Think of experience and learning as a lawyer’s income – they work and they get paid in knowledge – and then think of efforts to harvest and give away that knowledge as a tax. This analogy occurred to me when an interviewee in a consulting project offered an explanation for…
Among the tools available to in-house attorneys who strive to protect new ideas of employees is defensive publication. An extended discussion of this technique appears in the “Canadian briefings” supplement, at page 5, to the ACC Docket of September 2011. As I understand it, when a company concludes that an…
Benny Tabalujan, ed. Leadership and Management Challenges of In-House Legal Counsel (LexisNexis Australia 2008) at 14, refers to a survey by Mahlab Recruitment in 2008. Mahlab announced that Australia’s in-house lawyers worked an average of 50 hours a week. Later, in a chapter by the editor, he cites a 2008…
A profile of General Mills’ top lawyer, Rick Palmore, refers to the significant amount of time his 50-lawyer team spends on checking advertisements and other marketing materials. The three-page profile is in SuperLawyers, Bus. Ed. 2011 at 221. The decision whether a claim made for a cereal or other product…
The law departments of companies with famous and valuable brands spend time combating counterfeit products. Actually, to varying degrees all companies protect their key brands and protect them as vigilantly as they believe is warranted. When you’re Procter & Gamble with 350 lawyers, the intellectual property to be guarded of…
ILTA’s 2011 Law Department Technology Survey gathered data in December 2010 from 54 law departments. Almost all of them were from the United States or Canada and three out of four were from companies with at least a billion dollars of revenue. The findings included that “Legal IT committees were…
Two years ago, the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) surveyed its law department members about their technology, including several specialized kinds of software for law departments (See my post of Feb. 15, 2009: three focused applications.). That survey covered 45 respondent law departments; this year’s increased slightly to 54. For…
Five challenges that arise from inept communication often show up in law departments. I wrote about them in my latest National Law Journal article, published on Oct. 10, 2011, and had the temerity to suggest some ways the vorpal blade might snicker snack improve them (if the end of that…
ILTA’s 2011 Law Department Technology Survey asked about intellectual property software, but 22 of the 54 respondents had none. Seven others had created an in-house system, which left 25 departments using at least one of ten applications. Those 25 named the system they have installed. Five each (9%) use Computer…
“In 1330, the Florence Commune introduced the first sumptuary laws: limits on what kind of fabrics could be worn, when, in what styles, by whom, only so many buttons, no fancy patterns, only so much jewelry, not more than so many dishes at dinner parties, restrictions on spending for weddings…