If lawyers take the time, they can record the lessons they learn from their practice. Among the many forms recordation takes, this blog has recognized guidelines, checklists, and annotations. Here, to make explicit my tacit posts, I have collected them. As to checklists (See my post of Jan. 26, 2010:…
Brad Blickstein, David Cambria and all the others on the Law Department Operations Survey Board have done a good job over the past three years to collect and analyze data from US heads of law department operations. Having once again extracted interesting findings from their latest survey report, now in…
“[T]heory is a statement of concepts and their interrelationships that shows how and/or why a phenomenon occurs.” That definition from the Acad. Mgt. Rev., Jan. 2011 at 12, pushed me to contemplate the enormous amount of work that needs to be done for someone to even propose a theory of…
In the 50 law departments of companies with the most revenue that have responded to the 2011 General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey, 36 of them report a matter management system. It dismays me that 14 of them (28%) did not report a system, but that may be because the person…
Several times I have ventured that total legal spending correlates positively with the profitability of a business sector. When margins are generous, it seems quite likely they justify legal investments to create intellectual property, build corporate infrastructure (new initiatives, evolving law, global spread), and consummate corporate transactions (M&A, equity and…
It is inexcusable for general counsel in this decade of cost scrutiny not to know and understand what their lawyers cost the company on an hourly basis, including but far from limited to their compensation. In-house legal talent comes at a cost that derives from pay and benefits, certainly and…
I wonder about the ratio of spend on software for matter management to spend on external counsel. Call that MMS-spend-to-total legal spend, such as $100,000 per year for the software and $10 million on average paid outside vendors, a ratio of 0.1 percent. Similarly, what is the ratio between what…
My benchmark survey, General Counsel Metrics’ second year, through yesterday had obtained 190 participants. It is well on its way to breach the 1,000 participant milestone. Interestingly, of the law departments in so far, just under half did not participate last year. If most of last year’s 805 participants re-enlist,…
A law department I recently read about boasted this strategy explicitly, which set me to wondering about its advisability. My conclusion: a bad idea. Extended very far this logic would push a general counsel to in-source as much as possible and therefore balloon the headcount. Some lawyers would not have…
One of the questions asked by the Third Annual Law Department Operations Survey was for respondents to “rank the top three challenges of managing law department operations.” Coming in near the bottom, 7th out of 10, was “Stay abreast of law department technology.” With only 15 total points, very few…