This sentence from 2008 regarding Australia startled me. “Of the estimated 50,000 lawyers currently in practice throughout Australia, around a quarter are employed in-house.” One out of four? That seemingly high ratio comes from Benny Tabalujan, ed. Leadership and Management Challenges of In-House Legal Counsel (LexisNexis Australia 2008) at 3.…
Proving yet again that in-house lawyers around the world share similar sources of job satisfaction, consider the survey results cited in Benny Tabalujan, ed. Leadership and Management Challenges of In-House Legal Counsel (LexisNexis Australia 2008) at 51. Conducted in 2005 by the Institute for Knowledge Development (IKD), the survey data…
An update on Bloomberg Law, whose second incarnation has recently been rolled out, appears in Law Technology News, Oct. 2011 at 44. Quite different than the complicated pricing of its main competitors, Bloomberg Law charges $450 per month per user for unlimited access. The steady change in how online research…
Law Technology News, Oct. 2011 at 38, recounts a painful story of a large pharmaceutical company that needed to track and allocate legal costs to business units, products, or cost centers. Also, according to the author, Kenneth Jones of Xerdict Group, the general counsel’s office needed to break out legal…
Law Technology News, Oct. 2011 at 19, says that “SAP and Tata Consulting Services now have an iPad application for their jointly developed Legal Management System.” That pregnant sentence tells us at least four possible developments (1) SAP, one of the giants in ERP systems, has put its toe in…
One of the general counsel interviewed by Law Technology News, Oct. 2011 at 18, praised videoconferencing with outside counsel. Glenn Weinstein of iRobot uses hardware and software from Logitech Vid and is “encouraging all of our outside counsel to get on the system.” It sounds like this capability operates from…
For more consistency, have the administrator oversee evaluations of non-lawyers. When paralegals and support staff report to the administrator of a legal department, with input from the lawyer leading the team they support, the greatest benefit is consistency in performance objectives and measurement. The head of operations can calibrate across…
The Canadian Corporate Counsel Association (CCCA) published in its Autumn issue an article about measuring the value of a law department. It describes the considerable efforts of a large Canadian power company to depict what its legal team accomplishes. This blogger has some trenchant quotes in the article, to be…
Complexity III (See my post of Sept. 21, 2011: complexity with 17 references.). Cottage industry III (See my post of Sept. 22, 2011: cottage industry with 9 references.). Hotlines (See my post of Sept. 21, 2011: hotlines with 6 references.). Matter management system benefits (See my post of Sept. 26,…
Most associations of law firms boast about their size and international reach. The likes of TerraLex, LexMundi, Primerus and others believe that global coverage matters to clients. Other networks stress their regional expertise and footprint. Still other networks of firms orient themselves around specialized areas of law. There are groups…