Meetings — @#$&^%$ — the bane of in-house lawyers. Can’t live with them but (in a big company) can’t live without them. Further, a well-known software designer, Will Wright of Electronic Arts, estimated that with a team of twenty people, “three hours was usually spent working for every hour spent…
One aggregated post (what I call a metapost) and two individual posts since its appearance have noted and welcomed blogs by in-house counsel (See my post of Feb. 17, 2011: lists 11 blogs by in-house lawyers; March 1, 2011: Melanie Hatton blog; and March 3, 2011: Mr. Bizzle blawg.). A…
Comments I made earlier about Indra’s structure said nothing about an additional layer in law departments and a frequent cause of hard-to-resolve management issues: a geographic reporting matrix (See my post of Jan. 11, 2011: Indra’s law department structure.). Indra itself has not expanded yet to the point where, for…
Data from 2009 for 56 of the largest German companies indicate that the average cost per hour of their in-house lawyers was €148. At 1.5 US dollars per Euro as the approximate exchange rate, the cost was in the range of $222 an hour, almost precisely what the equivalent would…
A recent market report from Hyperion Research describes a dozen vendors of matter management and e-billing who are identified as “Market Participants.” The Aug. 2010 MarketView Report of Hyperion Research, “e-Billing and Matter Management Systems for Corporations,” at 14-17 gives thumbnail descriptions of each company, its products, services, and strengths…
An effective law department: a common notion but it lacks construct validity (Jan. 4, 2011) A construct is (1) research-based, (2) its meaning is agreed upon by a consensus of professionals qualified in the appropriate field of study, and (3) it’s quantifiable. All are weak for “effective law departments.” Seven…
The Harv. Bus. Rev., March 2011 at 65, has an article about “the new path to the c-suite.” One part looks at what it takes to become a chief legal officer. It explains what the author sees as the dramatic upgrade in the position of general counsel during the past…
This newest find is cloaked in secrecy, since Mr. Bizzle blogs under cover of darkness. Why? “I blog anonymously because I feel less self-conscious that way. I haven’t covered my tracks that well, so I try to avoid controversy.” What is it with this penchant for secrecy among in-house bloggers?…
“Though the role of general counsel will continue to attract senior partners from law firms, companies will be more reluctant to pull executives straight from private practice, preferring candidates with in-house experience who understand how to manage the people and finances of a legal department and how to operate as…
A statistical adjustment to improve data. A footnote to a graph in a recent report adds a statistical explanation: “To account for the unbalanced nature of the response rate over time, a regression with a time trend and company fixed-effects was run.” The report is the Litigation Cost Survey of…