To find a qualified expert witness quickly and efficiently is no easy task. Moreover, the charges of the experts can run to six figures, not to mention the fees of your lawyers who prepare them for their testimony (See my post of May 17, 2006: estimated $6 billion-plus niche for…
Multiple-choice questions on surveys of law departments are ubiquitous yet problematic (See my posts of June 16, 2007 on MECE; Dec. 3, 2007 for five improvements; and Dec. 20, 2005 on wording.). An alternative form of question asks respondents for text comments. The challenge then is to turn the comments…
Adverse selection applies to those who manage law departments. First, however, a short explanation of the term. One example of adverse selection is where more people who need insurance buy it and healthy people forego it. An incentive system drives out the good and leaves in the pool the worse…
At a panel, a financial-services company’s general counsel described a study he carried out regarding customer arbitrations. The general counsel had staff pull one out of eight arbitrations at random going back 12 years and compile approximately 50 data points about each of them. Among the data points were whether…
Hail the powerful and protean pile! As venerated, useful, and overlooked as the pencil, the pile commands an honored, if humble, position of esteem in law department management. The pile is integral to knowledge management. We each know just where that article is from a year ago in the pile…
A managerial breakthrough waiting to happen is the recognition by general counsel that an isolationist view of law departments limits our understanding of reality. It is blinkered to focus on how law departments become involved in an issue only at certain points and exit when the “legal part” is done.…
The Association of Litigation Support Professionals, “the only nonprofit organization whose members comprise the full spectrum of individuals involved with litigation support,” publishes a monthly newsletter for its members. Hundreds of service providers could be members of this group (See my post of Oct. 29, 2007 on this cottage industry.)…
Ron Friedman attended the ACI Legal Process Outsourcing conference on January 17th in New York City. He posted on his blog the comments of Donna Webber, Chief Counsel, CIT Capital Markets, who was speaking about the experience of CIT in using Indian legal service providers. ”Law department headcount was frozen…
That term has allure. It means “How many choices does a law department have to solve a given problem.” I ran across it in a fine article in Cal. Mgt. Rev., Vol. 50, Fall 2007 at 178, and mused over how it might apply to general counsel and their decisions…
If you want to spur new practices in your law department and break out of the mold of accustomed behavior, you might want to adopt an idea from MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 49, Winter 2008 at 48. In this article on how to boost innovation, the authors describe a…