David Wilkins of Harvard Law School gave a presentation a couple of weeks ago where he used a memorable metaphor for a useful idea. Referring to the much greater frequency with which general counsel reduce the work going to a firm rather than terminating the firm, he puckishly drew on…
Michael Caplan, the financial coordinator for Marsh & McLennan’s law department, commented recently in a column about his department’s efforts at outside counsel cost control. “Back in June [2011], we ran a request-for-information on what were the best-in-class outside counsel billing guidelines and how to utilize technology to align to…
A meaty footnote in Michelle Beardsley’s article in the Fordham Law Review, Vol. 79 (2011) at 1924 (fn 314), cites several studies that have highlighted a dramatic drop in the number of trials in the United States. For example, there were roughly 45 percent fewer tort, contract, and real property…
A new report from Rand, “Innovations in the Provision of Legal Services in the United States,” puts the range of U.S. attorneys at 760,000 to 1,100,000. It cites Harvard Law School Program on the Legal Profession for estimates that in 2007, lawyers in the United States included 120,000 in government…
Courtesy of a recent Rand report, we have the number of attorneys for five European Union countries, according to the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe in 2008: UK (155,323 for 62 million population), Germany (146,910 for 82 million), France (47,765 for 62 million, The Netherlands (14,882 for…
A cloud of companies surround law departments and seek business from them. Here is an illuminating slice of the cottage industry. For the Council on Litigation Management’s annual conference, 3 premium, 14 platinum, 19 gold, and 20 silver sponsors signed on. Nine of them are law firms. The remaining 47…
Collective actions by several general counsel is what this post has in mind. They agree to do something jointly and the resulting consortium can out-achieve what any individual department could. Previously, I have assembled 30 posts on this blog that refer to aspects of collective (or potential collective) action by…
John Maynard Keynes, eloquent and acute as always, offered his view on the study of economics and its tenuous link to practical applications: “The theory of economics does not furnish a body of settled conclusions immediately applicable to policy. It is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of…
I admire the report just issued by Fronterion Top Ten Trends for Legal Outsourcing in 2012. The full version is at www.fronterion.com/tenfor2012. As I thought about trying to write a counterpart for law department management, another part of my mind objected. The objections carried the day. Trend-spotting has an air…
The profiles of general counsel are pretty dry as far as law department management juiciness. Still, squeezing a recent one about Maryanne Lavan, the lawyer leading Lockheed Martin’s 136 worldwide attorneys, you see a useful drip. She spent six years at a law firm, then six years at Lockheed as…