In the 2012 supplement to Bob Haig’s massive compilation on law departments, Successful Partnering between Inside and Outside Counsel (West 2012) at 42:18, the authors of a piece on project management mention an idea. An unnamed law firm “combined a timely ‘workload report’ sent by e-mail or fax early each…
A lawyer from Littler Mendelson, speaking at the InsideCounsel SuperConference, described the firm’s software to handle administrative agency charges. The firm developed the system to coordinate EEOC complaints on behalf of a huge employer who wanted to bring down its outside counsel spend. Built on Contract Express, the innovative system…
The larger the business the more global it and its legal department become and thus the greater its need for local in-house counsel. A commenter on my article about benchmarks and matter-management software wrote, as if it were self-evident, that “global law is more expensive than domestic for a ton…
An article in Fortune, May 21, 2012 at 90, describes one application of what it calls the popular “gamification” trend. This form of software brings in videogame storytelling and interactivity to mundane tasks such as compliance training. Not only are forms of games more interesting to employees, they also allow…
doeLEGAL supports not only its ASCENT matter management product for legal departments but also its discovery-document processing capabilities. As to the latter, the company announced late last year that it had passed a Standards for Attestation Engagements 16 (SSAE 16) Type II audit completed during the first nine months of…
The General Counsel of Kaplan Inc., Janice Block, spoke on a panel at the InsideCounsel SuperConference. She described a quick-step process by which her legal team selects law firms to handle certain matters. When an appropriate new matter comes in, they pick six law firms and send them an e-mail…
In 2007 Australia’s federal court called into question whether e-mails and documents prepared by in-house lawyers were subject to attorney-client privilege. In response to that threat, Telstra Corporation took a number of actions. For example, it amended the employment contracts of each of its 150 lawyers “to make it crystal…
A paper written by Jeff Hodge for Bridgeway, Legal Spend Management: An International Perspective, states at page 13 “since invoices in the EU are considered tax documents, the invoice reviewor cannot adjust them. Any adjustment to an invoice must be made using credit (or debit) notes which are then tied…
All law departments interview applicants, often devoting hours to them and more time for internal deliberations. It dismays me, then, to read that “decades of research have suggested that, despite their widespread use, interviews are not very predictive of applicants’ future performance.” We think we can size people up, ask…
A fascinating article concerns an analysis of causes of action in some 2,500 civil cases filed in Federal courts filed between 2000 and 2008. The research was by Christina Boyd, et al, in “Building a Taxonomy of Litigation: Clusters of Causes of Action in Federal Complaints”, which is available electronically. …