas about how to assure the independence of a chief ethics and compliance officer (CECO) who reports to the general counsel. “However, even where the analysis leads one to conclude that administrative reporting to the GC is best for the company the CECO…
One of the speakers at the SuperConference was from Motorola’s law department. She described the structure of the department, which has two unusual features. Overall, there are four clusters of lawyers dedicated to business units, with regional lawyers reporting up to the heads of them. What is unusual is In…