Cytec Industries, a $3 billion company that produces engineered materials and specialty chemicals, has a legal team of “16 lawyers, four paralegals, an export compliance manager and a government relations manager.” The entire team met for four days in Seattle and according to a profile in the ACC Docket, March…
It is often said in blog posts, articles and conferences that general counsel of US companies are managerially advanced compared to general counsel of the rest of the world. “Them’s fightin’ words,” you could say! How someone could demonstrate such superiority stumps me. If there were a dozen fundamental management…
An effective law department: a common notion but it lacks construct validity (Jan. 4, 2011) A construct is (1) research-based, (2) its meaning is agreed upon by a consensus of professionals qualified in the appropriate field of study, and (3) it’s quantifiable. All are weak for “effective law departments.” Seven…
A statistical adjustment to improve data. A footnote to a graph in a recent report adds a statistical explanation: “To account for the unbalanced nature of the response rate over time, a regression with a time trend and company fixed-effects was run.” The report is the Litigation Cost Survey of…
Twenty industries rankedby “legal efficiency” based on the world’s largest benchmark survey (Dec. 1, 2010) On lawyers per billion dollars of revenue, legal staff per billion, internal spending as a percentage of revenue, and external spending as a percentage of revenue, I ranked 20 industries by their median benchmarks. The…
Climbing the Avvo rankings. The Alexa rank of this blog on the legal blog list was Number 106 (Alexa rank of 1,055,886) on January 17, 2011 (See my post of March 9, 2009: number 260 and Alexa 30-day number of 4,316,294; and Dec. 13, 2009: number 161 with an Alexa…
From a profile of the General Counsel of Silver Lake Technology Management LLC, a private investment firm, I note these points. The Nat’l LJ, Jan. 31, 2011 at 8, mentions that Silver Lake has more than $14 billion under management. For companies that invest in and finance businesses, lawyers per…
The law department of Marathon Oil, headed by general counsel Sylvia Kerrigan, enjoys a profile page in Practical Law, Dec. 2010/Jan. 2011 at 96. Embedded in it lurk some blog-worthy topics. At $53.47 billion in revenues but only 65 lawyers, the ratio of about 1.3 lawyers for every billion would…
Accounting II (See my post of Dec. 27, 2010: more accounting references with 10 references.). Definitions (See my post of July 19, 2009: 11 more definitions with 11 references.). Definitions 8 (See my post of Dec. 6, 2010: 16 definitions with 16 references and 7 metas.). National coordinating counsel (See…
All this time writing mostly for lawyers, being a lawyer myself, trying to improve management for lawyers, it struck me as ironic that I haven’t drawn on fundamental concepts from the law that might help explain what general counsel deal with as managers. A number of legal precepts apply, and…