A previous post cited a Catalyst study in 2002 or 2003 (See my post of Sept. 25, 2005 about a PAR report and chargeable hours.). The law department study found in general that formal telecommuting arrangements (as opposed to occasional hours or days working at home) are uncommon. Two challenges…
Increasingly, as law departments spread around the globe, managing lawyers and those who work for them are no longer in the same location. Gone are the days when an Associate General Counsel could walk down the hall to supervise the day-to-day work of junior counsel. The Financial Times (Aug. 26,…
Human nature what it is, we look first at the results of a lawyer’s decision. For example, in Fulbright & Jaworski’s Second Annual Litigation Trends Survey (2005 at 18), the top measure of law department success in litigation is “results.” Managing litigation consists of a complex series of inter-related decisions.…
A study by Catalyst on telecommuting and law departments surfaced in a report by The Project for Attorney Retention (PAR), an initiative of the Program of Worklife Law at American University’s Washington College of Law (10 Wm. & Mary J. of Women & L. 367 (Spring 2004)). The Catalyst study…
My dislike for referring to people as “resources,” as in “We could handle this transaction in-house if we had more resources,” found an eloquent advocate in the Financial Times (Summer 2005). Resources are things we draw upon and exploit. They are raw material we use as efficiently as possible, extracting…
It’s easy to say, “In-house counsel should spend their time on the highest-value-added tasks they can identify.” An unstated assumption shadows that view: lawyers like tough challenges, they enjoy sophisticated legal work that demands of them full attention and all their faculties. Then I read that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has…
Among law departments with lawyers stationed around the world, one goal might be to pay each lawyer an equivalent amount of salary, as adjusted for the cost of living in each location. If a certain amount of Euros paid to a lawyer in Rome buys a certain bundle of goods…
It seems inevitable that among the direct reports to a general counsel will be one or two who are jockeying for their leader’s position. It’s human nature to strive for the next rung up, even when it descends to sabotage, passive-aggressiveness, and other deleterious, competitive efforts. A general counsel needs…
Working with a law department’s Latin American group, it became apparent that the continent has no paralegals as we recognize them in the United States. Instead, many of the lawyers, often paid minimal amounts by our standards, handle tasks that US paralegals would do. Or administrative staff, without specific legal…
The Forbes 400 richest Americans in 1985 who had a law degree numbered 19 (4.75 percent). Twenty years later, that percentage had nearly doubled, rising to 32 (8 percent). That factoid in the New York Times (Sept. 25, 2005 at BU3) piqued my curiosity. I assume nearly all of this…