“A combination of increasing automation, new business models, and offshoring has pushed down the average size of finance staff by 30% over the past six years – to 92 people per $1 billion of revenue.” The quote comes from CFO, Nov. 2010 at 48, and Hacket Group data, courtesy of…
Rotman Mag., Spring 2011 at 84, describes research by Haygreeva Rao, a Stanford professor of organizational behavior. Rao places much importance on the number of statements bosses make in meetings versus the number of questions they ask. “He argues that letting others speak and asking questions – real questions, not…
Academics conduct research that makes me envious. Consider a detailed study of contracts described in the Acad. Mgt. Rev., Feb. 2011 at 182. Three professors studied 385 contracts Compustar had entered into with buyers of its IT services. (Of interest to me was the statement that lawyers negotiated none of…
“The routines put in place to enhance productivity often hinder the practices that foster learning” This dispiriting trade-off comes from the Acad. Mgt. Rev., 2011, Vol. 36 at 461. Some scholars refer to this as the productivity dilemma: do something with formalized consistently and you retard improvement. Law department managers…
After I noticed several visitors who reached this blog from Linex Systems, I looked at its website. A law department case study caught my eye and gives some background on a productivity tool for law departments. David Byrne is Head of Knowledge Management for BT Group’s legal department. Working with…
Every law department has a few law firms they view as their stalwarts, their old-reliables, their go-to firms. Sometimes called primary law firms, they are known quantities and qualities – they are the reigning incumbents. A more formal designation, and the more European term, is a panel. My sense of…
An early post suggested a number of advantages (See my post of July 5, 2006: large law departments have scale advantages: division of labor, specialization, and investment in technology.). They have streams of similar work so those who do it become more expert (See my post of Sept. 10, 2005…
Lit. Mgt. Mag., fall 2011 at 59, offers an example of a fixed fee for discovery: “no more than 10,000 documents to review, no more than six fact depositions, no more than two experts named by the opponents and no more than one discovery-related motion filed.” That sounds plausible to…
As I thought about the advantages of large law departments, I thought of delegation and assignment. Bigger departments have more lawyers and paralegals, so they can use both to spread the work around to better match the person’s skills. That led me to consider the differences between the two verbs,…
Design precedes everything created by people. “[E]verything made and used by humans has been designed, in that it has been realized from an idea or its parts have been selected from the store of existing things, modified if necessary, and assembled into a new and purportedly improved thing.” Thus grandly…