My friend Jeff Hodge, Executive Director – Corporate at doeLEGAL, wrote a fascinating blog post about law suits per person in major countries. He cites research in Christian Wollschlager, Exploring Global Landscapes of Litigation (Nomos 1998) and testimony before the House Committee on the Judiciary in 2004 by Theodore Eisenberg,…
People who conduct surveys – I raise my hand high – should be wary when they throw stones at other surveys’ methodologies. Even at risk, I will continue to chide others on how they word questions and expect rocks through the windows of my own benchmark survey in turn. So,…
Here are some of my candidates, in alphabetical order. I welcome other nominations of general counsel of this stature who deserve extraordinary recognition for their managerial contributions. Bob Banks, one-time GC of Xerox and a founding father of what is now the ACC Mark Chandler, Cisco’s outspoken and innovative GC,…
Hugh Trevor-Roper’s book, History and the Enlightenment (Yale Univ. 2010) collects essays by the distinguished British historian. Trevor-Roper saw in the Enlightenment historians a seminal perspective, which is broadly called “philosophical history.” It rejects the mere accumulation of detail and fact; it rejects primary reliance on splendid examples of heroes…
One of the questions on the Third Annual Law Department Operations Survey asked respondents to “rank the top three challenges of managing law department operations.” Where three points went to a first place choice, two points to second, and one to third, “Driving/Implementing change” led the pack. It collected 95…
Looking at how some metrics varied from last year to this year, based on participants in both the 2010 and 2011 General Counsel Metrics global benchmark survey, I found it hard to reach momentous conclusions. On the whole, the year-over-year shifts were modest by industry yet that aggregation did conceal…
Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, Clever: Leading your smartest, most creative people (Harv. Bus. 2009) at 77, state that “high-IQ individuals frequently performed badly when they were put together in a team. In competitive situations, [the researcher cited] found that teams consisting of less clever people typically outperformed teams of…
Beliefs of general counsel regarding how best to relate to outside law firms vary enormously. Those ideologies, I submit somewhat puckishly, could be characterized with the well-known spectrum of political ideologies. Let me sketch my sense of the matchups. Reactionary general counsel favor turning back to days of yore when…
Part LII of a collection of embedded metaposts, perhaps a florilegium! Florilegium: a collection of short literary pieces. Please enjoy my metapost florilegium! Awards to law departments (See my post of Feb. 21, 2011: honors bestowed on law departments with 9 references.). Export compliance (See my post of March 20,…
Programs that run full-fledged capabilities, including those that run on specific hardware, such as Apple’s or tablet devices, have the edge now over web-based apps. So-called native apps (aka platform apps) can be visually rich and lively. Now, as the newest generation of the code for designing Web pages, called…