The larger the footprint of a legal department, the more it needs lawyers who can lead. Local offices need someone who can show the flag, at the high level, and agree to toner purchases at the low level. Different languages and cultures put a strain on distant, senior lawyers at…
Remarks on a recent panel by Robert Weber, the General Counsel of IBM, are available on Law.com. In the past, the company mostly hired lawyers with four to eight years of law firm experience. Now IBM increasingly hires straight out of law school. The decision to hire students from law…
A wonderful article in the ACC Docket, July/Aug. 2011 at 29, describes how the law department of Reckitt Benckiser Group, a global consumer products company, had all its 44 in-house lawyers take a psychometric assessment. It was one of several available for law departments, specifically the Caliper Profile (See my…
Not giving junior lawyers exposure to senior business people harms their development. It helps them feel more engaged and more in the flow of the business. Most law departments suffer from the problem of top lawyers who hoard access to top clients, to put it harshly, or who fail to…
Five challenges that arise from inept communication often show up in law departments. I wrote about them in my latest National Law Journal article, published on Oct. 10, 2011, and had the temerity to suggest some ways the vorpal blade might snicker snack improve them (if the end of that…
Proving yet again that in-house lawyers around the world share similar sources of job satisfaction, consider the survey results cited in Benny Tabalujan, ed. Leadership and Management Challenges of In-House Legal Counsel (LexisNexis Australia 2008) at 51. Conducted in 2005 by the Institute for Knowledge Development (IKD), the survey data…
No claims of originality or eloquence, but a writer in Diversity & The Bar, July/Aug. 2011 at 31, condensed the advantages usually cited for in-house counsel very succinctly. As background, Corporate Counsel Women of Color (CCWC) collected survey responses, among other forms of data gathering, from 857 women of color…
General counsel, especially, as well as other managers should never use the parental put-down: “Because I told you so.” David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (Viking 2011) attacks throughout what he calls bad philosophy, bad explanations. One form is the peremptory end-of-discussion just quoted (at…
Ironic, isn’t it, that this blogger, who tries hard to write clearly, admits to the impossibility of writing completely clearly. “[W]e habitually underestimate the difficulty of communication,” writes David Deutsch in The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World (Viking 2011) at 254. “It is impossible to speak in…
Judge Richard Posner, the prolific Circuit Court judge, was interviewed by the New York Rev. of Books, Sept. 29, 2011 at 49. Asked about the ages of appellate judges and their effectiveness in their seventies and eighties, Posner offered his obiter dicta: “I think for anybody in a management job,…