In a recent interview, a senior lawyer at Marsh McLennan, Lucy Fato, recounted some history. “A few years ago, we started examining all the firms that we were using to come up with a preferred provider list in the U.S. and then we rolled it out in the U.K. We’ve…
An interview of Amy Schulman, Pfizer’s top lawyer, offers insights into her view of her role, power, and risks. Found in the NY Times, Dec. 11, 2011 at BU2, her comments on leadership are perceptive. One of them all general counsel should take to heart. Schulman, in her exalted position…
This question, asked of the chief legal officer of the Mayo Clinic, John Oviatt, elicited an interesting reply: “Very much so. Legal services are just one more of many shared services within an organization. That’s how the C-suite views it, and so I think having a close working relationship with…
Bill Mordan’s latest column for the ACC Docket, Nov. 2011 at 108, talks about a variation on Lord Acton’s observation that “power corrupts.” Mordan explains that socially adept people tend to climb the career ladder well, but once they are in charge, some of them suddenly change, and for the…
A brutal piece in Fortune, Dec. 12, 2011 at 144, about the fall from grace of Bank of New York’s recently ousted CEO, Robert Kelly, gives a little insight into the sharp knives that surround big-time GCs. When Jane Sherburne took the top legal job in May 2010, “the board…
Adrian Furnham, 50 psychology ideas your really need to know (Quercus 2008 at 118, discusses brainstorming and concludes that “people working alone on a creative project produce better and more answers than a brainstorming group.” Any group, in fact, could suffer from these debilitations. He offers three explanations, and I…
Corporation Counsel for the city of Chicago has pushed to use no-cost lawyers from some of the larger law firms in the city to alleviate the department’s tight budget. In 2010, the city spent $25 million on outside counsel and something on the order of $37 million (its proposed 2012…
Not one to eat, shoot and leave, I wish to leave my imprint on law department management in the full regalia of grammatical grace. Toward that end, my powerful search software ferreted out these bibelot: Plural of general counsel (See my post of March 22, 2006: proper plural of “general…
The fast-function part of our brain, that which Daniel Kahneman refers to as System 1, operates mostly in three parts of our brain. Strategy + bus., Spring 2011 at 47, describes each of them briefly. These emanate from deep, primal parts of the brain that evolved relatively early. One is…
Splines. A spline function is based on the difference between a firm’s performance and the performance of a relevant comparison group. For instance, a spline function would look at a manufacturer’s law department metrics after subtracting from them the medians in that industry (See my post of July 31, 2011:…