A strategic plan to make better technology available in your law department makes much more sense to me than overall departmental plans. The software, hardware, and training covered by such a plan falls much more to the control of the department, although with corporate IT embracing it and standardizing it,…
Well, thankfully, now you can. My latest InsideCounsel column plunged into the insights you can gain when you understand, calculate, and properly apply the statistical tool called the coefficient of variation. The calculation, easy to do with Excel, lets you compare the relative dispersion of two sets of numbers that…
LinkedIn membership costs nothing, but the vast professional online site can provide significant value. Groups abound and you can look up people and often find more about them and how to reach them. Almost two months ago I started a LinkedIn group (Law Department Administrators) for administrators in legal departments…
The HBR Consulting benchmark survey suggests a guideline for what expenses should be included in a general counsel’s budget. It is something like “Do not include expenses that a company would have to pay even if there were no law department at all.” That sounds constructive, and would eliminate annual…
If you need an expert witness in a case, you can ask the law firm you have retained to locate one, or you can use one of the many services that specialize in finding experts (See my post of Feb. 2, 2008: expert witnesses with 9 references.). When outside counsel…
I came across this description of a service available from Macleod Dixon, a UK firm soon to join Norton Rose. “Technology Consulting and Support: In-house legal departments’ technology needs are often quite different from the technology needs and solutions in their business units. Macleod Dixon provides technology consulting to clients…
A practice that is expressly authorized by most states’ ethics rules, and often referred to as unbundled legal services, means representing a client on a limited basis. According to For the Defense, April 2011 at 41, such circumscribed legal roles include to defend a deposition, appear at a hearing or…
A tool to help communicate about and plan for a complicated project is what some analysts call a design structure matrix (DSM). As described in the Harvard Bus. Rev., Oct. 2011 at 106, in a DSM, “a project’s tasks are listed along the rows and columns of a matrix, and…
“Human beings tend to seek simple and neat explanations for a complex world.” Jochal Benkler explains in the Harvard Bus. Rev., July-Aug. 2011 at 84, that “cognitive fluency” is “the tendency to hold on to things that are simple to understand and remember.” Cognitive fluency may be at work in…
No sooner than I published about two impossible-to-reconcile figures on corporate legal spending, and the disappointing lack of support for either figure, I read another (See my post of Oct. 25, 3011 #2: $60 billion global and $200 billion U.S. litigation figures.). In Corp. Counsel, Oct. 2011 at 55, Mark…