“The ethics and compliance community suffers, in my view, from the absence of a standard, adopted framework for what an integrated, effective compliance program looks like.” These are the words of Jack Holleran, a principle at Ernst & Young, from Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, May 2009 at 8. Ernst…
For those who manage corporate attorneys, the term “map” has many applications (See my post of Jan. 1, 2008: the cartography of legal department operations; May 6, 2008: website for graphical explorations, including tree maps; and March 1, 2009: cartograms that link data to geography.). Maps allow us to depict…
Professional historians would bring to bear a number of concepts to their view of legal departments. Below are several that they would apply. Causality – does circumstance A lead to circumstance B (See my post of Jan. 25, 2008: causality with 10 references; and Jan. 25, 2008: over-determined events.). Historicity…
OK, not the most momentous topic, but as I listened to Karen Klein, General Counsel, Kayak.com at the recent Ninth Annual SuperConference, she kept referring to the two terms, and showed them repeatedly on her slides. A budget estimates what a legal department will spend in the coming fiscal year.…
Law Practice, Vol. 35, April/May 2009 at 45, refers to Diderico van Eyl, intellectual property counsel for SABIC Innovative Plastics, who uses project management techniques to improve legal work flow. As background, van Eyl mentions the Project Management Institute, which defines a project as “a temporary endeavor undertaken to create…
A presentation at a recent conference, by Andre Marais of Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner, explained five maps regarding patents – visual depictions of information – that his firm can prepare for clients. The examples shown in the presentation appear to be elaborate Excel spreadsheets with colored cells and shaded columns…
This blog had a recent visitor who read the following Tweet and clicked the URL. “As the economy shrinks, so do paychecks of in-house counsel, if they are still employed: http://snipr.com/gec5f”. This lead from Twitter was added by @exterro. Note the use of a shortening device for the URL. That…
After my admiring post on Cisco’s extensive guidelines for patents (See my post of April 22, 2009: Cisco’s 70-page guidelines for patent prep.), Jim Dunning, who blogs at GeoTrupe, commented with a more cynical – probably realistic — spin. “My only query is whether, given its length, such guidance would…
Piloting is the practice of testing an innovation in real, yet controlled conditions to improve it and fix bugs (See my post of Feb. 20, 2006: get more value from pilot programs.). All kinds of program changes by law departments benefit from a trial run through a pilot (See my…
A company I consulted to is steeped in intellectual property (IP) and four of its practices regarding those assets struck me as worthy of note. The company runs three “IP Review Boards” – one for each business line, because they each have completely different technologies. On each board are representatives…