Since March 2008, when I last assembled posts on legal risk and risk management, I have expounded on both topics a fair amount (See my post of Nov.15, 2005: legal risk with 7 references, see risk management; and March 23, 2008: risk management with 18 references, see legal risk.). Several…
Laura Schumacher, the general counsel of Abbott Laboratories, heads 162 lawyers and total staff of 328. The ratio of lawyers to staff is almost exactly even (See my post of April 18, 2009: lawyers as percentage of total legal staff and more with one to one; March 26, 2006: EMC…
Doctors only trust doctors, CPAs only respect CPAs, and lawyers only accept direction from lawyers (maybe). Since administrators (especially non-lawyers) can only go so far to tell lawyers what to do, it is not surprising that a large legal department would appoint a senior lawyer to run the operational sides…
Back in the day, companies thought of their international operations on a country-by-country basis and it made sense to have a local lawyer or two in-country report to the general manager of that country. Times change, as pointed out in E. Leigh Dance, Bright Ideas: Insights from Legal Luminaries Worldwide…
Here is an interesting quote from BNA’s HR Department Benchmarks and Analysis 2008: “HR departments are continuing a past decade trend of taking on more and more responsibilities. The percentage of HR departments taking on new responsibilities minus those giving up existing responsibilities has more than doubled during the past…
I have defined a large law departments as one that has more than 20 lawyers (See my post of June 27, 2006: large law departments defined; and Aug. 26, 2006: four largest law departments in France.). The topic is, shall I say large, but I scanned my 4,600 posts and…
The following quote comes from Stephen Mayson, writing in Laura Empson, ed., Managing The Modern Law Firm: New Challenges New Perspectives (Oxford Univ. Press 2007) at 152. ‘Organizational capital is thus distinct from both human capital (which is embedded in individuals) and social capital (which is embedded in the relationships…
At one time decentralized, IBM’s legal department recently centralized as it “’dis-embedded’ its lawyers from its business units and created a single global team.” This description comes from Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, June 2009 at 75, and reminds me of a comparable decision at Schneider Electric to have all the…
From Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, June 2009 at 66, we learn about the compliance function at The Hartford Financial Services Group. “The law department’s compliance group has a staff of 35 (13 of them lawyers); another 250 compliance officers, only some of them lawyers, are deployed in business compliance units.”…
The Hartford Financial Services Group won Corporate Counsel’s 2009 Best Legal Department award. It has 210 in-house lawyers supporting 2008 revenue of $9.2 billion. Further, “All firms that do a significant amount of [litigation] work for the company are assigned in-house ‘relationship managers.’ Similar to relationship partners at law firms,…