Even with large numbers of participants, such as 1,000 in the General Counsel Metrics law department survey, benchmark metrics probably reflect more centralized law departments than decentralized. Not just more of them, because centralized reporting departments – where all practicing lawyers report ultimately to the general counsel – greatly outnumber…
Could the compensation of general counsel, relative to their function peers such as the CFO, HR head, and CIO, give a clue to the relative value ascribed to law departments? In any specific company, not necessarily, because SVPs and EVPs arrived at different times, with different levels of experience, and…
Frank Fletcher, the general counsel of Nero AG whom I cited in a post a couple of days ago, wrote me. “We used MediaWiki, available at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki. We have been happy with the software except on occasion links to documents have become corrupted.” That is useful background, and thank you,…
Law departments of US companies can handle internally much of their client’s legal needs, the exceptions being litigation and some relatively infrequent specialty advice. International legal questions make up a small portion of the work (See my post of April 30, 2011: globalization overstated.). By contrast, with a company based…
The Economist, April 23, 2011 at 72, praises a book by Pankaj Ghemawat. His World 3.0 demolishes the world-is-flat argument, proving from many angles that globalization has much more modest manifestations. For example, “according to a study a few years ago, less than 1% of all American companies have any…
Covering 240 participants or so to this point, the 2010 data on key benchmark metrics will be quite rich. Lumen Legal is hosting a webinar for me to explain the findings and discuss law department benchmark metrics more generally. If you would like to sign up to dial in, at…
No one has written about the development over the past few decades of management practices in US law departments. We don’t know when operational methods first developed nor when they faded away. There are no historiographies of general counsel’s efforts to run their legal departments effectively. Bits and pieces of…
The Center for Studies on Economic and Social Law (CEDES), a Brazilian think tank, has sponsored a competition. “[T]he winners will be granted access to the litigation portfolios of five global companies with presence in Brazil, the United States and Europe. Winners will assess and compare the causes for litigation…
An e-mail correspondent alerted me to a vendor I had not heard of, Lecorpio. I looked at the company’s website. It listed a number of distringuished clients, including Autodesk, Analog Devices, IDT, LexMark, Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, Palm, Symantec, Thoratec, and Tyco International. It also listed three software applications that I have…
If members of a law department vote choose contending law firms, vendors, software packages, offsite choices, or anything else, they ought to bear in mind that the winning outcome could be within a range of random statistical error. In other words, if the vote were held repeatedly, without any of…