“Drink to me only with thine eyes” and you’ll get into a lot less trouble at the office fete than if you drink anything stronger. Sadly, wise advice about discretion and knowing one’s limits can too easily sip slip away. Mad Kane’s Office Party Follies takes a humorous look at…
Of seven methods of consultant training reported on in Consulting, Vol. 9, Nov./Dec. 2007 at 47, the most common, accounting for 32 percent, is “formal in-house training.” I doubt that law departments conduct formal training programs for their lawyers, except possibly writing skills or negotiation skills (See my posts of…
When lawyers in a law department are asked to fill out an upward appraisal of their general counsel, they probably feel a pang of unease, even if they have been assured that their responses will be held completely confidential. If too few people complete the review, or if there are…
The bigger the law department, the more of his or her time a general counsel has to spend on personnel issues. You might think that with large law departments, more people are comfortably slotted into the right level and type of work for them. You might think an HR person…
Antoine Henry de Frahan, writing recently on his blawg, Legal Management, discusses why general counsel should accept that some of their most talented lawyers will leave. “In a profession where people are used to the “up or out” philosophy, when there is no way up, the only option is to…
“We define culture as a system of shared values that define what is important and norms that define appropriate attitudes and behaviors for organizational members” Cal. Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Fall 2007 at 179. “Culture” is a slippery notion, one that has confounded my efforts to come to an inductive…
The ABA J., Dec. 2007, discusses the class of service providers who staff lawyers in-house for relatively long-term assignments at senior levels. The article mentions several of these groups and there are others (See my post of Nov. 27, 2005 about outsourced general counsel.). Here is a taxonomy of terms…
A session at The Lawyer’s Seventh Annual Summit For In-House Lawyers, which took place in Lisbon this past November, closed with an activity that has to be seen to be believed: “The session involved playing a communal game of snakes and ladders, with the snakes representing the perils of being…
By Mark I. Sirkin, Ph.D., Hildebrandt International A previous post explains how associates in law firms break into four distinct segments characterized by different goals, different work styles, and different needs (See Mark Sirkin’s post of Dec. 11, 2007.). Only two or three of these segments are really relevant for…
The 2007 Legal Business Assistant Survey gathered data from more than 2,200 assistants. The extensive findings can be found in Legal Business, Iss. 179, Nov. 2007 at 53 et seq. Amid the sea of figures and analysis two small tidal pools about law departments caught my eye. First, a chart…