Why does the sentiment prevail that lawyers in small law departments face noticeably more burdensome workloads than do lawyers in larger departments? Small and stretched vs. large and lazy? To the contrary, size probably creates more legal problems; smaller but legally simpler companies may need fewer lawyers. This is a…
Despite having addressed reporting from several perspectives, I have not pulled together my pieces on where the general counsel reports. So, I have filled that hole (See my post of Aug. 28, 2005: general counsel who seek to be the CEO’s consigliore; Jan. 1, 2006: reporting lines of General Electric…
Several years ago I wrote that many more general counsel in the UK report below the CEO than do US general counsel (See my post of April 12, 2006: UK GCs report less often to CEOs than the 80%+ mark in the US.). Since then, that disadvantage appears to have…
Marschall Smith, the general counsel of 3M, makes further geographic dispersion of his lawyers an inexorable trend: “Because 65 to 70 percent of the company’s sales are outside the U.S., so are the majority of our lawyers.” His interview in Inside Counsel, Jan. 2010 at 43, indicates that 3M has…
An article of mine on twenty ways to integrate a dispersed legal department will appear next week in the National Law Journal. It mentions teleconferences but not at the scale of 3M’s impressive application of that technique. 3M has 165 lawyers in 30 locations, so it is resolutely dispersed. According…
Academic theorists have named “the tendency of organizations in a particular sector to converge on a common way of working and set of beliefs that justify that way of working.” Institutional isomorphism is the off-putting label, but the term and its concept could apply to legal departments. The practices and…
In US legal departments, a good proportion of lawyers dedicate their support to one or more business units. By contrast, among a group of UK legal departments that took part in a recent survey, “around 29% of respondents say their legal function is structured mainly by area of law (compared…
If you have an estimate for the number of corporate counsel in any country other than North American or Europe, please email me. I am trying to figure out a plausible ratio of in-house lawyers to lawyers in private practice (See my post of Feb. 17, 2010: possibly 10,000 law…
If you have an estimate for the number of corporate counsel in any country other than the United States or Europe, please email me rees@reesmorrison.com. I am trying to figure out a plausible ratio of in-house lawyers to lawyers in private practice (See my post of Feb. 17, 2010: possibly…
If your legal team has offices strung out from Albania to Zimbabwe, you probably wish there were more cohesion, collegiality, and collective culture (See my post of Jan. 16, 2009: physically decentralized law departments with 13 references.). To the dozen techniques I have discussed in previous posts to share a…