The De Beers Group General Counsel, Glenn Turner will retire in mid-September and, according to the press release dated Aug. 26, 2005, “will be retained as a legal consultant to De Beers.” Other examples of retired general counsel shifting to become a consultant to the company have crossed my desk.…
A law department of about 70 lawyers electronically transmits a block of payables information each week from its matter management system to the company’s SAP system. It does so by sending the information to an intermediary server, from which an SAP crawler extracts the information and posts back to the…
In 2004, “Carey’s board, a sharp group of investors and outside board members as well as insiders, decided they were dealing with too many outside law firms. They took the list of firms they were working with and selected a top group.” Astonishing. The quote, from an interview of Carey’s…
The National Law Journal (May 9, 2005 at 15) reported that when Oracle completed its acquisition of PeopleSoft, “almost all of PeopleSoft’s 50-lawyer legal department” was laid off. I also heard that when Allied-Signal bought Honeywell, senior management told the merged company’s General counsel (Peter Kriendler) that the combined department’s…
Not every in-house lawyer dreams of becoming the general counsel. Not everyone wants to take on more responsibility and tackle tougher legal challenges. Some lawyers are B players, who have bumped into their ceiling and are content. A career at rest by no means sentences the lawyer to a pink…
No comparative metrics exist for comparing the quality of law department lawyers. What got me thinking was reading about the Law Department of New York City. That Department proudly announced that the percentage of lawyers joining it in September 2005 who graduated from one of the 30 top law schools…
Experts in human resources say that you should talk with your direct reports about their performance and then in a separate discussion talk to them about their compensation. People are unable to get out of their minds what they’ve heard about dollars, and focus on how they can improve their…
The senior legal team of a global law department, in an industry-leading beverage company, makes it a practice to focus every quarter an hour or so on one or two lawyers in the department. The lawyer who supervises the lawyer prepares a summary of material and comments about the lawyer.…
Having just read about Reggie Martinez Jackson, the baseball slugger, and his unadvertised Latino background, and pairing that factoid with the larger finding from our census of how difficult it is to define many peoples’ ethnic background, how accurately do law departments define diversity? When law firms declare the percentage…
As we watch the retirements of the baby boom cohort, the strata in companies where employees have been learning about their companies for 15 or 20 years and are in their late 50’s and early 60’s, law departments become valued repositories of institutional knowledge. Business managers ask the lawyers how…