A well-known consultant in Austria to law departments, Dr. Franz Brandstetter, has published a book on law department management. He provided me with this short description of his book. “The objective of Rechtsabteilung & Unternehmenserfolg – a management book – is to provide support for in house lawyers and legal…
All of us who care about management in legal departments are grateful to learn what specific departments have done to address specific issues. From “YYY Company hired partners who are twins because it is easier to figure them out,” to “ZZZ Company put shredders next to each paralegal’s desk to…
A branch of game theory known as social-choice theory studies institutions and methods of collective decision-making. Voting in elections, for example. Social-choice theory deepened enormously from the 1950’s on after Kenneth Arrow laid down five elementary axioms that any rule defining the preferences of a group should satisfy. To widespread…
Disadvantages when a company’s general counsel serves on some other company’s board have been covered here (See my post of May 11, 2011: conflicts, time, fees.). Those drawbacks notwithstanding, it is not uncommon to find general counsel who serve as a board member elsewhere. The advantages that come to mind…
The first experiment with competitive bids for fixed-fee arrangements having been conducted by many law departments, their general counsel contemplate the next round. What can they do differently to improve the process and outcome? All manner of improvements to the RFP process might help. As discussed on this blog, these…
Law departments mostly know their own costs in disputes, and some even know how much time their members spend on different matters. Rarely, if ever, does a company, let alone a law department, know how much employees outside the law department invest in legal affairs. My most recent Morrison on…
With nearly 7,000 posts under this blogger’s belt, about 6,999 of them have dealt with companies that have a law department – even if only one lawyer (See my post of July 5, 2011: reasons to hire a first lawyer.). Yet thousands of established, profitable and well-run companies have no…
Ideas for how to manage a law department better come from many sources. For me, as I read I note in the margins what I think of as “blog ideas” and later I go back and write those that still appeal to me. During the nine months since December 2010…
As part of my first-cut analyses of matter management system data from the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey, I looked at the size of law departments. As measured by number of lawyers, the departments that use one of the eight most commonly identified systems, have a median of 27 lawyers;…
To get Release 3.0 in late September and its benchmark metrics for your industry based on 500+ companies, all at no cost, click here to take the General Counsel Metrics global benchmark survey. As of this morning, 383 law departments have submitted their six pieces of staffing and spending data.…