A pair of professors at Boston University’s School of Law have calculated a price tag for the direct costs stemming from patent troll activity: about $29 billion. The $29 billion figure excludes a host of indirect costs to the defendants’ business, “such as diversion of resources, delays in new products,…
KIE Square, a consulting firm that specializes in advanced business analytics, has developed a business intelligence application. According to KMWorld, July/Aug. 2012 at 15, the software helps identify shipments likely to violate import regulations on the basis of the importer’s declarations and other paperwork (See my post of Jan. 24,…
The International Association of Outsourcing Professionals ranks what it defines as the global outsourcing 100 leaders. Listed in Fortune, July 23, 2012 at 55, a few of them have some involvement with legal outsourcing. I noted on a quick glance Donnelley Global Outsourcing and SPI Global. More interesting was…
Tax policies, employment laws, and cultural predispositions discourage companies in some major countries from growing much. In Spain, according to Fortune, July 23, 2012 at 16, and as holds in Italy I believe, very small firms are disproportionately represented as compared to the United States. It is much easier for…
“Over the past two decades Spanish companies in sectors where products and services can be traded internationally raised their productivity five times more than their counterparts in purely domestic sectors.” That finding in Fortune, July 23, 2012 at 16, suggests another reason why larger companies enjoy falling levels of total…
“[W]hile 50 percent feel that self-service drafting [of contracts and agreements] is important, 76 percent reported that their law departments do not have any kind of self-service drafting tools or protocols in place.” That summary of a glaring gap between efficiency and reality, the gap between clients being able to…
As if 25 benchmarks by industry, revenue, and number of lawyers from nearly 500 law departments were not enough, Release 2.0 sent last week offered more. It included an invitation to a free webinar to ask questions about the benchmarks, five trade groups with industry reports, an analysis of matter…
This blog produces an unending stream of posts. Periodically I harvest those on a topic. Metaposts, as I call these collections, include most recently the following. Arbitration II (See my post of May 30, 2012: arbitrations with 9 references.). Brazil (See my post of July 9, 2012: Brazil and…
A third of VF’s revenue comes from international sales, according to Corp. Counsel, July 2012 at 38, and five members of its 18-person legal department are stationed outside the United States.” VF Corp. is the world’s largest apparel and footwear company. It makes sense that a company that does business…
Several posts on this blog have laid out criticisms of various well-known management tools. This first post of two starts with a half dozen. For each of the six tools listed below I begin with one or more references to previous posts that give drawbacks of the tool. I continue…