My speculation is that the degree of competition in an industry strongly determines the industry’s legal intensity. Benchmarks such as those on personnel and dollars per unit of revenue will vary between industries because of greater or legal competition. You can measure competition by the number of firms (both public…
Earlier I wrote about the managerial decisions at the disposal of general counsel regarding lawyers who report to them. Each decision has limits but together they comprise power (See my post of April 5, 2011: 12 aspects of power.). Much material appears on this blog regarding each of those indicia…
A conference scheduled to take place in New York City on April 27-29, is called the Litigation Finance & Investment Summit. The agenda includes speakers from organizations that are involved in litigation financing. Listed below in alphabetical order by company are fifteen of them according to the brochure for the…
Little Bets: How breakthrough ideas emerge from small discoveries, by Peter Sims (Free Press 2011), has much to stimulate entrepreneurs and business people. Its theme also pertain to general counsel. Sims creates a compelling argument for “little bets,” which are “concrete actions taken to discover, test, and develop ideas that…
A hazard for me as I select and write about something on LawDepartmentManagementBlog is that I am lured by novelty and frontiers. The nuts-and-bolts of management for law departments – think of substantive oversight, workflow, adequacy of coverage, bench strength as a few examples – are less enthralling to write…
The March 2011 Issues & Insights from Corporation Service Company discusses contract management systems. One of the capabilities of a good one, and presumably part of what CSC’s software offers, is the automatic integration of e-mails to the contract in the system the e-mail refers to. This must entail a…
A short white-paper by Mike Lipps, managing director for LexisNexis of corporate counsel solutions, explains a study that pitted UTBMS coding against his company’s proprietary technology for bill review. According to the paper, CounselLink “processes more than $3 billion of invoices annually through SmartReview.” That automated bill review software does…
Will there someday soon be an app cottage industry for matter management systems? (Feb. 1, 2011) Vendors, law firms, user groups or collectives of departments might fund the development of apps. If the costs of lawyers have risen have risen at the same rate as other artisan-type professional services, where’s…
It sounds like a tricky situation for the general counsel, what with solicitation rules and non-compete agreements and unfair competition lurking. In reality, the general counsel may be on the side of the angels and should feel free to discuss the likelihood that work will follow the partner or remain…
Courtesy of World Trademark Rev., June/July 2010 at 36, law departments that have significant trademark activity can see the top ten trademark service providers. The ten cited most by respondents to the WTR survey were also ranked. In declining order they were Edital, Onscope, Corporate Service Company (CSC), CT Corsearch,…