When authors prescribe what should be done, they can get carried away. An example comes from the Int’l In-House Counsel J., Vol 2, Autumn 2009 at 1408, where the author discusses in-house counsel and risk management. “The in-house legal counsels should periodically perform an overall assessment of all legal risks…
Economics. Supply and demand; marginal cost; utility curves; comparative advantage; resources and productivity – all these explanatory concepts fall into economics, a powerful framework to illuminate a host of problems and solutions. It is the best set of tools for thinking through how to manage a law department (See my…
Ban on software customization of source code. One legal department has decreed that it will not ask for any changes in the source code of any software it licenses. The cost is too high, the rate of success too low, and the time to complete too long (See my post…
Publicly-traded companies significantly dealing with legal departments; know any others? Do readers know of any companies that are both publicly traded and gain a significant amount of their revenue from legal departments? Some that have come to my attention are Bottomline Technologies, an e-billing vendor (NASDAQ: EPAY), Jurimetrics, a litigation…
Jurídico de Saias, or Women in Skirts. I am indebted to Laurence Simons and their newsletter for highlighting this group of in-house women lawyers in Brazil. I suspect the English translation should be more like Lawyers in Skirts (See my post of Nov. 10, 2007: gender differences with 10 references.).…
Click on any of these ten embedded metaposts to see my prior posts. Each of these (See my post of Nov. 5, 2009: Part XLII) is shadowed by the number of its back references. Books on law department management (See my post of Nov. 16, 2009: books about law departments…
This assertion by James Potter, General Counsel of Del Monte Foods, pokes up its provocative head in David Galbenski,Unbound: How Entrepreneurship is Dramatically Transforming Legal Services Today (2009) at 192. Oh that his conclusion were true: “consequently, our clients will increasingly insist that business consultants be brought in to analyze…
David Galbenski, Unbound: How Entrepreneurship is Dramatically Transforming Legal Services Today (2009) at 219-224, includes an interview with Phil Crowley, a senior lawyer in the Johnson & Johnson legal department. I picked out some tidbits. History: Ken Perry founded the law department in 1934. Someday I would love to write…
The Belgium-based consultants, FrahanBlondé, mention in a May 14, 2009 post that they had completed a study of large law departments. I have not seen the report but I want to point it out because of its relevance to readers of this blog, both inside and outside. “We have conducted…
Weight-management programs at law firms coming to an RFP near you. In a 2008 survey of more than 450 employers with at least 1,000 workers, “Nearly three-quarters cited weight management plans as a chief strategy for maintaining affordable health care benefits.” The Harvard Bus. Rev., Vol. 87, Dec. 2009 at…