The ACC chooses a handful of companies to promote to its member as exclusive providers for various services. For example, according to Met. Corp. Counsel, May 2011 at 35, Applied Discovery holds that coveted position for electronic discovery, which led me to look at the other service providers with like…
A beautiful brochure arrived in my mail from the International Legal Alliance Summit, to be held in Paris on June 23rd. The brochure explains that attendees can choose 30-minute one-to-one meetings with senior partners from distinguished international firms or with general counsel from various big companies. A box lists general…
A piece in Met. Corp. Counsel, May 2011 at 30, points out advantages and disadvantages of fixed fees. One effect, according to Ashish Prasad, the CEO of Discovery Services,is subtle: “When negotiating a fixed fee, the client has an incentive to understate the complexity of the case.” Prasad cites Poonan…
To sort out a number of strands of an important issue – the value delivered by in-house counsel – I took the propositional approach. I offer nine propositions about that value, such as how to measure it, what it consists of, the role of clients, and other points. It is…
Law departments readily agree to talk with someone from one of their law firms about the firm’s performance. Some law departments are asked by their law firms to speak with a consultant about the firm’s performance. What are the differences to a department between talking to the party of the…
Some people, myself included, think of software for legal departments mostly in terms of features and functions. What the software can do and how well it does it dominates. But if a law department has several packages to choose from and those packages have converged on a fairly similar array…
A number of law department initiatives stumble because the lawyers don’t do their part. Whether the initiative be to contribute documents to a repository, write FAQs for an intranet, run a Center of Excellence, reduce outside counsel fees, take advantage of software, hire diverse candidates, or put evaluations into a…
The probability that a group of people will arrive at a correct answer to a factual question increases toward 100 percent as the size of the group increases. This is the Condorcet Jury Theorem, as explained in Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford 2006) at 25,…
We have all heard about and maybe even taken part in post-mortems. What about when something good happens? Does any law department systematically celebrate success and examine why it happened? Let’s call such a positive look back a “post-vivo” and thank the Harvard Bus. Rev., April 2011 at 72, for…
Cass R. Sunstein, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge (Oxford 2006) at 55, discusses research about the shortcomings of groups when they deliberate. For example, members tend to become much more confident about their judgments after they talk together, but they are not any more likely to be correct. Second,…