The one-time European General Counsel for Eastman Kodak, Helen Fletcher Rogers, left that position around 2004 and became a consultant with UK-based Lawyers in Business, “an organisation dedicated to ensuring in-house lawyers are able to make a real contribution to their businesses.” Lawyers in Business were described on the web…
CAGR is an imaginary number that describes the rate at which an investment or expenditure, such as outside counsel payments, would have grown if it grew during a period of time at a steady rate. Thus, if a legal department paid of $10 million to outside counsel in 2005 and…
Sometimes law departments turn to a law firm not so much for legal advice as for consulting advice. I know of companies where law firms have reviewed and recommended on a law department’s litigation process, on how another one should handle documents in discovery, on processes for dating stock options,…
An index is a way to show percentage changes in different series of numbers against the same starting point. Typically, a scale’s starting point is 100 and it tracks the divergence from that number over time of the series under consideration. For example, starting with data from five years ago…
Post mortems, aka after-action reviews, make sense under the right circumstances, such as after major litigation (See my posts of Dec. 10, 2005 about litigation studies at BellSouth; April 2, 2005; April 27, 2005 on knowledge management; and April 7, 2006 on litigation.). The value to a law department of…
Standard deviation is the most common statistic to describe how spread out are the values in a data set. (OK, if you insist: standard deviation is the square root of the data’s variance.) Standard deviations allow a person to compare the degree of dispersion among two sets of unrelated members.…
It seems plausible that those who lead law departments can pick up management ideas from those who lead tax departments. So when 98 major US-company’s senior tax executives offered views about their departments to KPMG in 2005, the five-page summary report held promise. My hopes were disappointed, as it turned…
The term “brainstorming” does not mean a group of people conjuring up ideas about something. Rather, according to the New York Times, October 28, 2006 at C5, brainstorming in its true form is a rigidly structured process (See my post of Nov. 28, 2005 on mind-mapping software and brainstorming). That…
This figure from the New York-based Society of Corporate Secretaries and Governance Professionals is cited by the Wall St. J., Oct. 23, 2006 at R11. The 20 percent figure feels quite high, given how recently software for board members has arrived (See my posts of July 19, 2006; and Aug.…
Readers may recall an earlier post that speculates how a law department could assess its litigation portfolio with an index based on a number of metrics (See my post of May 17, 2006 about indexing a law department’s litigation.). One of the ideas mentioned there was to factor in the…