KMWorld, May 2011 at S4, gives the background of Devin Krugly, currently at AccessData. In the squib it says that he came from Exxon Mobil and “a three-year effort to grow an in-house e-discovery team …” That project included “a year-long process to evaluate potential vendors which led to 24…
The Corporate Grapevine of the ACC Docket, May 2011 at 142, mentions that Joia Johnson, the chief legal officer of Hanesbrands, has been elected to the Board of Directors of Crawford & Co., an insurance services firm (See my post of March 25, 2009: GC of McDonald’s on board of…
Boris Groysberg, Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance (Princeton Univ. 2010) at 127, talks briefly about how an organization, such as a law department, can excel at assimilating new hires. Unfortunately, research about this is scarce: “Little is known about integrating experienced professionals into a…
“Researchers have estimated the cost of losing a seasoned professional as 75-150 percent of the person’s annual salary,” according to Boris Groysberg, Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance (Princeton Univ. 2010) at 239 (See my post of May 14, 2005: estimate of about $100,000 for…
It is easier to bring a lawyer into a department that already has one or more lawyers already in that person’s practice area than it is to bring in the first lawyer of a kind. This common-sense proposition came to my attention from Boris Groysberg, Chasing Stars: The Myth of…
I admire Boris Groysberg’s book, Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance (Princeton Univ. 2010). He exhaustively studied equity research analysts who were top-ranked by Institutional Investor. The first chapter condenses a huge amount of research on innate performance drivers and acquired performance drivers, and his…
Earlier I discussed what I thought was established wisdom: people with wide-ranging “weak ties” tap into and benefit more from ideas than those who mostly confer with their relatively few strong ties who think similarly (See my post of Dec. 31, 2010: a network perspective on the strength of weak…
Career paths for in-house attorneys occasionally wend out of the practice of law. It’s a tough transition, however, and controversial. The large number of references on this blog to émigrés from the legal team are perhaps the notable exceptions that prove the rule (See my post of April 18, 2005:…
Earlier I wrote about the managerial decisions at the disposal of general counsel regarding lawyers who report to them. Each decision has limits but together they comprise power (See my post of April 5, 2011: 12 aspects of power.). Much material appears on this blog regarding each of those indicia…
The emigration happens infrequently and I have always thought it was a result of client poaching. Put more politely, a client likes a lawyer’s background and abilities and persuades the lawyer to move over and take on a business role. The lawyer presumably welcomes the change of seat. The general…