Consultants love to recommend comprehensive processes through which law departments tell their key law firms how the firms are doing. In an ideal world, such full-scale evaluations need training, software, databases, forms, number crunching, meetings, roll-out plans, post-mortems, interviews, and complicated activities galore. Consultants thrive on all that hustle. The…
Cytec Industries, a $3 billion company that produces engineered materials and specialty chemicals, has a legal team of “16 lawyers, four paralegals, an export compliance manager and a government relations manager.” The entire team met for four days in Seattle and according to a profile in the ACC Docket, March…
Dan Ariely, writing in the Harv. Bus. Rev., March 2011 at 40, describes a thought-provoking contrast between what he terms “complete contracts” and “incomplete contracts.” He believes that “business’s increasing dependence on (I would say, fetish for) absurdly detailed contracts in every situation” leads to problems. If some situation arises…
A panelist at the Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession conference on March 9th, remarked that a successful in-house lawyer needs four attributes. He listed knowledge (what the lawyer knows), skills (how the lawyer applies that knowledge), behavior (what the lawyer does while applying that knowledge)…
An experienced marketing consultant, Dan Ross, said something worth pondering. He spoke about law firm brands at the conference two weeks past at Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession. Ross said that customers often choose a brand because of how that brand helps define the customer’s…
Practice groups in law firms make sense for both them and their clients. If you are a law department lawyer, however, and a partner from a law firm touts the firms “[Fill-in-the-blank] Practice Group,” what should you find out about to determine the Group’s value to you and your client?…
Much was said about law firm brands at an excellent conference organized by Mitt Regan of Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession. As summarized memorably by one speaker, a law firm’s brand is its “promise to clients,” in the words of several law firm marketers and…
At the recent conference of Georgetown University’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession, Lisa Hart, the CEO of Acritas, shared research data on why law departments retain the law firms they do. In the course of her remarks she said that Acritas has observed “an increasing focus on…
A study last year of French legal departments, co-conducted by Profit & Law and Equiteam, obtained responses last year from 100 French general counsel. Some of the data reported resembles counterpart metrics in the United States. The cited data in this post comes from page 14 of the report. The…
Not only are promotions hard to come by in most law departments, because the pyramid of senior positions narrows rapidly, but two other elements of our sense of happiness toss in monkey-wrenches. One is that bliss doesn’t last: once you reach the coveted rung of Assistant General Counsel, your euphoria…