The Kreller Group specializes in providing due diligence and background investigations for companies, according to a profile in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 16, May 2008 at 38. They serve as private-eyes for companies and are likely to be retained by law department attorneys. I mention them because they are a…
One of the most common management activities among law departments, of all sizes, is the offsite (aka retreat, legal conference, annual meeting, etc.). As my article describes , these gatherings can have wonderful events. I have just completed helping with two retreats, one for a law department of three lawyers…
Mehul Patel, the general manager of Axiom, published an article in the National Law Journal (April 28, 2008). He argues that pressures on law firms will force them to change, with two of those pressures being offshoring and “new-model firms.” Summing up his piece, he makes a dramatic statement: “After…
In Edward Russell-Walling, 50 Management ideas you really need to know (Quercus 2007), the author mentions this so-called law (at 11). Data should serve as aids to analysis (See my post of June 14, 2007: basic good practices regarding data.). The essence of the law is that once a social…
Edward Russell-Walling, 50 Management ideas you really need to know (Quercus 2007) at 49, differentiates three items, each of which a general counsel might seize upon. A mission statement articulates “our purpose, why we’re in business”; our values: “our style, what is unchanging and important about the way we work”;…
It is entirely probably that 80 percent of the value in this blog – perhaps wildly optimistic – exists in 20 percent of the posts. Why not, since Pareto’s Rule crops up everywhere (See my post of June 27, 2007 on Pareto’s idea and an illustration from timekeepers on a…
In 1987, Robert S. Kaplan and William Bruns introduced to business managers the tool of activity-based costing (ABC). The effort purports to trace indirect costs, such as legal ones, back to individual products or services, according to Edward Russell-Walling, 50 Management ideas your really need to know (Quercus) at 53.…
Most general counsel, when they think of benchmarks, have in mind only the typical ratios of numbers. Total legal spending as a percentage of revenue leads the parade (See my post of Dec. 19, 2007: within an industry.), followed by such stalwarts as lawyers per billion of revenue (See my…
The primary point of a database should be to allow managers in a law department to see the department’s work more clearly and to manage it more effectively – to take better decisions – based on the data (See my post of Sept. 10, 2005: myths of matter management systems.).…
Matter management systems have ample reporting capabilities, but inevitably various people in legal departments want reports that are not producible from the canned set. The report formats that come with the package need to be tweaked. Or a pre-defined report does not contain all of the information you need. Or…