An advertising supplement in the ACC Docket, Vol. 27, Jan./Feb. 2009 after page 48, very clearly describes decision-tree analysis. Brian Daley BDaley@ogilvyrenault.com of Ogilvy Renault writes: “At its most basic, a decision tree is a diagram that starts with two branches that represent a choice, for example to litigate or…
Linguistics philosopher Gilbert Ryle made a distinction between what he called task or action verbs and achievement or success verbs. In the context of legal departments, “write off” and “settle” are task verbs (they refer to doing something); “economize” and “resolve” are their achievement counterparts (they referred to goals, desirable…
Best practices do not exist, despite what many general counsel would like to believe. A few years ago I collected a few posts on “best practices,” but since then there have been two dozen more (See my post of June 6, 2006: best practices with 4 references). I have organized…
A splendid article in the McKinsey Quarterly, 2008, No. 4, at 131, by Stanford professors Hayagreeva Rao and Robert Sutton, makes the counter-intuitive point that efforts to innovate get a boost from constraints. Oddly, if you limit the number of choices people have to solve a problem, they may think…
When I am not blogging, I like to write articles. My oeuvre now covers quite a few topics. If you would like to download PDFs of any of my 38 articles, visit my website and enjoy! I have added short summaries of the topics of each article. Nearly all of…
A survey jointly conducted by the Law Society, the U.K. equivalent of the ABA, and NewGalaxy Partners, a London-based legal outsourcing firm, collected responses from 52 British corporate counsel. Some of them completed an online survey and some gave telephone interviews, which is a methodological twist. That is not the…
In January 2008, CFO magazine surveyed 181 finance executives about their company’s offshoring practices. About one out of three said their company used “offshore outsourcing” and another ten percent planned to. In CFO, Vol. 24, March 2008 at 76, a chart shows six job functions and what percentage of the…
It is an honor for this blog to become one of the 15 blogs on the ACC website. Three others also comment on management issues that general counsel encounter (InHouseBlog of Geoff Gussis, Wired GC of John Wallbillich, and the legal thing of Mike Dillon). The remaining blogs are from…
Information about 23,000 US patent suits filed in U.S. district courts since 2000 are online and available free for analysis. This treasure trove of data was made possible by Stanford Law School’s Intellectual Property Litigation Clearinghouse. As stated on the website, “The database includes real-time data summaries, industry indices, and…
These findings come from a survey of 235 mostly-US companies by the IT Policy Compliance Group (IT PCG) as reported in Info. Mgt., Vol. 43, Jan./Feb. 2009 at 10 (See my post of Feb. 6, 2009: savings from the various practices; and Feb. 7, 2009: costs of litigation hold practices.).…