Most of the material on this blog comes from US law departments and has their perspective, but insights and examples of practices have come from all over the globe. I have presented material on management from at least eleven countries: Australia (July 4, 2006, June 16, 2006 and June 30,…
Here are a baker’s dozen of methods to improve the professional skills of in-house lawyers. I don’t vouch for them all, but at the same time there are likely to be many other methods. 1. Executive courses, such as in marketing, finance, accounting and strategic planning. (See my post of…
Previous posts have mentioned outside counsel guidelines (See my posts of Aug. 1, 2006 that wonders about their effectiveness; Aug. 9, 2006 about certification by firms; Jan. 10, 2006 with an example; and Jan. 10, 2005 on retention or engagement letters and travel time.). What haven’t been distinguished are the…
A balanced scorecard presents data that falls within the Kaplan/Norton four groups (See my post of Aug. 24, 2006 on dashboards.). An example comes from the law department of United Technologies Corp. (UTC). Its scorecard collects metrics in four areas: Financial Performance; Quality Processes & Products, Leadership, Culture & Environment;…
A dashboard presents crucial data all in one place. A dashboard (nee Executive Information System) often uses thermometers, graphs, colors, arrows and dials to convey the information. A dashboard that I developed for a law department had on one page 12 indicators of the department’s activities and outcomes. Below the…
The Japanese term kaizen reminds us of a powerful principle of management: continuous improvement – not resting on one’s laurels – is the path to enlightenment. Its thesis is one reason I dislike talk of best practices (See my post of July 14, 2005 about the difficulty of following suit.).…
Law department management practices have evolved over the past two decades (See my post of Feb. 4, 2006 on the shift in reliance from external corporate lawyers to litigators.). Evolution, by which I mean the process over time of variation (mutation), selection and replication, has performed its magic on corporate…
The so-called Poisson probability distribution allows you to calculate the likelihood of an event happening. It’s necessary at the start, however, to know roughly how rare the event is. But if you do know that, as far as I can gather from John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical Literacy and Its…
Portal software draws on different databases to compile a broader picture of data (See my posts of May 1, 2005 on IP databases; and Aug. 5, 2005 more generally on law department databases; and June 27, 2006 with links.). Hypothetically, a law department with a portal could search regarding a…
Lawyers and paralegals who work in-house might find helpful a new genre of software – document summarizers – if they have to make sense out of large agreements, slews of letters, lengthy reports, or other documents that need to be boiled down. According to the Fin. Times, June 23, 2006…