What blocks lawyers in legal departments if they want to streamline how their department’s work gets done? It’s not lack of funds, management intransigence, lack of creativity or ideas. Assuming they would like to increase productivity, it’s not the crush of work, the lack of rewards, risk aversion, or barriers…
A review in the Economist, July 2, 2011 at 74, of a book by William Rhodes, a prominent banker, picked up on Rhodes’ methods to bring a roomful of disparate interests to a consensus: “keeping people awake until they will agree to just about anything, for example, or forcing everyone…
Paragon Legal, started by Mae Tai O’Malley around 2007, places former in-house lawyers – usually women – inside companies on a project basis. According to Fortune, July 4, 2011 at 77, Paragon “has more than 60 lawyers, 85% of whom are women with school-age kids.” They are billing at close…
Canadian Lawyer gathered salary data from 87 Canadian in-house counsel. I looked at each year out of law school and their ranges, meaning the absolute difference between the lowest salary and the highest salary. They averaged $76,000 but they showed no pattern with increasing years of experience. I would have…
And the seasons they go round and round, so I combed through the 120 posts that I picked in the last twelve months as the best of a month. That covered the posts of June 2010 through June 2011. My goal was to code the posts and then see what…
Canadian Lawyer gathered salary data from 117 Canadian in-house counsel. One sentence about the budgets for those participants set me to calculating. “In terms of average legal spends budgeted for 2011, 36 per cent said their corporate legal department would come in under $500,000, 26 per cent said $500,000 to…
Every now and then I run across unusual software packages that help law departments. Here are five of them that showed up during consulting projects or reading. (1) Fidelity offers a package that handles equity compensation awards and tracking. (2) ComputerShare has software that specializes in the arcane machinations of…
A piece on PSLs – professional support or practice support lawyers – in the ABA J., July 2011 at 27, led me to ruminate why some law departments don’t agree to share a PSL. The large law firms cited in the article have non-practicing lawyers who “provide practice guides, up-to-date…
Thomson Reuters has acquired the assets of eBillingHub. According to the July 2011 issue of Am. Legal Tech. Insider at 1, eBillingHub was one of the major players in the ebilling and electronic invoicing sector. The newsletter explains that eBillingHub is “best understood as a SaaS data exchange that automatically…
Here are my choices for the most interesting posts from two months ago. Sorry, it’s perfectly fine if a firm sets a fee based on estimated hours of work (May 8, 2011) Estimated hours represent a solid basis for a flat fee. Moreover, a flat fee, however derived, differs enormously…