I joined XING months ago, and other than one inquiry from a consultant, all has been silent. The social networking site has a huge following in Europe, but I have found little in the way of legal management material (See my post of Jan. 6, 2009: knowledge exchanges for in-house…
Try this at your next retreat. “Café conversations structure small groups of five or six around the host who stays with the table after the rest rotate to new tables to pick up on other conversations, deepen the chosen topics, and meet more people.” This idea comes from David Sibbet,…
The corner offices of law departments are hardly immune to trends. Fashionable management ideas such as competitive bids, bill auditing, convergence, offshoring and global spread of offices deluge general counsel (See my post of May 14, 2005: Bain survey of management tools; June 9, 2007: later Bain survey; Nov. 20,…
A professor and a researcher collected court orders for professional fees in 101 bankruptcy cases and performed a regression analysis that unraveled the factors that went into the bankruptcy judges’ awards of fees. The article about this study, in ABA J., Vol. 95, Jan. 2009 at 12, mentions such factors…
A recent piece by David Hechler, Corp. Counsel, Dec. 22, 2008, offers some details about the nascent – more like adolescent – industry of legal process offshoring (LPO). He spotlights UnitedLex and its CEO, Daniel Reed, and co-founder, Ajay Agrawal. UnitedLex employs about 240 Indian lawyers. Those lawyers have earned…
I commend the First Law Department Operations Survey, published by InsideCounsel and Blickstein Group, but, like anyone who digs into survey data, wish it would ask in the next survey a different style of question. My example is the question that asked respondents to check which of 16 cost-saving initiatives…
Susan Neiman’s Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grownup Idealists (Harcourt 2008) emphasizes that you cannot derive how things should be from the knowledge of how they are. That is, unless you hold very conservative views such as that our current situation is the peak. Hence, benchmark data, which describes how…
The term “change management” unnerves me. It claims to describe what seems to be a highly amorphous field (See my post of May 15, 2005: change management at the NLRB.). Even so, I have written about aspects of change in law departments. Most of my comments dwell on the obstacles…
Justia’s BlawgSearch has a category called “Corporate Law Department Blogs”. I have listed the blawgs in that category with this month’s rank from the highest ranking down. Justia determines the rank of a blog based on the number of visits to it from the BlawgSearch search engine and directory listing…
In 2006, the General Counsel of Accenture, Douglas Scrivner, created a part-time position within his Legal Group specifically designed to focus on its internal and external diversity initiatives (See my post of Jan. 14, 2007: Accenture’s expectations of outside counsel on diversity.). At the time Scrivner created the position, the…