This post scrapes the bottom of pessimism. Still, the mismatch that must happen between relatively uninformed lawyers and the savvy partners they presume to direct deserves comment. So did the Emperor’s clothes. We make three assumptions about inside lawyers who have retained outside counsel to give advice in an area…
On the website of eHow.com you can read a thumbnail description of several corporate staff functions, including legal. Very peculiar in several respects, it is pasted below. The bracketed numbers I inserted follow the odd words or phrases I comment on after the quote. ‘The legal department receives legal reports…
The legal department of the Financial Times recently introduced a practice that, taken at face value, I would question: “the introduction of questionnaires for internal clients to fill out upon completion of a job.” (Corp. Counsel, April 2011 at 26) I question that effort because it imposes too much on…
Lisa Hart, the CEO of Acritas, shared research on what law departments find effective when law firms solicit business from them. These five attributes of pitches come from her presentation at the Georgetown University Law Center’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession conference three weeks ago. Acritas surveyed…
It is an honor to be invited to speak on a panel at InsideCounsel’s SuperConference. The panel’s topic, at 2:00-3:15 PM on May 23rd, will be metrics for managing law departments. I will be focused on benchmark metrics and client satisfaction measures. My co-panelists will be the General Counsel of…
An executive from Micro Strategies, Inc., in Met. Corp. Counsel, March 2011 at 33, points out some of the proliferating cloud choices: “software as a service [SaaS], infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and desktop as a service.” SaaS includes such online hosted software as Serengeti Tracker and…
An excellent chart in a recent benchmark report by Otto Henning & Co. based on large German companies provides insights into their law departments and level of use of nine technologies. Based on implemented systems only (Im Einsatz), all of them have access to a corporate intranet (Unternehmens-Intranet). Online research…
The top lawyer of Anheuser-Busch InBev, Sabine Chalmers, describes her 150-lawyer department in Practical Law, March 2011 at 80. In accordance with her dual title of Chief Legal & Corporate Affairs Officer of the $36.8 billion company, she and her team also have responsibility for “corporate affairs.” The profile briefly…
“The board of directors decides the outlines of the staff, and structural organization of the legal and compliance function. Among other things, it decides whether the functions are joined or separate, whether they are handled centrally or not, to whom these functions report (board of directors, audit committee, CEO, etc.)…
Total cost of ownership (TCO) should be a calculation done by all law departments before they select software. An executive of Datacert wrote that the definition of TCO “includes all the upfront costs of procurement, including hardware and software, as well as ongoing operational expenditures such as training, administration, maintenance…