Professionalism runs rampant in legal departments – not just lawyers. More and more members of legal departments at least have the opportunity for additional education and recognition as a trained person in their area, a hallmark of professionalism. This idea came to me from an article on the rising level…
This blog has put its boots on and waded into the ugly stream of bad interactions among co-workers. After all, in legal teams as elsewhere frustrations and grievances lurk and often spread (See my post of Oct. 24, 2006: rumors and back-biting.). Several came to mind. Bias regarding physical appearances…
Gina Passarella, writing in the Legal Intelligencer, Oct. 14, 2009 on the Thomson Hildebrandt 2008 Law Department Survey (ed. Jon Bellis), extracts some findings that suggest internal budgets were kept mostly flat other than modest increases in compensation. The survey shows median total spending increased by five percent in the…
A report from the Corporate Executive Board identifies 38 attributes in what it calls the Employment Value Proposition (EVP). Out of 38 EVP attributes of an organization, they found two to be the top drivers of commitment: “Manager Quality” and “Collegial Work Environment.” Manager Quality is a vast topic, barely…
Don Liu, general counsel of Xerox, mentions an unusual restriction on legal departments. “I’m aware of at least two U.S. public companies that had a non-U.S. lawyer who ran their legal department, although they couldn’t call themselves the general counsel because of licensing requirements.” The quote comes from David Galbenski,…
This post gathers my metaposts on various categories of employees in legal departments, other than the general counsel. There are too many posts about general counsel for me to make sense of them in this way. So I focused on six other levels. Administrators (See my post of Feb.13, 2008…
The ties between some law departments and their primary firms can be very close, but a suffocatingly close one was referred to in Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, Oct. 2009 at 20. Chevron chose Charles James to become general counsel in 2001; James had been a partner at Jones Day. James’…
In a profile of the chief responsibility and ethics officer for MillerCoors,Diversity & The Bar, Sept.-Oct. 2009 at 35, describes a practice followed by Richard Deusenberg, the now-retired general counsel of Monsanto. “For one week every year, he ran his company’s legal department on our [Valparaiso University, Indiana] campus. During…
“For a company with $10 billion in revenue, each year of additional average lawyer tenure in a legal department reduces damages, settlements, and fines by approximately $1.7 million.” That finding comes from research the General Counsel Roundtable published in 2001 (based on 1999 data). The longer its attorneys have practiced…
Not much appears in the press about secretaries in legal departments. I do not mean Corporate Secretaries, I mean admins, executive assistants, traditional file-copy-type-answer phones-and-schedule secretaries (See my post of May 17, 2006: whither the term “secretary”; and Nov. 22, 2006: the new title, “Legal Administrative Assistant”.). Everyone knows that…