For your next retreat, give some thought to inviting the general counsel from a leading company within your industry to present to your law department. He or she need not prepare PowerPoint slides but could offer experiences and observations about either legal issues that face that company’s law department or its management issues. In fact, the more interchange there is in such a session, the better.
A session keynoted by such a speaker gives members of the law department an opportunity to hear and ask about a similarly-situated law department. If there is any exchange at all about approaches, the invited general counsel is likely to learn something new and the law department will have a method of corroborating or challenging its own practices (See my post of Sept. 22, 2005 law department retreats.).