One of my blog posts drew on data from Portugal, USA, UK, and Belgium to estimate very roughly legal departments per billion dollars of GDP at 0.6, 0.7, 0.5, and 1.2 (See my post of May 10, 2010: four countries and GDP.). If we take as the lodestar the low…
An article in Compliance, Winter 2012 at 14, explains some of the amendments to the 2010 Organizational Guidelines by the U.S. Sentencing Commission. According to the authors, “compliance programs should include a reporting line between the corporate compliance officer and the board of directors or subcommittee, as well as reports…
To the extent lawyers are based outside the country of a law department’s main group of lawyers, an awkward circumlocution for “internationally-based” lawyers, general counsel have a harder time knowing what to pay them. Data from local markets is much harder to find. Several posts in the past few years…
What are some of the beliefs most lawyers in the United States take for granted, rarely consider or even notice, regarding corporate law departments? We are all blind to our own habituated views that we do not observe, to say nothing of articulating or even less questioning, what is “the…
My supposition, before I began General Counsel Metrics and its global benchmark survey, was that most general counsel would want comparative metrics on staffing and spending in the months just before their budget was due. I thought of that as August and September, mostly. In fact, I have come to…
If a general counsel or other manager in a law department sets out to accomplish a specific goal in a set period of time, that is an initiative, also referred to as a project (See my post of Jan. 7, 2010: examples include to license a new software system, change…
At 3M, the law department of 92 lawyers has a mentoring program for newcomers. “All new legal employees are assigned a mentor to provide specific advice on work and networking, as well as encouragement to help ensure retention.” This quote comes from Diversity & The Bar, Nov./Dec. 2011 at 37.…
An ad in Diversity & The Bar promotes a highly specialized database that can tell a general counsel how much the law department pays in fees to diverse lawyers. I took a look at the website and could not find out more than the ad explains. The ad mentions that…
Wherever there are metrics for managers of law departments, there will be discontent. Someone looks bad if performances or results are compared to others’ and the natural reaction is to discredit the unfavorable numbers. My column for InsideCounsel, Morrison on Metrics, earlier this month draws on my consulting experience where…
Collective action (See my post of Dec. 19, 2011: collective actions by law departments with 6 references and 1 meta.). Compliance reports to legal (See my post of Dec. 31, 2011: compliance reporting to GC with 5 references and 2.). Contract complexity (See my post of Dec. 22, 2011: complexity…