Articles Posted in Thoughts/Observations

A member of DuPont’s IT organization who supports the company’s legal department wrote recently in Peer to Peer, Vol. 24, Nov. 2008 at 71, about protecting equipment. A poster that she had just seen dramatically warned people not to leave their computer unattended. “No excuses! Lock all laptops!” She makes an excellent point.

Everyone who works in a law department ought to be especially vigilant about equipment security, because some of the company’s most confidential information passes through their hands and computers. Security of information in legal offices is a concern; the security of laptops while traveling is an even more serious concern. In that regard, “approximately 3,000 [laptops] are found unattended every week at eight of the largest airports in Europe,” according to IP Rev., Winter 2008/09 at 25.

On Feb. 3, 2008 I published this blog’s first “embedded metapost” (See my post of Feb. 3, 2008: if more than 5 posts, and with URL; May 13, 2007: I ask if metaposts are useful to readers.). Since then I have accumulated and published 24 of them for a total of 240 embedded metaposts.

Close to 235 posts have referenced one or more of those embedded metaposts (See my post of Aug. 12, 2008: more than 100 metaposts on this blog.). Those 240 metaposts average 14.9 back references (median is 11) and include a total of 3,551 back references.

Pushing the envelope even farther, I published a hyperpost, a topic with more than five metaposts (See my post of Jan. 2, 2009: 8 metaposts collected.). I keep thinking that I will run out of topics to aggregate but neither my fascination with collecting nor topics that permit it has flagged.

Although the amounts paid to outside counsel by law departments may decline in line with a general drop-off in corporate activity, what remains of that spend may increase unjustifiably. In a cynical and untrusting frame of mind I conjured up inflated bills for to the following four reasons:

1. Padded bills (See my post of April 8, 2008: billing padding with 8 references.).

2. Overworked matters, which is different than bill padding. Bill padding I define as fraud – no work was done but hours were plugged in, whereas overworking matters means the time was actually put in, but it was not necessary or contributory.

Other LPO-related blogs. I should add a couple more: LPO News by Anirudh Bhati, who is a professional working in the Legal Process Outsourcing Industry and Legal Process Outsourcing by Mark Ross (See my post of Jan. 18, 2009: 15 blogs about legal offshoring.).

Salaries paid Indian legal graduates are minuscule by US standards. “LPO companies employ Indian legal graduates with starting salaries of about $7,000,” says Reena Sengupta in the RSG India Report 2008, according to Legal Strat. Rev., Winter 2008/2009 at 8.

Three conferences outside the US for in-counsel. The Asian Corporate Counsel Summit, on March 23, 25, 2009 in Hong Kong, the European Forum for In-House Counsel, April 23-24, 2009 in Brussels, and Unternehmensjuristentage (In-House Counsel Summit), Feb. 17-19, 2009 in Berlin, Germany. If any reader has material from these conferences they would like to share with me, it would be my pleasure to write blog posts about what I glean from them (See my post of Nov. 16, 2008: conferences aimed at inside lawyers with 11 references.).

For about 15 intense, fast-paced minutes I regaled a group of 75+ bloggers and wanna-be bloggers on the various tools I use to find out more about who visits this blog. My PowerPoint slides may give readers some ideas for their own blogs, a greater appreciation for blogs on legal management, and some insights into the small universe of Law Department Management Blog (See my post of Sept. 25, 2008: this blog and posts about it, with 41 references.).

I welcome any suggestions of other tools I should try that would improve my blog or help me better understand its reach. For example, I may try ExtremeTracker or FeedBlitz. Click here for my presentation.

Courtesy of Monica Bay of Legal Technology News, there is a short clip of me on the first day of Legal Tech. I thought it was such a kick to do this, and to market this blog to the masses. Obviously, my make-up person, wardrobe assistant, gaff lighter, script writer, and elocution coach failed miserably.

For my three minutes of fame worthy of gentle mockery, use the code below, since I do not know how to upload it for TypePad!

To provoke readers, and to push myself to organize my own thoughts, I hereby anoint ten management concepts as the most crucial for general counsel to ponder and apply.

The top five are Client, Risk, Quality, Productivity, and Talent:

Client – without an entity there is no need for an in-house lawyer.  Once there is, the client is what the in-house lawyer serves;

Here are the most recent embedded metaposts with URL links (See my post of Jan.13, 2009: Part XXIII.), each of which shows the number of references cited within them.

1. Blogs on law department management (See my post of Jan. 28, 2009: law department management blawgs with 11 references.).

2. Compliance reporting (See my post of Jan. 20, 2009: reporting lines of compliance function with 11 references.).

During the 30 days ending on January 22, 2009, Feedburner reported the following 19 “Uncommon Uses” of this blog, LawDepartmentManagementBlog.com. “Uncommon uses” are accesses of the feed through sites not universal to all of FeedBurner’s feed users, such as its own website or other sites that post our feeds. During that period the blog had many, many more hits from Law.com but I have aggregated the oddities from that site. Other sites that refer to this blog I have checked off as not “uncommon uses” so they do not appear here.

I include this information to give a sense of the wide-ranging readership of this blog and the number of sites that publicize it (ABA Journal, Wall St. Journal, Martindale-Hubble, Legal OnRamp, Forbes, Twitter and Facebook). Drupal101 is mysterious; I think it is an online search tool. RTable is run by a professor at Duke.

Uncommon Uses Hits

Someone visited this blog recently after a Google search of the term “law department best practices – Canada.” I smiled at the assumption that Canadian law departments might have unique management hurdles or solutions. Laws, judicial institutions, and the legal industry vary enormously country by country, but management goals of general counsel remain basically the same. Their techniques to select and instruct counsel, motivate staff, adopt technology, and please clients translate easily into every language and need no passport. Perhaps 95 percent of what I cover on this blog, even though much of it emanates from US-based departments, applies to legal departments worldwide, even those in Canada.

That said, I have written frequently about non-US law departments. Some of my posts step back and look at law departments of an entire region (See my post of June 15, 2005: Asian compensation levels; July 25, 2005: US vs European departments; and April 18, 2005: European move toward risk management.).

Other posts have been on Europe generally (See my post of April 18, 2005: European general counsel becoming more strategic; May 14, 2005: formal complaint mechanisms; Sept. 5, 2005: costs per hour; Oct. 29, 2005: some benchmarks; Oct. 31, 2005: expectations of outside counsel; Feb. 12, 2006: employment litigation; and June 15, 2005: compensation for general counsel).