Trenton, New Jersey, accepted $22 million in state aid because of the deep budgetary hole it was in. That lifeline from the state came with a number of restrictions. Bloomberg Businessweek, Dec. 5, 2011 at 38, mentions that one of the constraints is that the state’s Community Affairs Department now…
Fronterion’s recently released Top Ten Trends for Legal Outsourcing in 2012 is worth reading. One point it makes relates to the increasing frequency with which law departments will retain LPOs and insist that their law firms rely on the work of the LPO. Law departments will butt into their law…
An informative article co-authored by the general counsel of Alfa Laval appears in the ACC Docket, Nov. 2011 at 39. One portion discusses “risk tolerance,” and gives the edge in risk tolerance to companies that (1) have the money to absorb the worst-possible outcome and (2) encounter the situation repeatedly,…
Release 4 goes out this week, bulging with key benchmark metrics from 740 law departments. That marks quite s a jump from 530 legal departments in October’s Release 3. Many more will take part in this epic benchmarking effort before it closes in January – and I hope you do…
In an article about how to integrate two law departments when their companies merge, there is a list of “Twenty-Five Key Areas of Focus for Legal Department Integration.” The list appears in the ACC Docket, Nov. 2011 at 62. The first eight areas highlight management of the operations of the…
Last year there was news about law department consulting offered by Eversheds and several law firms tout their consulting skills regarding e-discovery. Recently I saw another instance of a law firm that wants to consult to law departments. An ad in the ACC Docket by Seyfarth Shaw promotes how its…
The general counsel of Alfa Laval co-authored a solid article in the ACC Docket, Nov. 2011 at 39. The authors discuss a common method to describe possible outcomes: expected value. Each outcome that has a monetary result is expressed as the percentage of the particular outcome multiplied by the money.…
“[M]aking a prediction in terms of probability simply does not fit well with predicting an event that will happen only once.” A lawyer who tries to give a client the likelihood as to whether something will happen – for example, the odds that the Department of Justice will oppose a…
In 2010, a major division of Royal Dutch Shell decided to use zero-based budgeting to reset its cost structure (See my post of July 16, 2007: zero-based budgets; Jan. 2, 2009: advantages of zero-based budgets; March 29, 2009: five steps toward more reality in budgets; April 22, 2009: zero-based staffing…
OMC released a report in November that pulls together a formidable amount of data and analysis on legal process offshoring around the world. London-based OMC specializes in advising law firms and law departments on opportunities to have services provided in lower-cost jurisdictions. Page 15 of the OMC report lays out…