If you belong to Linkedin, invite me to be one of your connections. I have been a member for over a year and have accumulated 53 connections. This professional network might help in-house counsel find other counsel who share similar management interests. So I wondered what the membership might tell…
If a law department takes part in any cross-functional team to address electronic discovery, or if the law department sets up its own team (See my post of Nov. 13, 2007.), the group needs to have representation from three primary constituencies. The team needs somebody with a legal background, somebody…
Having recently skewered a paragraph in an article that described and mangled a mythical situation about choosing a lawyer as a CEO (See my post of Jan. 4, 2008.), I soon stumbled upon another bizarre paragraph. Deconstruct this one from the McKinsey Quarterly, 2007 No. 4 at 118, in an…
Wikipedia has this to say as its introduction to ethnography. Ethnography is “writing that presents varying degrees of qualitative and quantitative descriptions of human social phenomena, based on fieldwork. Ethnography presents the results of a holistic research method founded on the idea that a system’s properties cannot necessarily be accurately…
As befits my two-decade career as a consultant I perceive many benefits for general counsel who retain consultants (See my post of Jan. 1, 2008.). Still, it has not escaped my attention that some general counsel choose not to enjoy those benefits. Why would that be? 1. Consultants cost money,…
For two decades I have thoroughly enjoyed my career as a consultant to law departments. Many of my posts on this blog draw on this experience. Given that background, it is not odd that I have written from time to time about aspects of law department consultants. At times I…
Sniffing around on Wikipedia, I realized that no one has written about that topic über alles, that sine qua non, that ne plus ultra – law department management. There are snippets under “general counsel” and “chief legal officer” and I did stumble upon “legal administrator,” but recoiled from the fact…
In a backhanded way this blog has already identified the publications that put out on a regular basis articles that help managers of in-house counsel. I listed the most common sources for my own reading and, inevitably, blogging (See my post of Nov. 13, 2007.), of which 14 of the…
As my 20-year consulting career testifies, many general counsel turn to consultants from time to time. A few general counsel are inveterate consumers of consulting. The plurality looks to outside advisors every now and then. But many law departments these days, I sense, bear an animus against consultants. Possibly the…
Contributing author Brad Blickstein has defined and compared the terms “offshoring” and “outsourcing” (See the post of Blickstein of April 27, 2007.). What readers may not have realized is how frequently this blog has turned to the topic of offshoring. Readers can track down at least 18 substantive references to…