All law departments interview applicants, often devoting hours to them and more time for internal deliberations. It dismays me, then, to read that “decades of research have suggested that, despite their widespread use, interviews are not very predictive of applicants’ future performance.” We think we can size people up, ask…
Below is a translation from Portuguese of an item about a Brazilian state (Maranhao) and its establishment of a minimum wage for in-house lawyers. This came from a Brazilian consulting firm’s website. “The controversy surrounding the base salary of lawyers seems to be in their final days in Maranhao.…
Interviewed by the CCCA Mag., Winter, 2010, the tub-thumping former general counsel of General Electric offers a grandiose view of the general counsel’s role. According to Ben Heinemann, a trend that is more powerful than cost-cutting is “that business and society issues have become an important part of the CEOs…
The term “reverse mentoring,” new to me, it appears in InsideCounsel, April 2012 at 41. They are programs “in which people who are in the earlier stages of their careers mentor more-experienced attorneys in the department to help them to see the organization from the eyes of people at an…
The Atlantic, July/Aug. 2012 at 68, has a piece on the leadership styles of introverts and extroverts. According to some recent research, “introverted leaders typically deliver better outcomes than extroverts, because they’re more likely to let proactive employees run with their ideas.” Later, the article suggests that extroverted general counsel,…
My law school alma mater, Columbia (JD ’78), took steps after the 2008 crash to help its graduates find jobs. According to the Col. Law School Mag., Spring 2012 at 2, the Dean of the Law School “reached out to more than 100 graduates who are general counsels or deputy…
An article in the Acad. Mgt. J., April 2012 at 399, concerns a problem well recognized among human resources professionals: “the transition from expatriation to repatriation routinely culminates with repatriates quitting organizations.” If you post a lawyer to an overseas location, when they return they often leave the company. The…
As my General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey now collects compensation data, I pay more attention to findings from that realm. For example, “In Brazil, lawyers can expect to receive an average basic salary of $279,600 – 21 percent higher than the average of $231,500 in the United States.” That comes…
Organizations that collect compensation and benchmark data gravitate toward large law departments. They want to boast about the impressive number of lawyers among their respondents, the gargantuan revenue they support, and the league-table rankings of their participants. The downside of the Fortune fetish is that the resulting metrics do not…
For the first time, this year’s General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey collects and reports on compensation data. Only law departments in the United States or Canada are eligible to submit lawyer and administrator compensation data and receive a report, at no cost. To obtain your benchmark report, click on this…