In the portfolio of John Chou, general counsel and secretary of AmerisourceBergen, fall four groups. The law department includes 21 lawyers and 24 other members. Those 45 are less than half of his total complement because it also includes government affairs, regulatory affairs, and corporate security. All told, the “law…
A survey now underway asks law department respondents, “What have you found to be the most common reason for people [presumably, just lawyers] leaving the business [presumably, the law department]?” The four choices offered on the survey deserve comment: “Career progression,” “s alary,” “join competitor,” and “redundancy.” My supposition is…
When companies do business in many languages, their legal department can help more when it has lawyers who are conversant in those languages. Multi-lingual capability is a topic this blog has addressed (See my post of April 26, 2006: managing lawyers who do not speak English as a primary language;…
At a panel hosted this month by Canada’s Heenan Blaikie, a leading general counsel told the audience that “a law firm’s bill is its best opportunity for marketing its services.” He suggested that the bill can make clear the value the firm delivered that month and, indeed, give some insights…
Lawyers, sometimes pummeled by non-lawyers as arrogant and prideful, bring that opprobrium on themselves if they try to elevate their department as grander and more influential than others would agree. A number of instances of inflated self-regard and self-promoting have appeared on this blog (See my post of July 24,…
From GC Insights: What Multinational General Counsel Value Most (ACC 2012, supplement to ACC Docket) at 27, we learn about the law department of Ford Motor. It has 146 lawyers and 215 other staff. Among the 361 total people are Ford’s tax lawyers as well as internal audit. It is…
A recent survey of in-house counsel, reported in Deloitte’s Global Corporate Counsel Report 2011 at 17, gave the three most common responses when they were asked to specify why they retained outside counsel: “Need for greater specialist expertise,” “need for additional legal resources,” and “complexity of the legal work.” Far…
Research by a company, admittedly one with a stake in highlighting e-mail overload, “found that most employees spend at least a third of their time at work on e-mail.” Inside counsel may log something like that, or at least feel that consumed by e-mail. Therefore, It has been a frequent…
Good reasons can be adduced for why a general counsel hires a senior lawyer from outside the department, but drawbacks to that decision persist. According to research reported in the NY Times, April 22, 2012 at BU7, external hires, “on average, make around 18 percent more money than internal employees…
The Economist, April 14, 2012 at 76, writes that the current CEO of Honeywell took over in 2002. Rather than try to change values of employees, which are harder to measure, he focused on how to increase the frequency and effectiveness of a dozen important behaviors. General counsel can learn…