Another blog by a general counsel. Frank Fletcher, the general counsel of Nero AG, has started a blog at “LegallyFrank.com”. He plans to make contributions every Sunday and in time to post his ACC Docket articles plus some new material. Not all of the topics will be legal (See my post of Feb. 11, 2011: lists eleven blogs by in-house counsel; March 1, 2011: Melanie Hatton blog; March 3, 2011: Mr. Bizzle blawg; March 10, 2011: three more blogs; and March 21, 2011: Rich Baer blog.).
Malpractice for pro bono involvement. A General Counsel I was speaking with the other day mentioned in passing that he discourages pro bono activities by his lawyers because they lack malpractice insurance (See my post of April 25, 2009: malpractice and in-house lawyers with 6 references.). I wonder what such incremental coverage costs?
Nice comments about this blog. Jordan Furlong of Edge International picked 10 “must-read” legal blogs. Law Department Management was one of them and he had these kind words: “Rees Morrison’s blog is the deepest collection of data and insights on in-house law departments available anywhere.” Furlong’s kudo, for which I thank him, comes from the Edge International Communiqué of May 2011.
Blawgs in the Library of Congress? “In 2007, the US Library of Congress implemented a programme to preserve blogs by people in the legal profession,” wrote an author selected for Mircea Pitici, ed., The Best Writing on Mathematics 2010 (Princeton Univ. 2011 at 91. Given that more than 3,000 law-related blogs have appeared in the US alone, the Library set itself a Herculean task.
Four-fold and five-fold, etc.. I noticed two instances of these phrases in the 2011 supplement to Bob Haig’s Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel. One (at 29) said that a company had reduced its employment litigation “more than five-fold.” Another author (at 48) noted the rise in RFPs, “possibly by as much as fourfold.” My point is not about the proper format of the word – avec or sans hyphen – but about the complexity of the wording. A five-fold reduction means 20 percent of the former number; a fourfold increase means that RFPs were four times as common as before. If you want to explain increases and decreases, avoid this archaic formulation. The comprehensive treatise, I want to make clear, is none the worse for this minor point.