A paper by Lefki Giannopoulou and Gavin Lawrence discusses several sophisticated techniques for making better litigation decisions. They explain this technique with an example of a decision tree to think through whether to negotiate a settlement or prepare for trial (See my posts of Jan. 17, 2006 and Oct. 24,…
As part of the material Rachel Taknint, VP – Law Department Planning and Operations & Associate General Counsel of Northwestern Mutual, made available to members of the Association of Life Insurance Counsel (ALIC), she included a summary of the Law Department’s 2007 strategic priorities. Each one is admirable. Align legal…
More ought to be said on Bayesian statistics (See my post of Jan. 20, 2006, with its brief comment.). The breakthrough of Reverend Thomas Bayes (1702-1761), there is now even an International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA). Bayes first expressed the probability of any event – given that a related…
An article in Historically Speaking, Nov./Dec. 2006 at 11, addresses historians but also speaks to those who try to make sense out of how law departments are managed. The author – Prof. Marc Trachtenberg of UCLA – stresses that, contrary to the popular saying, facts do not speak for themselves.…
Management Tools and Trends 2007, at slide 14, reported on by Bain & Company’s Darrell Rigby, lists usage and satisfaction rates from 2006 for 25 well-known management tools. Of those 25, 12 of them general counsel use in various forms. I list them below as they are named and in…
From an article in the McKinsey Quarterly, 2007 No. 1 at 77: “The fact is that many everyday concepts in business – including leadership, corporate culture, core competencies, and customer orientation – are ambiguous and difficult to define.” No wonder this blog has had much to say, but has not…
The Five Percent Trimmed Mean, a descriptive statistic, can help law departments describe such data as their spending patterns, amounts of invoices, cycle times, and internal hours worked. The technique came to my attention in an article by Stephen J. Lubben, “Choosing Corporate Bankruptcy Counsel,” ABI Law Rev., Vol. 14,…
Those who want to improve the effectiveness of a law department need to attend to its processes. A framework for doing so comes from Michael Hammer in Harvard Bus. Rev., Vol. 85, April 2007 at 111, where he proposes and describes the five key process enablers. “Design” covers “the comprehensiveness…
If the Six Sigma methodology intrigues you, read the recent piece in Of Counsel, Vol. 26, May 2007 at 7. The article explains how Tyco purportedly used Six Sigma techniques in deliberations that led to its hiring Eversheds (See my post of April 22, 2007 about the arrangement.). Being possessed…
InsideCounsel, May 2007 at 66, profiles the general counsel of the Dutch chemical company Akzo Nobel. It mentions that Jan Eijsbouts “drastically reduce the number of outside firms uses from hundreds to less than 20.” Two pages later it states that Mark Harding, the high-profile general counsel of Barclays, demanded…