Results from the tenth annual ACC/Serengeti survey on managing outside counsel give some insight into the incidence of three kinds of software that helps collect spend data about outside counsel. According to the ACC Docket summary, Sept. 2011 at 18, of the responding “hundreds of ACC member law departments,” 64.6…
Andrea Bonime-Blanc oversees internal audit, enterprise risk management, ethics, corporate responsibility and compliance for Verint Systems, a global software company. She reports to the Chairman of the Audit Committee and indirectly to the Chief Legal Officer. In a recent BNA Insights article (Corporate Governance Reports) she gives four reasons why…
Less than four years ago, Pernod Ricard created six dedicated hubs of intellectual property lawyers and paralegals specialized by different categories of alcoholic beverages. About 30 of them work in these hubs, which are usually located near the production facilities. All this is spelled out in the Leaders League 2010…
Selection of a matter management system seems daunting; configuring or customizing the one you chose, installing it, converting historical data to it, and then training staff on its functions and the changes it requires in processes seems even more intimidating. Even then you have to keep it running and bringing…
An item in Bloomberg Bus. Week, Sept. 26, 2011 at 81, points out that there are two aspects of concentrating. “One is to get rid of extraneous thoughts, the other is to focus on the task at hand.” Fine, but how do you clear your mind of distractions? Recent research…
During late 2009 and much of 2010, U.K. heads of legal showed significant appetite to use more “mid-tier firms” in that country as well as more “international firms.” This shift in reliance for outsourced legal work appears graphically in a Winmark survey of CLO Programme membership (at 13). It is…
A recent survey asked general counsel of UK companies how well their law department is valued by their company. One choice, the most favorable, was “The legal department is recognised as a valuable part of the organization.” Of the 124 respondents, 29 percent strongly agreed and 60 percent agreed; only…
Winmark, through its CLO Programme members, obtained survey data in the Autumn of 2010 from 124 UK general counsel. The 27-page report can be requested from John Jeffcock. Here is the report’s summary of what happened to those departments overall in the financial meltdown. “Like in 2009, 2010 saw a…
Based on longitudinal data from a large group of U.S. law departments, it appears that the economic recession did not have all that much impact on them. My most recent article for the National Law Journal, published on Sept. 12, 2011, discusses the two-year changes and notes the slight increase…
Corporate Legal Solutions, Inc. was founded in 1988 by three attorneys to provide matter management software geared toward corporate legal departments. From its history on the company’s website, the first product, Legal Management System, was DOS-based. It shaped the basic principles of design for what became Case&Point. Case&Point was introduced…