The slugfest of patent litigation unleashed by Apple related to Google’s Android operating system has proved to be frightfully expensive. Samsung, HTC and other companies are up in arms. Quoting Prof. Mark Lemley of Stanford Law School, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, April 2, 2012 at 63 said “these companies have paid their…
Last summer, Legal Suite, a French powerhouse of matter management software for legal departments, conducted a survey. Legal Suite invited visitors to Village de Justice, an online site for lawyers in France, to answer questions about their legal technology use. They collected 58 responses and published the findings. One question…
Nonlinear systems occur when “outputs of a system cannot be expressed in terms of a sum of inputs, each multiplied by a simple constant.” The quote comes from John Brockman, Ed., This Will Make You Smarter (Harper Collins 2012) at 184, a piece on scale analysis. If a formula could…
This humble, but practical bit of advice comes from the ACC Docket, March 2012 at 32. E-mail serves best to transmit information that doesn’t need discussion. Long threads of e-mails, especially if there are multiple people copied and they weigh in, become unwieldy quickly. It is much more effective to…
A point-counterpoint in Lit. Mgt., Spring 2012 at 56, presents the case for and against staff counsel in insurance companies. Favoring staff counsel are “predictability of fees, decreased cycle time and increased trust between claims staff and attorneys handling their suits.” The proponent of staff counsel also argues for them…
In the ACC Docket, March 2012 at 24, the general counsel of NetScout Systems holds high the banner that that the “legal team should be an active participant in all critical corporate decisions.” Unless “critical corporate decisions” is deemed synonymous with “decisions where legal input must be had,” in which…
In MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Spring 2012, at 19, as a co-author the Director of the USPTO states that “intellectual capital and intangible assets – including technology, brands and strategic competencies – comprise more than 50 percent of the business outputs in the U.S. economy.” If so, wouldn’t you expect…
A survey of more than 50 function heads of European companies found that “fewer than one in 10 function heads felt they had received sufficient guidance on how their function should contribute to the company’s overall strategy.” Reported in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Spring 2012, at 12, the research by…
The general counsel of NetScout Systems co-wrote a piece in the ACC Docket, March 2012 at 22. Early on, a sidebar sketches how general counsel over the past century have been perceived. The early 20th century, was the “golden age” of corporate counsel, “where the majority of corporate executives were…
An article with this title appears in Claims Mgt., March 2012 at 14. Metrics fan that I am, I read with interest about the six. Not much to say on the first two, except to agree that time to close and average defense cost per claim make sense to track.…