“Most large law firms have far more lawyers than the availability of client work requires.” Ed Wesemann in the Edge International Communique asserts this. Wesemann explains that “This is, in part, driven by the law school hiring programs that require firms to predict their staffing needs almost two years in…
The Fifth Release of the GC Metrics global benchmark survey will go this week to 829 participating law departments. That is a record increase of 24 from last year. There are now 27 industries detailed, with the addition of special analyses for airlines, automotive suppliers, medical devices, national labs, semiconductors,…
My sense of the term “strategic planning” has been an exercise by a legal department to look ahead a couple of years and try to anticipate evolving needs for legal services and skills. What might happen in the future and how can we best prepare for it? My recent posts…
As Louis XIV remarked about Edward Gibbon, “scribble, scribble, scribble”), this blog has repaid readers’ interest in compensation many times – on the order of 124 posts, including some duplicates. At your option, you can benefit from delving into this stock of eight metaposts on compensation. Compensation of in-house lawyers…
Wading through survey rankings by law department managers of why law firms are reluctant to embrace alternatives to hourly billing, I dutifully listed the results in declining average rank order. Having done so, I was struck by the uneven gaps between some of the rankings. In fact, as I calculated…
No doubt, the Human Resources department controls many aspects of compensation for members of legal departments. They enforce corporate policies about amounts of raises, eligibility, mid-year corrections, promotions, titles, bonuses, equity awards and everything else. To regulate its domain, HR obtains data on lawyer compensation and uses that data to…
The “European Briefings” supplement to the ACC Docket, Dec. 2011, at 12, describes how Procter & Gamble’s EMEA law department, 120 lawyers strong in two dozen locations, coped with regulations by the European Commission’s of chemical substances. The department worked closely with Allen & Overy on compliance with REACH, including…
Whether or not money is the root of all evil, money is certainly at the root of many posts here. I have collected compensation-related posts since my last metaposts and organized them by several topics. Past the paycheck, or what do in-house lawyers earn in addition to their salary (See…
A column in the ACC Docket, Dec. 2011, at 24, by an unabashed proponent of offshoring who invests in companies that provide those services, went too far. He recounts an ABA panel which “showed that outsourcing legal work is more than a trend among law firms and corporate legal departments.”…
Joseph Mazur, What’s Luck Got to Do with It? – The history, mathematics, and psychology of the gambler’s illusion (Princeton 2010) at 92, “Economists have long sought a meaninghful measure of risk, which should depend on a person’s specific financial situation.” Similarly, the finances of a company affect how legal…