A publication from an insurance company offers some suggestions for how to deal with change, which I have paraphrased. Get the facts about what is changing, what is not changing, and why. Rumors and speculation distort the actual changes that may be ahead. Actively seek information from people you trust…
Practices are the fourth and most common level of activities in my schema (See my post of Nov. 19, 2008: priorities; Nov. 19, 2008: programs; and Nov. 19, 2008: practices.). Practices are people’s accustomed ways of working and working together. They include culture, and everything that ethnographers pay attention to…
Projects are a third level of activities in law departments, defined primarily by their being one-off significant activities (See my post of Nov. 19, 2008: priorities; and Nov. 19, 2008: programs.). Project examples of projects include relocation of the law department and the choice of a matter management system. Other…
Having introduced priorities (See my post of Nov. 19, 2008: priorities.), here I turn to programs. Programs are a law department’s repeated sets of activities that have defined objectives and similar steps done time after time. Programs, therefore, include evaluations of lawyers, client satisfaction surveys, monthly reports, quarterly budget updates,…
This series of four looks at the management activities in law departments at four levels: priorities, programs, projects, and practices. Each post defines a level, gives examples, and touches on some observations about the level. Let’s start with priorities. Priorities are the fundamental contributions delivered or expected of an in-house…
Wired’s Business Trends 2008 describes four online services that use people in addition to algorithms to filter the Internet’s wealth of information: Brijit, Mahalo, ChaCha, and Squidoo. What this blawgster tries to do, with Internet material as well as hardcopy and my own consulting experience, is somewhat similarly to curate…
Visualize a circle in the middle of a PowerPoint slide that has multiple arrows pointing inward to it. The circle might be a desired future state for a law department. Each arrow and text box it comes from represents a different aspect of that vision. This description of a “Mandala…
If a reader attended one of the following four conferences and would be willing to share with me any of the conference proceedings on management topics, I will be glad to post about the ideas they contain. Or let me know what ideas were interesting to you. Anonymity fully preserved!…
So far this year I have published nine articles, of which five concern relations between law departments and the law firms they retain: “When Interventions Go Too Far” [interventions in law firm operations] (NY Law Journal, Feb. 28, 2008) “The Road to Alternative Fees” (NY Law Journal, April 17, 2008)…
At some point we will be able to analyze data on a moderate numbers off cases and predict the costs of similar cases. An inspiration for this forecast is a computer system that predicts which death-row inmates are most likely to be executed, as described in Scientific Am., Vol. 299,…