Well-run legal departments should have goals that have cascaded from corporate headquarters. A mission statement announces some of the durable goals, others might vary from year to year. A practice in a law department is a means to achieve one or more of those goals. To illustrate, a goal is…
Your law department has used a firm satisfactorily for years, but nevertheless seeks bids from it and other law firms to handle certain matters. The incumbent firm comes back to you with all kinds of new ideas and potential concessions or advantages. How do you respond? Some inside lawyers might…
When the current general counsel of Mercedes-Benz (Charles Shady) took the wheel two years ago, the legal department ranked 29th out of 30 in an in-house survey, with just 68 percent of the group expressing job satisfaction. In 2010, the law group was the highest-rated department for employee satisfaction in…
The other day I heard an argument new to me for an extended fixed-fee period. The period was three years. Three years seemed right to this general counsel because law firms could not afford to run at a loss (low-ball) for such an extended period. For one year, they might…
A few days ago I ventured to list in order of respectability why legal departments don’t aggressively control costs of their law firms (See my post of July 21, 2011: 14 reasons.). I am gratified two readers added their thoughts. John Conlon pointed out “that many of the corporate in-house…
A report a few years ago had data for a group of law departments about “the largest expense item incurred by” the participants. The median figure for that big ticket item was fairly consistently about eight percent of the total legal spending of the departments, whether you looked the participants…
Non-stop activity at work – meetings and conference calls end to end with no respite – wears people down. One reason proposed by sleep researchers is that “we oscillate every 90 minutes from higher to lower alertness.” An article in the New York Times, July 24, 2011 at BU8, likened…
It is difficult to corral with assurance which software offerings should be included as matter management systems. For example, should systems that primarily focus on electronic submission of bills be treated as matter management systems (See my post of Oct. 18, 2006: lists e-bill package providers.)? Should we invite into…
Logical positivism, a philosophical movement in the 1920’s and ‘30’s, held that a “proposition not reducible to a simple enunciation of fact can have no intelligible meaning.” The quote comes from Bruce Mazlish, The Riddle of History: the great speculators from Vico to Freud (Harper & Row 1966) at 204.…
Although I don’t speak Portuguese, I hope I correctly translated a post on the LinkedIn site of FDJUR, hosted by Jose Nilton Cardoso. He asked the group’s members a question along these lines. “The structure of the law department in your company might include other functions. Of the following, where…