A Six Sigma project at a manufacturing firm tackled the chaotic situation of too many corporate entities where too little was readily known about them. The project concluded that the lawyers needed to gather information on all the company’s Asian-Pacific entities. They created a database and prepared an ownership chart.…
Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) resembles some decisions about non-hourly fee arrangements in that both are efforts to match what is paid against the value of what is gained. A thoughtful article in the Bus. Lawyer, Vol. 63, Aug. 2008 at 1187, analyses closing opinions of counsel in terms of standard CBA…
Counsel to Counsel, Sept. 2008 at 18, has some findings on online professional networks. Based on a survey of 673 lawyers — including 449 corporate counsel — almost 50 percent are members of online networks and more than 40 percent are interested in joining a network designed specifically for attorneys.…
Part of a comprehensive patenting program is to create maps of an industry’s and company’s patent landscapes. A patent landscape visually portrays the number, strength, and relationships between the relevant patents and a company’s own patents. According to IP Law & Bus., Vol. 6, Sept. 2008 at 44, “GE designed…
In an article on creativity, an author discusses postmortems held by Pixar, the movie studio, but his insights carry over to law departments. He believes that people learn from postmortems but don’t like to conduct them. Most people would rather talk about what went right than what went wrong. And…
A company called Corporate Counsel Exchange reached me yesterday and made me an offer I can certainly refuse. Some months from now, I can attend an event where I will be guaranteed 10 meetings with “general counsel who are interested in management consulting services.” Well, that is what she promised.…
Yup, I actually logged on to Twitter and rounded up the usual suspects. Pretty bleak, since when I searched “general counsel” all of 10 appeared. But that was much better than “law department” which came up with 1 hit and “legal department” had none. I closed my session with a…
Patent lawyers in companies can retain a slew of service providers. Given the huge sums of money involved in patents and their strategic importance (See my post of Aug. 13, 2008: total legal spending related to R&D spending and patents.), it is not surprising that this blog has mentioned quite…
An earlier post covered the three most populous categories of sponsors at the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) Annual Meeting (See my post of Sept. 21, 2008: law firms, discovery, and compliance.). As I contemplated the group of sponsors as a whole it became clear that many vendors offer products…
A huge source of information about the law resides in blogs. The ABA Journal, Vol. 94, Sept. 2008 at 54, drawing on responses of approximately 850 lawyers to a nationwide survey, states that two percent of American lawyers maintain a law blog. Since there are something like one million lawyers…