Surveys find that richer people report higher satisfaction with life than poorer people. Data on this oft-found result comes from Eduardo Porter, The Price of Everything: Solving the mystery of why we pay what we do (Portfolio/Penguin 2011) at 62, 69. Analogously, it seems likely that higher-ranking managers give better…
A survey of French law departments during the fall of 2010 asked whether they had put in place a panel of law firms and negotiated fee arrangement with those firms. From responses of 91 general counsel, two thirds of them had done so (69%). Convergence and discounts have become a…
If one thing costs more than another, similar thing, that fact alone “turns on the neurons in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with pleasure feelings.” Eduardo Porter, The Price of Everything: Solving the mystery of why we pay what we do (Portfolio/Penguin 2011) at 20,…
Georgetown University Law Center’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession coordinated yet another highly successful conference last week. Among the wide-ranging presentations about trends in the delivery of corporate legal services that Professor Mitt Regan and his colleagues hosted, one featured Lisa Hart, the CEO of Acritas, who…
My overall point from a blog posts during the past few weeks about benchmark data from Germany has been the striking similarities between most of them and their US counterparts. Another example is inside and outside spending per lawyer and the ratio between them. The General Counsel Benchmarking Report for…
“We trust our legal department to be risk-averse and process-oriented, and as a result, they’re not very provocative and they’re not controversial.” With those disparaging words from KM World, March 2011 at S3, an executive of a content management vendor roundly dismissed at least his legal department. Process-oriented. The image…
It is often said in blog posts, articles and conferences that general counsel of US companies are managerially advanced compared to general counsel of the rest of the world. “Them’s fightin’ words,” you could say! How someone could demonstrate such superiority stumps me. If there were a dozen fundamental management…
Caterpillar has 18 lawyers in its litigation department. The department’s head lawyer, deputy general counsel Lance High, also has on his team 13 engineers “dedicated to helping with cases that challenge the design and manufacture of Caterpillar’s products.” The passage comes from Corp. Counsel, March 2011 at 68, and surely…
The lead article in Corp. Counsel, March 2011 at 67, profiles seven experienced administrators (aka business managers, managing directors, directors of administration, etc.). The piece on Danette Gallatin of The Williams Companies had a couple of sentences not so much about that role but about dispersion of law departments when…
Data will play an increasingly important role for general counsel as they navigate the turbulent years, so I should add three more sources of such data (See my post of June 16, 2010: six pools of management data for general counsel.). Acritas produces its Smart Legal Brands report with a…