For a group of insurance companies, litigation in the past 12 months dropped or held steady Whether people sue more or sue less when the economy declines ought to be a well-understood empirical fact. Managers of in-house legal teams should be able to plan based on the correlation or lack…
At a SuperConference session on litigation management, a lawyer from CapitalOne said that his department allocates a portion of its spend on outside counsel to firms that are not on the preferred partner manifest. He said “It’s partly training them and partly assessing them to see if they might become…
For the most part, the general counsel’s team can and does decide which law firm makes sense for a particular matter. Sometimes, it must be admitted, that exclusive privilege bends a little – or a lot – if others with more power or influence want to direct the retention. My…
In the May 2011 Harvard Business Review, one article (at 85) argues that the biggest roadblock to work productivity is that “People don’t capture stuff that has their attention.” They commit to do something, “but they don’t write it down and it goes into a black hole.” Worse, they don’t…
Law departments institute many practices to handle the torrent of contract review, drafting and negotiation. In the past 18 months or so, this blog has cited nearly two dozen practices that deserve consideration. For several references I have cited the company that was the source of the practice (See my…
Every year legions of lawyers and the claims specialists who work with them handle tens of thousands of claims. Insurance companies especially care about this onslaught, what with the billions of dollars they spend each year on claims coverage, defense, and resolutions. Other companies also have claims functions when they…
I looked at data from 272 law departments that had participated so far in this year’s the GCM benchmark survey (with full data) and the 114 that identified their matter management system. Having described the dispersion of those named systems as well as the eight most common (See my post…
A recent survey’s report on law department value ends with a strange twist. “In summary, the more the legal department can free up attorney time to focus on revenue-generating activities, the better it will serve the client and the better the business will perform.” If “revenue generating” comes down to…
Robert Pozen practiced law, among his many distinguished careers in business, government and academia. He was a partner at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Caplin & Drysdale, where he led its banking/securities department from 1981 to 1986. Pozen wrote an article in the Harvard Bus. Rev., May 2011 at…
A speaker from Baxter Laboratories said at a SuperConference panel that they have instituted some disciplines to keep matter budgets relevant. Every month outside counsel must certify that the matter is on budget and inside counsel must do something similar to show that the budget is on track. Certification can…