Jeff Kaplan published a piece on May 9th about the interplay between lawyers in law departments and a company’s compliance efforts. His idea is worth pondering. “Much has been written on the need for C&E functions to be independent of law departments but considerably less about the critically important roles…
Praise this quote from a general counsel: “We have defined our areas of focus in-house in terms of five ‘pillars,’ including transactions support, dispute resolution, compliance, vendor support, people and talent, and legal department management.” The quote can be found in an interview on Law360, May 4th, of Jerry Okarma,…
Since Sarbanes-Oxley was enacted in 2002, “costs [of being publicly traded] have proven to be much higher, while the number of companies going public has dropped sharply.” The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2010 at 47, mentions this, which made me think of legal departments (surprise, surprise). If the number of companies…
I have advocated allocating points as an evaluation method that serves better than a simple ranking of 1, 2, 3 (See my post of Aug. 14, 2005: better to ask respondents to allocate points; July 4, 2006: sophisticated technique; July 3, 2007: most sophisticated method; July 20, 2008: a downside…
These ideas come from Henry Mintzberg, Managing (FT Prentice Hall 2009). Prof. Henry Mintzberg, a thoughtful and prolific iconoclast about management, set out the four ideas that I have adopted below and applied to legal departments. Communication and keeping up to date. Managers thrive on talking and listening, and on…
A web portal by Dell wins an award for innovation. The March 2010 issue of Law Tech. News explains that Dell’s patent team “created an external hosted web portal that not only provides Dell’s internal patent team with a system for setting up and conducting meetings and voting on necessary…
Two more handfuls of embedded metaposts and their back references (See my post of March 11, 2010: Part XLV), plus their back references. Agency theory (See my post of April 21, 2010: agency theory with 7 references and 1 meta.). Associations of law firms (See my post of April 14,…
Fear of being seen as a “sales person” inhibits general counsel from portraying the value of their department (Feb. 1, 2010) General counsel need to publicize the work and accomplishments of their team. Pushing past the standby of lawyers per billion of revenue (Feb. 4 2010) What sounds so simple…
The Smarter Legal Model (Practical Law 2010) by Trevor Faure, General Counsel of Ernst and Young Global, has just been published. The marketing blurb touts the book as “a practical “toolbox” of complementary methodologies which have been applied on a multi-million dollar scale and proven to: increase legal coverage by…
Four-time general counsel. Corp. Counsel, March 2010 at 37, notes that when Tracy Rich recently became the general counsel of Guardian Life Insurance Company, it was his fourth general counselship in a 30-year career (See my post of Nov. 16, 2008 #3: four-time general counsel.). The legal surcharge for being…