Articles Posted in Thoughts/Observations

More costs not included in fully-loaded cost calculations. In 2005, Robert Half Legal published its Future Law Office report on “Client Service: Challenges and Strategies.” On page 17, a senior lawyer at Ernst & Young mentions that his company instituted several popular initiatives aimed at retaining good staff. He mentioned a personal concierge and childcare at reduced rates. I mention them because I doubt that the costs of those programs are reflected in the law department’s budget, and thus its fully-loaded cost per hour (See my post of Aug. 27, 2008: fully-loaded cost per lawyer hour with 31 references.).

Vacation rollover policy. In 2005, Robert Half Legal published its Future Law Office report on “Client Service: Challenges and Strategies.” On page 17 we learn that Ernst & Young changed its vacation rollover policy, “allowing employees to carry unused days for a longer period of time or accept cash payments instead.” No general counsel can make such a change, but a general counsel can promote that flexibility (See my post of May 11, 2008: typical vacation patterns.).

Japanese readers of Law Department Management. Having my first visitor from the Douban site, I am proud to announce that my blog is one of six under 优秀的法律博客推荐. All this is explained clearly by the header 首页 我的豆瓣 友邻 小组 读书 电影 音乐 同城 九点 书籍 电影 音乐 博客 小组 成员 活动 and, in case there is any doubt, by the subtitle 搜索.

Yearly paper usage by white-collar workers. The Atlantic, Jan./Feb. 2009 at 67, tells us that white collar workers, at least, are gradually moving toward less paper. In 2000, the average worker – with lawyers included somewhere in the lot – consumed 144.2 pounds of paper. In 2008, the average declined to 129.3 pounds. Toner cartridges in law departments are grateful (See my post of April 27, 2008: power down printers to conserve energy.).

General counsel severance agreements. The Career Development Office at Yale Law School posts a guide for its law students who may be interested in law departments as employers. Under the topic of compensation, it mentions employment contracts for general counsel. “Severance agreements at the GC level are common, though not universal, and provide back-end insurance.” That last term means that the compensation may not be as high as a partner in a law firm would pull down, but there is a golden parachute for the general counsel.

Structure and size of Goldman, Sachs’ law department. A senior lawyer at Goldman, Sachs contributed to the Career Development Office at Yale Law School’s guide for law students who may be interested in working in in-house. In 2007 that lawyer wrote that she worked in a four-lawyer “Department,” part of a 24-lawyer “Division,” which is in turn part of “325-375 in [the] Legal Department worldwide” (See my post of Oct. 19, 2005 #2: 90 lawyers outside the US and staff of more than 400; Dec. 19, 2005: Esta Stecher and “her team of 200 attorneys”.).

My blook on outside counsel managementcould not have been published without a range of software.

Word, the sina qua non software. Every word in the blog and blog owes a debt to Word.

Dragon Naturally Speaking for dictation (See my post of Feb. 23, 2008: dictation with 5 references).

Four times I have attempted to pull together the definitions on this blog of terms that are important for general counsel (See my post of May 3, 2006: 32 definitions; Aug. 26, 2006: ten definitions; and Nov. 26, 2006: 13 more definitions.).

My most recent effort was late in 2007 (See my post of Dec. 5, 2007: nine more definitions.).

Still the legions of defined terms march on, including in their storied ranks an additional 26:

Here are the most recent embedded metaposts with URL links (See my post of Dec.29, 2008: Part XXII.), each of which shows the number of references cited within them.

1. Benchmarks, historically (See my post of Jan. 12, 2009: benchmarks over time with 8 references.).

2. Brainstorm (See my post of Dec. 31, 2008: brainstorming with 5 references.).

R&D spending is seven times total legal spending. For the “Global Innovation 1000,” as defined in an article from strategy + bus., Iss. 53, Winter 2008 at 60, R&D spending as a percentage of sales amounted to 3.7 percent in 2007. Since 0.5 percent is a fairly figure for total legal spending, then the R&D-to-legal spend ratio is about 7.5 to one. These huge companies, with revenues in 2007 of $13.2 trillion, might have had higher legal spending if only because of their technology and innovation intensiveness (See my post of Aug. 21, 2008: total legal spending as a percentage of revenue (TLS/Rev) with 9 references and one metapost; April 6, 2008: benchmark law against other staff groups.).

Pessimism about the efficacy of bonus payments to law firms. A number of my posts have taken up various aspects of law-firm bonuses. I have come to doubt their efficacy. Click here for my article in PDF format.

A mathematical step that allows cross-industry comparisons of benchmarks. “To enable meaningful comparisons across industries, we indexed the R&D spending levels and financial performance metrics of each company against its industry group’s median values.” strategy + bus., Iss. 53, Winter 2008 at 66, explains this step and I think it means to divide each company’s metrics on spend and financial performance by the median figure for their industry group. Doing so would index each company relative to its peers, so all companies share a common measurement (See my post of Jan. 1, 2006: explanation of normalized data.). This step would improve benchmark reports.

This blog has accumulated close to 3,900 posts. For me to be able to find, organize and build on the 14.7MB of material I have written, I need software tools. I tried to learn Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming beyond the macros Word can create easily, but quickly surrendered. I found Laura Miller (“Ms. VBA”) through Elance and retained her. She quickly and effectively wrote VBA macros that let me do several tasks quickly and well. Notably, one macro finds all the back references in each of my posts, which allows me among other things to convert them into the tables in my blook on outside counsel management

Another macro separates the header from the date of the post. Her macros have saved me hundreds of hours and allowed me to do more with my posts. I hope Laura can help me start to use Access for my aggregation.

Thank you, Laura.

Addendum to inside-outside comparison of interdiction. The advantages of inside lawyers and outside lawyers differ in terms of identifying and stopping wrong-doing (See my post of Dec. 27, 2008: Ron Pol quadrants *1.). My point on one perspective was that “I give a strong edge to the partner, because putting your job as inside counsel on the line to blow the whistle on a powerful executive deters you much more than the risk a partner faces of losing part of her legal fees in the future.” Ron Pol wrote with a thoughtful point: “This edge is perhaps less than it once was. With large law firms especially, and modern compensation models based more on individual earnings than traditional lockstep, individual partners face greater pressures to be ‘team players’, narrowing the gap between inside and outside counsel’s willingness to interdict/prevent wrongdoing.” Ron also gave the email of the author of the original article. skim@swlaw.edu

US legal outsourcing projected to reach $2 billion by 2013. Based on a recent survey and “some conservative assumptions, five years from now Ron Friedman on Dec. 9 estimates that U.S. corporate law departments will spend about 3% of their budget on legal outsourcing. This translates to US legal process outsourcing (LPO) spending in 2013 of almost $2 billion.” Ron Friedman posted this on Dec. 9, 2008. I mention this item both for its estimate of the LPO market and its implication that US law departments will spend in 2013 about $60 billion on, presumably, outside expenses.

FASB proposes a controversial requirement to disclose forecasts of maximum exposures to individual lawsuits. The Financial Accounting Standards board has shaken general counsel around the country by its proposed changes to statements No. 5 and No. 141(R). “The new rules would require a company to provide its best forecast of the maximum possible exposure to loss from litigation or the impact of mergers.” An article in the ABA J., Vol. 95, Jan. 2009 at 12, describes the firestorm of opposition to the change. Without knowing much about this area, it certainly seems that the disclosures would be layered with disclaimers and would have to give inflated guesses (See my post of Nov. 9, 2009: FASB rule change regarding expensing legal fees.).

A dream I have is that every back reference on this blog (“See my post of Dec. 31, 2008: something.)” is a back reference)) were hyperlinked to the previous post and every post shows at the bottom the posts later on that cite it – forward references. This soup of ideas would be immediately navigable.

More than ease of movement, such linkages would allow me to ferret out genealogies of posts – what posts relate to each other and how closely. To get a feel for this mapping, I did a small one. I took the final three posts in my Productivity category of my first 3,000 posts. Two posts were on Feb. 7, 2008 and one was on Feb. 4. One post had four back references, which together had one back reference, as well as one forward reference. A second post had six back references, which had three of their own, and one forward reference. The third post (Feb. 4) had five back references, which in turn referred back to a total of four posts, and it had two forward references. (I noted only two instances where a second generation post referred to a first generation post.)

Being a quant jock, I assigned five points to each first generation back reference or forward reference, and three points to each second generation reference (where a first generation reference post cites another post). On that basis, the first productivity post scored 28 (4*5 for 1st generation back references, plus 1*3 for second generation, plus 1*5 for first forward reference). The second productivity post scored 44 and the third scored 27. Now I have a handle on how to describe my “postal community” and to compare one post to another on number and relatedness of predecessors and successors.

Here are the most recent embedded metaposts with URL links (See my post of Dec. 16, 2008: Part XXI.), each of which shows the number of references cited within them.

1. Beauty contests (See my post of Dec. 21, 2008: beauty contests with 8 references cited.).

2. Bill auditors (See my post of Dec. 27, 2008: bill auditors with 15 references.).