In-house attorneys may fume when told they cannot hire any longer the trusted, familiar counsel they used to, that they must transition work to the large and unfamiliar winners of a preferred counsel contest. Ruptured are the long-standing relationships, gone are the modest bills from dedicated partners cast-away are the…
Even if a company does not enter into a fixed-fee arrangement for all-you-can-eat from a law firm in a specialized area, it might look into an arrangement where short calls are not billed. Alternatively, short calls are only billed a set amount such as $100 for a call of less…
In the Fall of 2010 ALM Legal Intelligence collected surveys from 176 US in-house lawyers. LexisNexis CounselLink published the findings. A part of the report draws on a theoretical distinction of the Association of Corporate Counsel between what it has defined as “traditional” and “proactive” law departments. The archetypal operating…
The General Counsel of Polycom, Sayed Darwish, spoke at Consero’s conference last month. One of his charts gave the number of pages in various historic statutes regarding financial services. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 took a mere 31 pages; Glass-Steagall of 1933 had 37 pages; the Interstate Banking Efficiency…
The January issue of Historically Speaking has several essays on narrative. As historians use the term, it means the larger “story” told by them in their articles, monographs, and books. Different from factual accumulation, causal relation, or measured argument, the narrative power of good historical writing rests on an over-arching…
Danette Galletin, the law department administrator at The Williams Companies, sketched at Mitratech’s Interact some things that department has done to accumulate and disseminate knowledge. One is to start a law department blog, which they use mostly to post communications to the group of 70 lawyers and 31 support staff.…
The ideal general counsel, as a selfless developer of people, mentors the lawyers below and helps them maximize their potential. We wish. In the rough-and-tumble real world, cautions Jeffrey Pfeffer, strong performance may harm you if your powerful general counsel refuses to play that nurturing game. “Power holders prefer to…
Not a good mission to “try and do as much legal work as possible in-house” (April 1, 2011) My conclusion: a bad idea. Data on matter management systems of large law departments – quite a few with no system or a customized one (April 3, 2011) In the 50 law…
An E-Bay procurement person who supports law department, speaking at Mitratech’s Interact Conference, explained her company’s use of a Tier 1 list of about a dozen law firms, each of which gets annual reviews and quarterly budget reviews. She mentioned that the company used more than 400 law firms five…
Impressive that a number two in a law department jumps to the Court of Appeals. Corporate Counsel online on May 18, 2011, said that the US Senate confirmed Yale University’s number-two GC, Susan Carney, to the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals (See my post of May 3, 2007: Chubb…