Many in-house counsel spend more hours in their office than they do anywhere else awake. How they fill, design, and maintain their little plot tells much about them. Those individual – or mandated – features of an office, such as desks, chairs, cabinets, also shackle or enable productivity. Workspace design…
A while back, I wrote a few posts about open-office plans (See my post of Sept. 16, 2008: physical layout of offices; and Sept. 30, 2009: hallways, conference rooms etc. of legal departments.). That movement, I sense, has gone nowhere in legal departments. Lawyers don’t like to work in exposed…
From guest blogger Jeff Kaplan at Kaplan Walker, an expert on compliance. “The need for strong FCPA compliance measures is not likely to go away any time soon. The flow of FCPA investigations and prosecutions shows no sign of abating – if anything, the bounty provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act…
I tried to find my prior writings on globalization and lawyers who practice “international” law. It is a polyglot group, to say the least (See my post of April 9, 2005: globalization of legal issues may be exaggerated; July 20, 2005: practice area benchmarks suggest less than 10% of in-house…
A survey of 80 US law departments in 1989 classified the lawyers in those departments into eight practice areas. The largest group was “General” (26%) followed by “Intellectual Property” (22%), “International” (11%), and then “Litigation” and “Government” (both at 9%). In the smaller practice areas were “Corporate/Securities” (7%), “Labor” (5%)…
Sandy Samuels was Countrywide’s general counsel for 18 years, until Bank of America acquired the huge mortgage services company in 2008. Corp. Counsel, Dec. 2010 at 18, writes that “Samuels built the legal staff at Countrywide from nine attorneys to more than 250.” As a percentage increase almost 3,000 percent,…
Sometimes referred to as the risk professions, this quartet has overlapping but distinctive roles. I recently heard these broad definitions and added my own for audit. Law interprets statutory and judicial rules and makes sure internal constituencies understand them. Compliance applies the rules to day-to-day conduct and monitors the level…
A supplement to the ACC Docket, by Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, Summer 2010 at 6, discusses approvingly the establishment by companies that license their patents to others (“outlicensing companies”) of a separate corporate licensing team. The team should operate on its own, not part of law or business development, and…
The American Intellectual Property Law Association’s (AIPLA) Rep. of the Ec. Survey 2005, at 5, states that 27 percent of the 1,558 survey participants practiced in-house, with fully a third of them serving as the head of the Corporate IP department. When they estimated how much of their time they…
Of the Fortune Global 500 companies, 165 are based in 10 vast cities. I presume that their legal departments staff many of their lawyers in those megalopolises. Here are the leaders from Foreign Policy, Sept./Oct. 2010 at 125: Tokyo (51 Global 500 companies and probably law departments), Paris (34), New…