Articles Posted in This Blog

Readers of a blog deserve an explicit statement of the value system of the blogger. For those readers who care and who pay attention, they can figure out what I believe. Even so, for the others and for myself, here are several truths I hold to be fundamental.

Inside lawyers serve worthwhile ends and deliver value. They deserve wise management (See my post March 16, 2008: attacks on the morality of law practiced within a company.).

Our understanding of managerial cause and effect is and always will be limited. The many strands of managerial reality are more complicated than our capacity to fully grasp.

During three consecutive weekday mornings, I downloaded from SiteMeter the visitors’ detail. Of the approximately 300 visits, 224 were from different sites (which means that about 25 percent of the sites had more than one visit during those three days). Of the 224 distinct sites, 108 were ISP addresses and there is no quick way to find out who they are. If you use WhoIs.com, it takes quite a bit of time and tells you that many are service providers. I spot checked a handful.

Of the 116 visitors from sites that had names, such as Aetna.com, many were internet service providers (Comcast, Quest, etc.). Of the rest, 30 were companies, 7 were law firms, 3 educational institutions, and 2 were government. It is not possible to tell anything about a specific person within an identified site, so I cannot say that people from companies were with their law departments.

This small sample, however, suggests that visitors to LawDepartmentManagementBlog come four times as much from corporate entities as from law firms.

To have a good sense of humor is part of being a good manager. To write blog posts without humor is a slog [I just wrote about going to war and one reason, along with freedom, God and rights was to revenge the kidnapping of Helen of Troy. That is not LOL funny, but it amused me. Some of what comes out of my pen flirts with funny (See my post of Sept. 18, 2007: humor and jokes among posts with 29 references.).]

Anyway, while foraging on the net, I ran across the blog of lawyer David Mills. His site, Courtoons, was fun so I picked a cartoon and invite you to wile away some time there. Click on the link to see the cartoon.

To improve this blog I have tried several new ventures since my last update (See my post of Feb. 20, 2009: a retrospective on the prior year, my fourth as a blogger; and Feb. 26, 2009: firsts for this blog.).

1. Inserted my first image in a post (See my post of June 14, 2009 #1: process of publishing the image.).

2. Welcomed more guest authors, such as Robert Unterberger, PJ Thomas, Bruce Heintz and Jeff Kaplan.

Traffic is one reward for blogging, so I am always grateful when other blogs or websites either cite to one of my posts or include me on their blog roll. I have thanked 40 so far, and here add another 13 (See my post of June 17, 2009: 14 blogs/websites that have directed readers here; June 26, 2009: 13 more referral sources; and July 10, 2009: 13 more referral sites.).

Adamsdrafting.com (Ken Adams, Esq.)

Blawg.com/ (Bill Gratsch)

Some time having passed since I published 100 or so posts during May, I reread them all and chose the ten most provocative and interesting. For each, I wrote in brackets after the header a brief description of the post; you can click on the post title to read it in its entirety. If you have a comment or would like all the posts at once, please email me and I will be happy to send them to you in a Word file.

1. Auctions: pick the best bidder but for one dollar more than the second best bid (May 28, 2009)

   [A way to lessen the likelihood that the prevailing bid is too low for the winner to perform well. This method increases the chance that a fixed-fee arrangement will succeed for both sides.]

Of the more than 300 metaposts I have compiled, 40-50 related pairs of them I have combined into what I refer to as Metapost Pluses. Each Metapost Plus has more than 10 posts, organized logically, and with several recommendations at the start for general counsel. Eventually, I hope to send updates to those who request a Metapost Plus by email.

My first four that are available, at no charge, are:

Convergence

These ten posts got the most views and clicks (the numbers in parenthesis) since January 16, 2007, when I first signed up for FeedBurner. What seems odd is that all of the posts are from March through May of this year.

Unfortunately, other than that four of them concern outside counsel, I cannot see any pattern in what was popular (See my post of May 8, 2009: e-billing systems 245/81; March 16, 2009: offshore case study 239/34; Feb. 22, 2009: contract management software 233/51; March 26, 2009: effect of associate layoffs 221/58; April 29, 2009: ACC Covenant 209/84; March 1, 2009: compliance at lower cost 207/63; April 15, 2009: convergence of inside and outside costs per hour April 6, 2009: client training 200/76; and March 11, 2009: lawyers per billion 170/140.).

During the 28 months, LawDepartmentManagementBlog had 64,697 views of 463 items as well as 66,841 clicks back to the site on 861 items. As of this writing, about 575 people have subscribed to this blawg through a feed.

I am honored to have become a guest author on Jason Busch’s Spend Matters, a leading blog in the area of strategic sourcing, purchasing and procurement. My forays into those who buy goods and services for companies will also appear on Jason’s blog (See my post of March 1, 2008: procurement with 17 references.).

Similarly, I am pleased to announce that Legal IT Professionals Weblog has introduced me as a guest author. The longer posts on this blog regarding in-house technology will be replayed there, making them available to the 5,000 members of the LinkedIn group of that name as well as to other readers.

Of possible use for general counsel and other in-house professionals, many blogs concentrate on compliance-related topics, which includes ethics, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and corporate governance (See my post of Oct. 7, 2008: ethics with 29 references; June 11, 2008: compliance with 33 references; and

Aug. 17, 2008: corporate governance with 18 references.) Here are 16 of them I have located (but have not examined); I welcome guidance as to other blogs I have missed.

Business Ethics Blog (Chris MacDonald)