A major US insurance company headquartered in Boston has nearly 700 lawyers in 63 field legal offices. Of them, about 120 use WinScribe’s OnDemand “cloud based” digital dictation workflow technology. One out of five is impressive penetration of the productivity tool. I have not seen any other data on even…
CEO’s know that “A great CFO is his best secret weapon.” Aside from the sexism, that’s a shot at CLOs. Or maybe GCs are not so secret? The article in Fortune, July 25, 2011 at 27, rubs in the comparison: “A great CFO needs to be part numbers whiz, part…
An article’s author writes that “Whereas there were about 3,000 multinational corporations in 1914, the figure rose to 63,000 in the year 2000.” If that latter figure is correct, and the J-shaped growth curve has continued for whatever they mean by “multinational corporations,” one could imagine 70,000 now, a decade…
If a law department participates in a project to collect and organize the contracts of a company, one of the headaches can be to translate historical contracts into a similar format. Legacy contract conversion presents a challenge for a law department to the degree people had stored contracts and forms…
Legal Strategy Rev. of CPA Global published an interview of Helen Gillcrist, Vice President and Manager of Enterprise Legal Services at Liberty Mutual. According to the June 27th piece, Gillcrest manages the insurance company’s relationships with several thousand law firms. Pay attention to four thrusts mentioned in the article. http://www.cpaglobal.com/newlegalreview/4903/mutual_objectives_seal_lawyer_…
Charles Darwin scrupulously tried to address the criticisms he recognized would follow the publication of his revelations on evolution. He bent over backwards to honor all attacks he could anticipate. That style, once called the “habit of sympathetic summary,” philosophers now refer to as the “principle of charity.” Summarize a…
As I watch last year’s participants in the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey return to the fold this year, I have wondered why some do not. Several possible explanations have occurred to me. These reasons, other than the first one about cost, apply generally to my efforts as well as…
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 write that “over the last 25 years government data shows legal services constitute a slightly larger…
Several of the functions that are “on the bubble” for law departments or are more typically handled outside the department have significant process elements. With contract administration, to take one, the legal counsel is a smallish part, but tracking, database entry, distribution, and calendaring are repetitive tasks. Likewise for compliance,…
On June 27, 2011, Legal Strategy Rev. of CPA Global published an interview of Helen Gillcrist, Vice President and Manager of Enterprise Legal Services at Liberty Mutual. Gillcrist joined Liberty Mutual in 1981 and soon took a senior role in the law department, becoming perhaps the first law department administrator.…