A brand new benchmarking report gives lawyers per billion Euros for five industries: professional services, high-technology, pharmaceutical, consumer/retail, and manufacturing. The industries’ medians varied by four to one. When we index the metric for manufacturing as 1, then consumer/retail was 1.74; pharmaceutical was 2.4; high-technology was 2.8; and professional services…
If your legal department is scattered around the world, you might like to know some of the ways you can create a one-department culture. These ten techniques certainly do not exhaust the topic, but they should help you strengthen your efforts. I have listed them roughly in what I perceive…
What has happened since InBev mixed its law department with Anheuser-Busch’s? We know from Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, March 2009 at 61, that a few months after the November 2008 merger the legal team had stirred together 250 lawyers. The acquiring company’s general counsel, Sabine Chalmers, was named for the…
It would be convenient for the cognoscenti of law department management to be able to describe numerically levels and spans of control. For example, if a 10-lawyer department has four lawyers who report to the general counsel (“direct reports”), the general counsel’s supervisory ratio is 4:1. The remaining five lawyers…
The Dutch giant, Philips, has a huge group called Intellectual Property & Standards (IP&S). According to IP Review, Iss. 24, Winter 2008/2009 at 34, IP&S has a headquarters team of 45, and “some 500 people spread across 16 countries.” It is responsible for all of the company’s IP assets –…
IP Review, Iss. 24, Winter 2008/2009 at 13, profiles the German automotive components company, Bosch. It explains that the large IP team of Bosch has two sector-specific patent groups (mechanical and electronic), a licensing expert, a trademark specialist, and an anti-counterfeiting team, “which has its own network of brand protection…
In Germany in 1897, Robert Bosch applied to register a patent for the magneto device that starts a car’s engine. Eleven years later, his company formed an intellectual property division, which celebrated its centenary last year. During the intervening 100 years, Bosch added more than 30,000 employees working in research…
At Cadbury PLC the business regrouped from four regions to eight, and the law department matched that change exactly. It is a clear example of how efforts to align with the business side can push a law department to restructure itself (See my post of June 15, 2008; alignment with…
At least six senior legal roles at Merrill Lynch have been axed as part of the investment bank’s global restructuring. As reported on The Lawyer.com, an associate general counsel, the “general counsel of litigation and employment,””co-head of global litigation,” and three other senior lawyers have been terminated and will leave…
When the Bank of New York — Mellon Corp. merger closed in July 2007, Carl Krasik, the general counsel, had to meld 150 lawyers from two very anxious, legal departments into one legal team. According to an article on Law.com, Krasik structured the merged department based on merit, lawyering skills…