The terms centralized and decentralized are used with two unrelated meanings. To many people who describe law department structure, they refer to the geographic location of lawyers (together physically at headquarters or spread around). For others, it means the reporting relationships of the lawyers. In the second sense (which I…
A shared-services law department has three hallmarks. The head lawyer reports to an executive who runs the shared-services organization, which typically includes other units such as human resources or accounting. Second, and more important, clients can choose to use the shared-service lawyers or they can turn to outside counsel. This…
Many businesses have an ethics officer whom employees can call anonymously to report a possible infraction. If employees do not want to call someone from their own company sometimes they can call a law firm that handles such reports. Often ethical complaints are reviewed by a committee on ethics and…
There are probably survey results that limn the distribution of paralegals in law departments by practice area, but I can’t locate one. A clue might be gleaned from an article in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 14, Dec. 2006 at 53. A vice president of Special Counsel, Jodi Nadler, offers some…
Setting the side “law” and “legal” in the phrase law or legal department (See my post of May 24, 2005 for the difference between “law department” and “legal department.“), what is the essence of department? Related terms include “function,” “team,” “office,” “group,” and “unit” – all groups of people with…
A good example of a law department that has assigned its lawyers a major responsibility and several minors comes from top of mind, Vol. 5, 2006 by Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham at 4. Radio One’s law department has four lawyers, each of whom is a generalist but also a…
I invite readers to enlighten me. The reason doesn’t seem to be that tax law is so arcane that a general counsel can’t manage those skilled in its cabalistic mysteries. ERISA is pretty daunting too. It can’t be that the CFO has a particularly tight bond with tax attorneys, else…
In 2001, FMC Corp. had 48 lawyers and $3.9 billion in revenue. It spun off FMC Technologies as a $1.9 billion company — but that company had only eight attorneys. The larger company, with 12.3 lawyers per billion of revenue, spawned a company with 4.2 lawyers per billion! Even more…
Where a law department assigns some lawyers to be responsible for the primary legal needs of a particular business unit (See my post of Oct. 14, 2005 on single points of contact.) and assigns the rest to handle specialized areas of law, it helps to clearly draw the lines of…
A professor at the Harvard Business School, Pankaj Ghemawat, researched six key measures of cross-border economic and other business activity. He looked at telephone calls, management research, direct investment, private charity, stock investment, and trade. His conclusion belies the stridency of those who trumpet rampant internationalization: “Most types of economic…