Many people may have heard about Ben Franklin’s T: to help reach a decision, list pros and cons and then cross off those that balance each other out (See my post of April 2, 2006 – Franklin T’s and other decision aids.). Some variations on it appear in Len Fisher,…
A heuristic is a simple rule or set of rules for making acceptable decisions from partial information or in a limited time span. People use heuristics all the time (See my post of Sept. 9, 2008: economics of information explains why we rely on heuristics; March 15, 2009: the affect…
This blog tries not to market particular offerings of services or products, but this post cites one to describe an approach that law departments ought to know about. A glossy of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman describes PEARL™ — Pillsbury’s E-Discovery Alliance of Resource Leaders. The firm has strategic alliances with…
Expensive litigation and a cost-oriented arrangement led me to make several points. As described in Litigation 2011 at 40, Medela, a Swiss-based company that is the world’s leading maker of breast pumps, hired Dechert to defend it in a 2006 class action. Three years later, “with Dechert’s fees piling up…
When an industry standard is established for some technology, as for example smartphones rely on several industry standards, those patents that are deemed “essential” for the standard become subject to different rules. The company that owns an essential patent may be required to license it on a fair and reasonable…
A “Found Money” initiative. One of the law departments that took part in a recent survey recognizes its ”In-house attorneys who have saved or delivered money to the company by going beyond their ‘day jobs’ and leveraged their legal skills sets and knowledge of the company to ‘find’ money that…
A corporate lawyer at Brown Brothers Harriman, Florian Feder, has created a legal wiki,Standardforms.org. It provides a free depository of sophisticated legal documents. According to Robert Ambrogi, who wrote about this resource on June 3, 2011, “Notably, the site is not intended to serve as a cache of ready-to-use legal…
I doubt that the Board of Directors of companies care one whit about how the law department runs. To them, it’s a black box. Unless there is a problem such as an anti-trust investigation or a gargantuan lawsuit, where for a bit they may wonder about how the problem is…
The ubiquitous David Cambria said this during a SuperConference panel and I got to thinking what he means. Partly he means that if you look back at numbers, that is more limiting than when you project numbers forward. But projection (modeling) does rely on historical numbers. The distinction blurs to…
Without attorney-client privilege, law departments can’t compete equally with outside counsel. Retrograde jurisdictions fail to provide that powerful shield (See my post of April 25, 2011 #1: narrow rejection of privilege in Europe.). By law, salaried lawyers of an Indian company are barred from representing their client in court. That…