Data on high costs to obtain patents of small, high-technology companies A recent article by Gillian Hadfield cited an in-depth empirical study of patent activity by small technology companies. The excellent study compiled data and explanations about patent costs for those companies. “The average out-of-pocket cost for a respondent firm…
Many in-house lawyers are frequent travelers. They fly for client meetings, for huddles with outside counsel, for team gatherings and conferences, CLE sessions. The degradation to their health that results starts with weight gain and includes higher blood pressure, worse cholesterol, more stress, and poorer sleep patterns. All these maladies…
A Washington, DC virtual firm called Clearspire has 20 or so lawyers and an unorthodox business model. The Economist, Aug. 13, 2011 at 64, says that its lawyers offer cost estimates for each phase of their work. If the lawyer exceeds the estimate, too bad for the Clearspire lawyer. “But…
Reverse auctions, where law firms submit successively lower bids on a matter or group of matters, are far from taking over the retention world (See my post of Aug. 9, 2011: huge overstatement by Ariba employee.). Even so, at least four groups offer online capabilities to enable the process. ELawForum…
If you feel management of this $100 billion segment deserves recognition, by inside counsel and by law firm lawyers, a few minutes of your time would make a difference. To quote from an e-mail I received from the ABA, “Use the Blawg 100 Amici form to tell us about a…
Am. Legal Tech. Insider, Aug. 2011 has an item on page 7 about Capensys, a software training company. It trains users on Microsoft’s Office 2010 as well as other applications used in law firms. Capensys “employs a goal-based training approach that begins by interviewing lawyers and staff to determine how…
I heard about Procurelaw.com and looked at its website. For members they can use “Legal Panel Manager” to help control and monitor the flow of work with their panel firms; “Go to Market” lets them source the right firm by sending their RFPs to qualified firms. Here is the explanation…
Thomas Werlen, general counsel of Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, leads a legal team of 700-plus that is spread across 140 jurisdictions. As he explains in the European Lawyer, June/July 2011 at 39, “The department is organised in a three-layered matrix of work areas, countries and business divisions.” That makes sense:…
Benchmark reports typically sort participants into recognized broad industries such as manufacturing, high tech, and pharmaceutical. Several times I have taken a swing at these traditional industry classifications because they have flaws or miss factors that might distinguish law departments more usefully. One post alone discusses six attributes that significantly…
The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) has expanded to “more than 28,000 members (in 10,000 companies).” That statement from Corporate Counsel’s August issue tells us its membership averages 2.8 lawyers per member department, a calculation that does not support any estimate of the average or median number of lawyers per…