Another blog by a general counsel. Frank Fletcher, the general counsel of Nero AG, has started a blog at “LegallyFrank.com”. He plans to make contributions every Sunday and in time to post his ACC Docket articles plus some new material. Not all of the topics will be legal (See my…
No one has written about the development over the past few decades of management practices in US law departments. We don’t know when operational methods first developed nor when they faded away. There are no historiographies of general counsel’s efforts to run their legal departments effectively. Bits and pieces of…
Save your telomeres. Telomeres stop chromosomes from fraying at the ends. From time to time chromosomes replicate and each time they do it shortens their telomeres. After 50-70 such divisions (a number known as the Hayflick limit after its discoverer), a chromosome can grow no shorter and it stops dividing.…
Reductionists try to explain a something with a single primary cause – it is common to both the religious and scientific ways of thinking. Astrology is reductionist, Marxism as well, and Freudianism offers another example. Single factors, such as gender or the march of material progress in history, appeal to…
So-called micro-history “takes small events in the past involving inconspicuous people and a limited number of sources and teases out of them stories and meanings that presumably throw light on the larger society.” This quote from Gordon S. Wood, The Purpose Of The Past (Penguin 2008) at 127, holds for…
Academy of Court-Appointed Masters (ACAM). This organization “is composed of judges, attorneys, and a few non-attorney subject matter experts who are often called in to serve as special masters” in cases that have significant e-discovery issues. I read about ACAM and extracted this quote from Met. Corp. Counsel, March 2011…
Will there someday soon be an app cottage industry for matter management systems? (Feb. 1, 2011) Vendors, law firms, user groups or collectives of departments might fund the development of apps. If the costs of lawyers have risen have risen at the same rate as other artisan-type professional services, where’s…
Brad Blickstein, David Cambria and all the others on the Law Department Operations Survey Board have done a good job over the past three years to collect and analyze data from US heads of law department operations. Having once again extracted interesting findings from their latest survey report, now in…
An upcoming conference on Social Media Law charges widely different amounts for different classes of attendees. In-house counsel pay $695 for the one-day conference. Law firms attendees pay much more, $1,295, but not as much as the wretched of the earth (“Consultants/Vendors”) who must cough up $2,095. The conference’s topic…
Once my recent post was written about metrics of Anheuser-Busch InBev, I thirsted for more on that legal department and its management practices. Mostly due to the columns Sabine Chalmers, the combined company’s top lawyer, has written, there were ample quaffs. In this post I have poured together the references…