The new company general counsel at Siemens, the engineering and technology giant, significantly restructured the sprawling legal function. As reported in Legal Week, April 3, 2008, Peter Solmssen appointed general counsel for each of the company’s corporate, energy, industry and healthcare groups as well as regional counsel for the Americas,…
“At most companies, responsibility for intellectual property still resides in the legal counsel’s office rather than with the chief technology officer, chief financial officer, or some other manager responsible for guiding financial and commercial growth.” The tone of voice being so querulous, the author obviously thinks that dumb old patent…
In law departments that have a number of conference rooms, members of the department often find it nettlesome to manage reservations of those rooms. People reserve a room, and then cancel or shorten their time. Others plan to use their office but an extra person or two shows up so…
The general counsel of Affymetrix, Barbara Caulfield, decided that she could increase efficiencies and save money if her law department handled IP litigation internally (See my post of Feb. 9, 2008: don’t “manage” litigation, handle it.). An article in IP Law & Bus., Vol. 6, Feb. 2008 at 9, describes…
Many law departments operate to some degree as a loose confederacy of silos (See my post of March 1, 2007 on the risks of compartmentalized legal practices.). Groups of lawyers within silos [vertical reporting lines] burrow on with little sharing of knowledge or resources between them and other silos. Between…
At a recent panel, a senior lawyer with General Electric said his department has set up “Centers of Excellence.” He likened the Centers to shared services groups (See my posts of Dec. 31, 2006 on law departments as shared services and a definition; March 23, 2007 on Raytheon’s legal specialists…
In-house lawyers usually like to work some days from their house. Telecommuting has obvious advantages: flexible working hours, less lost time in commutes, lower parking and gas costs, and, arguably higher productivity. These reasons in favor or working at home come from a study by Lexmark International, cited in Bus.…
Intellectual property lawyers create all sorts of fuss and bother in law departments because their skills and experience spill over into other practice areas (See my posts of Aug. 5, 2007 about Hitachi and its IP function; and March 28, 2006 on PPG’s.). Each overlap has the potential to cause…
A previous post refers to data about the aspirations of UK general counsel to belong formally to their companies’ boards of directors (See my post of Nov. 12, 2007.). In the United States, few general counsel are members of the Board, but they attend almost all meetings, in part because…
Lovells, the UK-based megafirm, surveyed 180 in-house lawyers across Europe and reports that 28 percent of the UK general counsel sit on the boards of their companies, but twice that number think they should (See my posts of April 12, 2006 for an earlier survey that 40% want to be…