Honeywell International has about 25,000 patent files at any time. According to an interview in Met. Corp. Counsel, Jan. 2007 at 37, Honeywell’s Chief Intellectual-Property Counsel, David Hoiriis manages a team of approximately 36 intellectual property lawyers. Unlike litigation or transactional matters, patent applications often spawn multiple related patent matters.…
ACC energetically solicits sponsors and ACC Alliance partners, always with a hand deep in their till, and recognizes their contributions of talent and talents (as in the ancient currency weight) in various ways. All this is the daily trade of any association. I make no comment whatsoever whether any Alliance…
IBM has a group of 160 research mathematicians who do not immerse themselves in theoretical research but rather apply their experience and discipline to solve real-world problems. This group harkens back to the operational research (OR) that came into being during and after World War II (See my post of…
If you go one past the well-known two-by-two matrix, you have a three-by-three matrix, referred to sometimes as a nine-box. When you categorize data or concepts in such a nine-cell format, you can make finer gradations than with the classic four cells (See my posts about 2-by-2 quadrants of Aug.…
During the late 80s and early 90s, I was enthralled by the prospects of artificial intelligence for lawyers. I even wrote for the ABA Law Practice Management Section’s newsletter on document assembly (See my post of March 24, 2005 doubting the spread of such software.). But that early promise never…
Much of the ruckus about off shoring legal work has died down, but there is the occasional recrudescence. Two vendors were mentioned in the Nat’l L.J., Vol. 29, Jan. 15, 2007 at 16 as part of the legal process outsourcing industry: Pangea3 LLC and Lumen Legal. Others I am aware…
In several of my consulting projects I have helped my client law departments compile a representation of their management history. In the form of a timeline, it depicts changes in the department’s size, locations and spending in relation to significant external events. The events include acquisitions, divestitures, organizational restructurings, revenue…
General Motors Detroit-based legal department employs 107 attorneys and 109 support staff. The department chose Mitratech’s TeamConnect and then both designed and implemented an impressive set of modules. The integrated modules include “document management, records retention, off-site storage management, regulatory reporting and rule compliance, intellectual property, litigation support, and issue…
It was a small item, but it touches a topic many readers may never consider: how secure from third parties is the information in electronic bills transmitted by law firms? An item about Utica National Insurance Group, which uses billing review software from Allegient Systems, mentions that “every legal invoice…
One of the bubbles burst in Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Harvard Bus. School Press 2006) at 49 is that managers remember well and therefore learn accurately from the past. There is “an enormous problem with inferences based…