One of the speakers at the SuperConference mentioned that his seven-lawyer department uses SharePoint as an internal blog. Inside lawyers and others can collaborate with that tool. Also at the SuperConference, a speaker from Hewlett-Packard’s law department mentioned that they have created a SharePoint application where, among many things, they…
The bread-and-butter of many in-house attorneys consists of commercial contracts, those contracts either to buy or to sell goods or services, and the legal work attendant on them (See my post of Dec. 22, 2009: primary role of many inside lawyers; Dec. 23, 2009: one-third of litigation involves contract disputes;…
Studies have shown that conservative bloggers cite other conservative blogs and include links to them in their blog rolls; liberal bloggers likewise segregate their references and citations. This point Cass Sunstein makes in Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford 2006) at 190. A test of this proposition would be…
The latest newsletter of executive recruiters Laurence Simons mentioned ProcureLaw.com, “an online tendering platform for legal services.” Misys General Counsel, Tom Kilroy, tells us that he saved around 50 per cent on legal fees after running a tender to select a law firm to carry out an employment law project.…
A handicap for many managers of in-house legal teams, when they want to make sense out of a mass of data, is that they do not understand statistical tools well enough. Aside from learning them on their own, they might look around their corporation to find someone who already knows…
Managers in law departments might want to avail themselves of a decision-making method known as the Delphi technique. Cass Sunstein in Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford 2006) at 208, outlines the three key aspects of the technique, which is sometimes called the nominal group technique (See my post…
An article in the Acad. Mgt. Learning & Ed., March 2011 at 41, distinguishes between “explanatory sciences and design sciences. The explanatory paradigm, as predominately followed in business schools, is concerned with understanding what is, while design science (as predominates in medicine and engineering) is concerned with what should be.…
In a study of 47 companies, mostly insurance, a recent survey found that about a third of them maintain a staff counsel operation. Of those, about half (57%) the time staff counsel for claims “reported structurally through the chief claims officer as opposed to through the legal department.” Among the…
Software to help handle contracts – recent references [metapost contract software II 12] The ubiquity of commercial contract work in legal departments matches the prolixity of software that can help. I have previously collected posts about technology and contracts, but more have accumulated since then (See my post of Nov.…
Two previous posts have shared analyses of the matter management systems of participants in this year’s General Counsel Metrics survey (See my post of June 13, 2011: leading systems by number of departmental users; and June 14, 2011: comparison of leading systems to non-users on total legal spending.). The 142…