As companies do business in increasing numbers of countries, it follows that they will need to hire law firms in some of them. Convergence of firms – the deliberate use of dramatically fewer law firms – must then give way to de-convergence – a larger roster of firms retained. Likewise,…
In 1998, while a partner at Altman & Weil consulting to law departments as I have done for the years since, I wrote an article about ten 1999 resolutions for general counsel. Now, 14 years later, have those resolutions been acted on and come to pass? No, since the first…
The NY Times, Jan. 1, 2012 at BU7, gave unemployment rates by level of academic achievement. The rate started at 13.2 percent for those with no high school diploma, dropped to 8.8 percent for those with only a high school diploma, and dropped almost a further half to 4.4 percent…
Last year around this time, Dec. 14th to be exact, I published post number 6,000. This post is the one-thousandth post after that one. After 7,000 of these little critters, as always I fret the well will run dry; so far, however, the aquifer of law department management topics remains…
Writing in the ACC Docket, Nov. 2011 at 72, an author stresses the conflicts of interest a general counsel might have to face as she balances attorney-client privilege (in her lawyer role) against disclosure and full cooperation with government authorities (in her compliance role). She also argues that lawyers intimidate…
Don’t worry if you don’t understand the header, I’ll translate. When I notice a potential accumulation, I collect six or more posts on a topic into what I call “metaposts,” of which there are now more than 500. Every now and then at least six metaposts cluster around a topic…
At a recent conference run by ALM, the general counsel of Rockwell Collins spoke about Six Sigma principles applied in his department. One of his slides addressed processes to determine alternative fee arrangements, and it mentioned “design decision-trees for process.” Whenever a law department does some set of steps repeatedly…
These are the eight metaposts I have compiled since my last hyper-post on intellectual property (See my post of Aug. 19, 2009 #3: six metaposts on intellectual property.). The latest topics include: Patent trolls (See my post of March 22, 2010: non-practicing entities with 6 references.). Patent license agreements (See…
Lee Cheng, the general counsel of Newegg, spoke at the most recent Consero Corporate Counsel Forum. His portion of a panel covered relations with external counsel, including cost management. One bullet on his slides advised that “an excellent reason to terminate a relationship [is] when cost of outside counsel is…
LawDepartmentManagementBlog is pleased to publish the submission of Phil Homburger, the founder and CEO of Synaptec Software, creator of the law department matter management system, LawBase. phil@lawbase.com “We started programming LawBase in 1979. It became an actual product in 1981. We began before the IBM PC was announced and before…