David Krasnostein, the General Counsel of Australia’s National Australia Bank, went in-houses first as the lead lawyer for Telstra. An article explained that back then, about 1995, he attended Insead to take a “national executive business course for a couple of months.” The course widened his understanding of business (See…
I have long advocated simplifying and reducing the number of titles in law departments. Doing so reduces jockeying for titles, makes easier the decisions on promotion and transfer, and enables more broad-banding of compensation. Thus, I was surprised to learn that under the laws of at least one state, a…
Worried about cheerfulness in your law department? Try one of these low-cost tactics guaranteed to boost morale or double your lost respect back, as described with a straight face in the Manager’s Intelligence Report (Sample issue in Oct. 2005, at 2) (See my post of Oct. 29, 2005 on morale…
If a law department suffers from “low morale,” it is because one or more other elements of the department are out of joint, not that morale fluctuates on its own. Just as personal happiness is a consequence or byproduct, not an independent entity, morale flickers (or blazes) because the law…
Never having seen any data on the sources of new hires, I feel obliged to fabricate pseudo statistics: 48.37 percent of all new hires came to the attention of the general counsel from unsolicited resumes; 34.36 come from lawyers the general counsel knows personally; 12.4 percent from executive search firms;…
I bagel to differ, but here’s what Rob Vosper of Corp. Legal Times (Oct. 2005 at 14) insinuates: “For its first two years as a public company, Krispy Kreme thought it was a good idea to operate without a GC. During this period, management played fast and loose with the…
Just look at my picture and you know that I can’t be writing from the standpoint of sartorial expertise. Nevertheless, I full well recognize that as it influences morale and retention and culture and gravitas, the dress code of a law department makes a difference. What the difference is, I…
NLP claims to be a set of techniques drawn from the fields of psychology, linguistics and hypnotherapy, which supposedly help people achieve excellence in learning, business, and other areas of life. A critique in the Financial Times (Aug. 26, 2005 at 6), however, damned it from every angle. “Many of…
A survey of the FTSE 100 companies – conducted by The Test Agency Hogrefe, a psychometric test publisher – received 73 responses, and 59 of them said they use some form of psychometric testing (Fin. Times, July 18, 2005 at 8). Managers are the most common subjects for the tests,…
Pritchard Law Webs has announced that its host (LaVern Pritchard) has created software that prepares a thesaurus/taxonomy. Readers may not appreciate the importance of having a taxonomy if their law department hopes to organize its knowledge, but it is crucial. Or at least that is what I glean from the…