An article on requests for proposal in the ACC Docket, June 2011 at 74, states that hourly rate arrangements are more and more giving way to metrics “to assess efficiency and effectiveness.” The metric proffered is “percentage of work handled by partners and associates, respectively.” I am at a loss…
Do invoices from law firms flow in steadily during the year, or are there dry spells and floods? I wrote my latest column for Morrison on Metrics to try to sort out what might raise and lower the level, but in the end came to nothing conclusive. Nor do I…
A mainstay of my consulting principles holds that one of the best contributions a consultant can make to a general counsel is to open the toolbox. The tool box of management practices includes lots of choices and approaches, the mixing and matching of which to the particular circumstances of the…
A chronic complaint of business unit lawyers is that the mandarins off at headquarters pursue their own agendas on their own time and pace. They are out of touch with the rough-and-tumble of making a dollar. HQ doesn’t feel the same urgency and pressures as the lawyers at the coal…
Henry Petroski tells us in his book on design that “By the latter part of the nineteenth century, some five hundred different types of hammers were being produced in Birmingham, England, alone.” If the market supported such an array of one particular tool, if no one hammer was manifestly the…
A few days ago I had the privilege of speaking during an Exari webinar on contracts and risk management. I discussed a dozen practices that some law departments follow regarding contract management and risk mitigation. If you click on this you can register to hear the recording of the session…
When legal departments have six or fewer lawyers, not counting the general counsel, it is my impression that the predominant structure is flat. More often than not at that number, all the lawyers report directly to the general counsel. By “report,” I mean the general counsel sometimes assigns them work,…
I just completed posts on four findings from a recent survey about the effects of UTBMS codes on law firm billing practices (See my post of June 23, 2011: often, many codes used even in a modest bill; June 27, 2011: codes made little difference in billing behavior of firms;…
Many people have criticized PowerPoint for its rigidity, its format restrictions, riot of animation, endless slides. The overuse and abuse of the ubiquitous program has become a staple of cartoons. A chapter in Henry Petroski, Success through Failure: the paradox of design (Princeton 2006) at 34-33 rehearses the usual criticisms.…
The longer a lawyer stays in the same law department the more embedded the lawyer becomes. Known to everyone in the company, familiar with the execs and the cleaners, politically attuned, a compendium of historical business knowledge leavened with legal savvy, the lawyer’s value grows proportionally (or faster) with tenure.…