A profile in the Fin. Times, June 13, 2007 by Alan Cane, traces the career of one-time general counsel and then chief executive of Pitney Bowes, Michael Critelli. The piece dropped four tidbits. Critelli moved in-house for ethical reasons. After Harvard Law School, Critelli litigated in private practice until age…
For most law departments, the turnover rate of lawyers is much lower than that of employees elsewhere in the company. Even so, we hear quite a bit about lawyer departures, voluntarily or otherwise. Some posts here on this blog look at departure metrics (See my post of March 4, 2007:…
If you are a US-based company but have a sizeable contingent of Asian lawyers, do they count toward your diversity goals? I suppose not, because the idea of diversity is to have people of different attributes mixed in the same place. Even with that, however, it must be complicated to…
My second blook organizes almost 300 posts related to talent management. Its 201 pages are organized in nine chapters and further organized by major topics within the chapters. My organizing theme for the chapters is chronological, from when you first think about hiring someone, through finding them, paying them, on…
Robert Sutton, a Stanford professor of management science and engineering, offers his advice on a case study in the Harv. Bus. Rev., Vol. 86, March 2009 at 40. His comments enlightened me about the insidious, under-estimated costs of large-scale terminations and the knee-jerk reaction to lop off the lowest 10…
According to the Altman Weil 2008 Law Department Metrics Benchmarking Survey at 108, the larger the law department, the lower the median percentage of lawyers leaving the department, as a percentage of the total number of departmental lawyers. In other words, the larger the department, the better it retains lawyers.…
The many posts on LawDepartmentManagementBlog about the ratio of lawyers per billion of revenue fall into three clusters: metrics for a specific company; explanations of what drives the metric; and wider-ranging coverage about the metric. In the course of describing specific law departments, I sometimes mention their lawyers per billion…
An earlier post considered self-centeredness in young lawyers (See my post of June 30, 2007: narcissism and demographic groups.). What about narcissism in a general counsel? strategy + business, Issue 54, Spring 2009 at 119, mentions that “The personality traits that lead narcissists to take control of groups are the…
At the top of my Gmail on Feb. 16th was a Google ad by the Law Department of State Farm! They are recruiting lawyers. When I clicked through, I read: Legal / Litigation Our mission is to provide high quality, consistent, practical, creative, timely, and cost-effective legal service to assist…
The ACC Empsight Small Law Compensation Survey provides data about general counsel of law departments with fewer than 10 lawyers. The data comes from ACC Docket, Vol. 27, Jan./Feb. 2009 at 8. The Survey gives the mix for them between base salary, cash bonus, and long term incentive (LTI) amounts.…