A senior attorney with Ford Motor Credit spoke on a panel at the SuperConference. She laid out several aspects of the reduction in force recently endured by her law department. Muzette Hill Stallings said that management told the department about the downsizing one month before the layoff day. That day,…
A former Morgan, Lewis & Bockius partner, Michael Holston, now the General Counsel of Hewlett-Packard, says he has had one goal for HP’s legal department: to make it the “best legal and government affairs department in the world.” Zusha Elinson wrote this in a story for The Recorder, dated May…
The thrust of several posts is that in-house career path is an oxymoron (See my post of March 28, 2006: ostensible reasons not to go in-house; June 24, 2007: the intractable problem of career paths; April 12, 2006: among least rewarding aspect of practicing in corporation is “career advancement opportunities”;…
The Advisory Panel of the CLO Programme includes nine top lawyers. Those lawyers have titles that are not run-of-the mill titles for their US counterparts (the titles I reflexively use in posts, such as general counsel and chief legal officer). I start the list with my favorite: Head of…
“I see an increasing desire on the part of boards to participate in the hiring of a general counsel. I think that the board needs to be more and more involved. This is in keeping with the recommendation of the ABA’s Cheek Committee which recommended more board involvement in the…
The self-serving attribution bias blinkers most of us, as commonly “individuals see themselves as fully responsible for their successes yet blame external sources for their failures.” Thus, as explained in the Academy of Mgt. Perspectives, Vol. 23, Feb. 2009 at 81, a litigator’s brilliance and doggedness won at trial but…
At a global financial firm, the tool used to evaluate the lawyers has three rows for performance and three columns for potential, a nine-box grid. As to performance, the manager assesses a lawyer as high, medium or low; as to lawyer’s potential, a similar scale holds of high, medium or…
According to an article in Academy of Mgt. Perspectives, Vol. 23, Feb. 2009 at 18, median CEO pay in 2006 at S&P 500 companies was just over $8 million. That figure is the “sum of the salary, bonus, stock awards, option awards, non-equity incentives, changes in pension value and nonqualified…
At Silicon Valley Bank, the legal department’s 10 attorneys did not receive merit salary increases this year. Leslie A. Gordon, GC California Mag., April 16, 2009, noted this reverberation from the economic slump. Many other law departments have experienced such restrictions as company-wide holds on salary increases, bonuses, matches to…
For some matters, Yahoo is now bypassing conventional law firms altogether in favor of outfits such as Paragon Legal or Axiom Legal, which rent out senior lawyers to handle short-term projects. Yahoo has used such temporary attorneys to handle legal work on projects that have included building a database or…