The Economist, Jan. 2, 2010 at 55, reviews various points on procrastination. Why we tend to put off doing something often has to do with our magnified sense of the cost of doing a task now as compared to in the future. One idea for a way to alter that…
Those who speak and write about legal department management should try to do so without jargon, with words pragmatic and clear. The opposite of that style means nothing definite comes through, that you hear the words but can’t understand their meaning. An egregious example bagged from Practical Law, Feb. 2010…
Talk about a risk of bias in survey data! A survey by administrators asked a group of law department operations managers in US legal departments “How much do you think your company’s legal spend would increase without a legal department operations position?” In other words, how much are you worth…
A profile of James Lipscomb, the general counsel of MetLife, ladles out an endearing accomplishment of his department. According to Columbia Law School Mag., Winter 2010 at 63, the department seeks to serve up an “inclusive” office atmosphere. “For instance, the employees initiated ethnic food tastings – an endeavor that…
In Britain, it is not uncommon for a junior lawyer from a legal department to spend some time with a law firm, especially to gain litigation experience. An example comes from Law Bus. Rev., Winter 2009 at 30, which cites MITIE doing such a reverse secondment with Burges Salmon (See…
My understanding is that the standard charge of executive search firms that place a candidate is on the order of a quarter to a third of the lawyer’s first year compensation. Or, at least that was the range back in the palmy days. Whatever the charge, it mostly applies to…
The Harvard Bus. Rev., Vol. 88, Jan.-Feb. 2010 at 104, has an intriguing study of the “best- performing CEOs in the world.” I wondered how many of them have outstanding general counsel at the helm, but when I searched among my 5,000 posts, I found almost nothing about the legal…
Asian-Counsel, Vol. 7, Oct. 2009 at 19, mentions an “Asia-Pacific Head of Legal & Compliance for a European asset manager” whose company conducted an “employee staff engagement survey” to identify the kinds of issues that were of concern to employees. Only if you have a very large and dispersed legal…
Int’l In-House Counsel J., Vol 2, Summer 2009 at 1301-02, argues that chief legal officers should lead recruitment even for lawyers based with business units and yet also involve the local executives the new lawyer will support. “A first cut of interviews will be done with the head office legal…
Hildebrandt Baker Robbins, a unit of Thomson Reuters, shared some data from its 2009 Law Department Survey on cost control strategies. The survey found that 73 percent of the companies have no plans to increase the use of contract/temporary staff. Only 13 percent have increased the use of contract/temporary staff…