Attorney-client privilege II (See my post of Feb. 28, 2012: attorney-client privilege with 13 references.). Boards and GCs (See my post of May 13, 2012: general counsel and boards of directors with 9 references and 1 meta.). Budgets, quarterly (See my post of May 30, 2012: seek quarterly budgets from…
Alternatives, published by of the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution, May, 2012 at 120, mentions ongoing work on a site that will enable certain kinds of disputes to be resolved on the internet. Specifically it explains that the Uncitral Working Group III Online Dispute Resolution initiative has enlisted…
Those who follow the field of alternative dispute resolution can find a trove of recent empirical research described in Alternatives, the newsletter of the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution, May, 2012 at 118. The issue summarizes four research programs and their findings regarding corporate legal practice and ADR.…
Realistic in-house counsel accept that the accuracy of a law firm’s budget declines precipitously the farther out it goes (See my post of Aug. 4, 2009: use a funnel metaphor for budgets; Oct. 22, 2008: build for flexibility rather than strive for prediction; July 9, 2009: obtain budget scenarios instead…
On a panel recently, a speaker urged the attendees, all from law departments, to request from their outside counsel what he called an “activity budget.” Rather than a money projection of what the firm’s services were expected to cost for the budget period, the information he requests is what the…
Organizations that collect compensation and benchmark data gravitate toward large law departments. They want to boast about the impressive number of lawyers among their respondents, the gargantuan revenue they support, and the league-table rankings of their participants. The downside of the Fortune fetish is that the resulting metrics do not…
Observers of the law department scene incessantly complain about thickets of regulations that drive up legal complexity and costs and they bemoan even more burdens on legal departments as regulations metastasize. But wait, here is the Economist, May 19, 2012, flying in the face of that dire prospect: “Many businesses,…
Let me propose a metric to show a law department’s value, based on the degree to which its lawyers are based in countries in proportion to the revenue from that country. In that regard, during the past two years, this blog has commented on several law departments with many locations…
We hear all the time praise for law departments that innovate. Do something new, General Counsel are told, to keep up in the competitive race and make the cover of a trade journal. In fact, it may be far more effective to copy what other law departments do and perhaps…
A new financial exchange, called IPXI, will let companies buy, sell and hedge patent rights. On the exchange, companies will be able to buy and sell “unit license rights,” which is a one-time right to use a particular patented technology in a single product. This is explained in the Economist,…