In mid-2011, at least twenty companies have licensed software to more than a handful of U.S. law department to help them manage matter information. Allegient, BottomLine, Bridgeway, CSC, CTTyMetrix, Datacert, doeLegal, EAG, Legalbill, LexisNexis, LawBase, LT Online, Mitratech, TrialNet, and Serengeti (acquired by Thomson Reuters in 2011) (See my post…
Earlier I fingered the chief culprit that preserves the status quo, the single most flagrant obstacle to improvement in law department operations: a refusal to stop and think about how work is done (See my post of July 11, 2011: pause and reflect.). If an internal lawyer does that, ten…
Amy Fox holds the title of Lead Knowledge Management Counsel in the Legal and Corporate Affairs department at Intel. We learn that because Fox will be speaking at an upcoming Ark conference, Knowledge Management in the Legal Profession on October 26-27 in New York City. Four observations result. One: Fox…
From the standpoint of a law department, you could say the ultimate value-based arrangement obligates payment only when and if the law firm accomplishes just what the department wants. With inventions suitable for patent protection, what could be better for a law department than to pay the law firm only…
Bill Henderson, Director of the Center on the Global Legal Profession and a Professor of Law at Maurer School of Law, co-authored an article in the ABA J., July 2011 at 41. The authors credit three interconnected forces with testing and stressing the legal market. None of them fit from…
“With some exceptions, any average of a large number of similar terms will have a normal, bell-shaped distribution.” This powerful statistical discovery by Pierre Laplace in 1810 as described by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, The Theory That Would Not Die (Yale Univ. 2011) at 6, means that if a law department…
The greater a company’s revenue, the less it spends on legal expenses in proportion to that revenue. Despite having amassed 15 possible explanations for that pattern, another one came recently to my attention (See my post of Aug. 21, 2008: client satisfaction or what leads to it, invention activity within…
Three international giants now own matter management systems for law departments. Since ThomsonReuters has acquired Serengeti, the alpha males of the legal industry can duke it out. From a different standpoint, the field of major players in the legal industry who offer matter management software is fuller. Wolters Kluwer came…
Let’s not be economic determinists when we think of law department management A framework or model consists of a set of concepts, while a theory explains how, why, and when the concepts are related. A useful theory explains and predicts. One framework to explain law departments and how they operate…
To this point I have located 33 books about law department management (See my post of Nov. 16, 2009: approximately 32 books about law departments with 8 references; and March 29, 2010: Trevor Faure’s The Smarter Legal Model.). Two more have recently come to my attention. Leadership and Management Challenges…