In October Altman Weil collected responses from what they describe as 176 top corporate lawyers. More than half the participants represented corporations with revenues between $1 billion and $2 billion. Twenty percent had revenue greater than $10 billion. Only one out of three respondents said they “regularly and formally evaluated…
An interview of John Oviatt, chief legal officer of the Mayo Clinic, turned up an interesting tidbit. He said you commonly recognize a pattern of concentration of spending by law departments: “[Y]ou see the number one law firm for many departments receiving in excess of 30 percent of the total…
John Oviatt, chief legal officer of the Mayo Clinic, uses the term “reverse convergence” to mean law departments retaining more law firms rather than converging on fewer firms. In a recent interview, Oviatt calls out two developments that can lead to increases in the number of law firms retained. “One…
Having put another notch in my belt of legal risk posts (See my post of Dec. 5, 2011: three observations on legal risk.), I looked for other risk-related metaposts. As my previous one covered through mid-August of 2009 and yesterday’s covered from mid-2010 through now, I updated my posts during…
In October the consulting firm Altman Weil collected responses from 176 “top corporate lawyers.” The majority represented corporations with revenues between $1 billion and $2 billion, while 20 percent had revenues above $10 billion. For this sample in 2011, the median increase in internal legal budgets was three percent, which…
An interview published this month of John Oviatt, chief legal officer of the Mayo Clinic, who oversees 35 lawyers and 45 other legal staff, covered his views of the importance of various benchmark numbers. Oviatt’s view is that “the second most important of all metrics is the metric of leverage,…
For a legal department its ratio of legal expense to revenue needs to be one of the top metrics, in the view of John Oviatt, chief legal officer of the Mayo Clinic. Here are his five reasons from an interview on Law.com, which I have numbered for reference. [1] “It’s…
A negotiation app that was released recently through Apple and will be released soon for Android (BlackBerry to follow) could help in-house counsel. This offering came to my attention from Don Philbin, Jr. He wrote “We’ve been studying negotiation patterns empirically with thousands of cases and have some good models…
A portent of the future: apps on tablet computers for in-house lawyers, supported by SAP and Tata Consulting (Oct. 10, 2011) Two big players and the advent of tablets and apps for law departments. Sumptuary laws in 14th century Florence and their echoes in outside counsel guidelines on disbursements (Oct.…
If you’d like to become more comfortable with logarithms and exponential functions, in the context of running a law department and understanding its metrics, you might have a hankering to read my InsideCounsel column on those mathematical relations. My Morrison on Metrics column compares linear and exponential functions and offers…