Henry Kissinger reviewed a biography of Bismarck in the NY Times Book Rev., April 3, 2011 at 10. He praises the Chancellor’s exquisite use of power and remarks more generally: “Power, to be useful, must be understood by its components, including its limits.” That sentence provoked me to think about…
Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, Clever: Leading your smartest, most creative people (Harv. Bus. 2009) at 77, state that “high-IQ individuals frequently performed badly when they were put together in a team. In competitive situations, [the researcher cited] found that teams consisting of less clever people typically outperformed teams of…
A panelist at the Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession conference on March 9th, remarked that a successful in-house lawyer needs four attributes. He listed knowledge (what the lawyer knows), skills (how the lawyer applies that knowledge), behavior (what the lawyer does while applying that knowledge)…
Not only are promotions hard to come by in most law departments, because the pyramid of senior positions narrows rapidly, but two other elements of our sense of happiness toss in monkey-wrenches. One is that bliss doesn’t last: once you reach the coveted rung of Assistant General Counsel, your euphoria…
Caterpillar has 18 lawyers in its litigation department. The department’s head lawyer, deputy general counsel Lance High, also has on his team 13 engineers “dedicated to helping with cases that challenge the design and manufacture of Caterpillar’s products.” The passage comes from Corp. Counsel, March 2011 at 68, and surely…
A recent article in Corporate Counsel discusses administrators of law departments. The author notes that the Association of Legal Administrators (ALA) just added its 10,000th member, but that only two percent of them work for companies. A decade ago, if I recall correctly from speaking before the Corporate/Government Section of…
Capable professionals achieve more and are more contented if their work constraints are more like boundaries than bureaucracy. If simple rules, constitutional principles, broad descriptions of authority accompanied by inspiring goals, set the direction and structure, in-house lawyers and their teammates can cope with the unpredictable challenges of a law…
Sociologists often invoke a “sharp distinction between rural Gemeinschaft (inherited, emotional community) and urban Gesellschaft (created, cold society).” Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (Univ. Chic. 2010) at 17, wrote that. She discredits it as a falso historical and societal split fabricated by German…
The Harv. Bus. Rev., March 2011 at 65, has an article about “the new path to the c-suite.” One part looks at what it takes to become a chief legal officer. It explains what the author sees as the dramatic upgrade in the position of general counsel during the past…
“Though the role of general counsel will continue to attract senior partners from law firms, companies will be more reluctant to pull executives straight from private practice, preferring candidates with in-house experience who understand how to manage the people and finances of a legal department and how to operate as…