As part of my series, here are the comments of Rob Thomas, for years the voice and pen of Serengeti: “Serengeti was founded in 2001 with ten employees. It arose from the ashes of ELF Technologies, a legal website company that failed for lack of funding in the aftermath of…
ILTA’s 2011 Law Department Technology Survey gathered data in December 2010 on the document management systems used by 54 responding companies. Tops was Autonomy iManage/Interwoven with 15 users (27% of the DMS users), followed by Microsoft Sharepoint (14 users). The remaining five systems were OpenText Livelink/Hummingbird, EMC Documentum, IBM Lotus…
A survey was conducted of UK and global companies that polled their general counsel and company secretaries. A detailed report of the survey’s findings involving board-level information can be found at:the Accelus website of ThomsonReuters. One finding was that the average corporation surveyed prepares and disseminates nearly 6,000 pages of…
Paraphrased in a recent profile, the General Counsel of AOL, Julie Jacobs, “sees the role of corporate counsel as establishing trust both inside and outside the company.” She makes other points in the long piece about expectations for inside counsel, but this one made me sit back and try to…
It’s often unfortunate for both a law department and a firm when the department stops using the firm; it’s worse when a department takes away pending matters from a firm but sometimes transitions are justified; it’s downright disastrous when a law department sues a firm for malpractice. That is what…
The Walt Disney Company’s law department has some 350 lawyers companywide. To help keep them all part of the same kingdom, a “couple of years ago, the legal department began having global videoconferences three or four times a year to discuss influential changes in the business, such as emerging technologies.”…
A recent book states that “when counsel does not act as counsel there are potential issues around professional indemnity insurance and whether or not the indemnity policy will respond.” The quote comes from Benny Tabalujan, ed. Leadership and Management Challenges of In-House Legal Counsel (LexisNexis Australia 2008) at 11. That…
A long-time observer of the corporate legal scene in Australia, Peter Turner believes that “Maintaining professional standards and independence in an increasingly tough and unforgiving business environment is perhaps the greatest single challenge that the in-house profession will face in coming years.” Turner is the former CEO of the venerable…
“Over the years, the cost differential between external and in-house lawyers has narrowed.” This statement by Peter Turner, with no empirical backup, is found in Benny Tabalujan, ed. Leadership and Management Challenges of In-House Legal Counsel (LexisNexis Australia 2008) at 6. To assess this claim, we need data to support…
If you are thinking about participating in the no-cost, quick and confidential online survey, you might want to see whether you have peers of about your size in your industry. Release 4.0 will go out in early December with more than 750 law departments. Covering 22 industries and five revenue…