The blog has extruded ten more embedded metaposts with URL links (See my post of Sept. 16, 2008: Part XVIII.), each of which shows the number of references cited within them.
1. Annual reviews (See my post of Sept. 21, 2008: annual reviews and evaluations, with 12 references.)
2. Blog, law department management (See my post of Sept. 25, 2008: this blog and posts about it, with 41 references.)
Preparing to write something about Cisco, I rummaged through my past posts. Amazed, I found 30 that cite the company’s law department (See my post of June 30, 2006: much publicity about Cisco’s law department.). That is 25 percent more than the references I collected for General Electric (See my post of Nov. 19, 2007: collects 24 posts about GE’s legal department.).
Many posts have to do with techniques of outside-counsel cost control (See my post of Sept. 14, 2005: fixed fees at Cisco; May 26, 2007: multi-year terms of fixed fees; March 9, 2007: competitively bids patent work; Nov. 5, 2007: Cisco and Fenwick & West; Nov. 24, 2007: service level agreements with firms that work on fixed fees; Dec. 5, 2005: virtual law firms; Jan. 6, 2006: “corporate captive” for LPO services; Nov. 5, 2007: cash incentive for a firm to reduce costs; and May 4, 2007: Brad Blickstein and Cisco saving fees of outside counsel.).
The software tools available in Cisco’s legal department are many (See my post of Feb. 6, 2007: document assembly; April 8, 2007: rules-based drafting tools; June 20, 2007: document management system; June 27, 2006: internal law-department blog; June 17, 2008: Cisco’s High Tech Policy Blog; June 27, 2006: portal for its applications; June 16, 2006: online contracts and e-signatures; and Aug. 28, 2008: telepresence rooms.).
I have often written about this blog (See my post of Feb. 20, 2006: first anniversary and 1,000 posts; Feb. 20, 2007: two years and 2,000 posts; Feb. 5, 2008: third anniversary comments; Dec. 5, 2007: my pride in this blog; March 30, 2008: Law Department Management selected for Forbes blogroll; Sept. 22, 2005: difficulties in assigning posts to categories; May 13, 2007: cross references and metaposts; June 16, 2007: no hyperlinks to my cross-references; Jan. 18, 2008 #2: references to previous posts; Jan. 4, 2008: third-order information; Feb. 24, 2008: information architecture of this blog; Sept. 9, 2008: more ways to set up post categories; Sept.18, 2007: humor; and Aug. 12, 2008: vocabulary.).
I have asked for questions and submissions (See my post of Aug. 10, 2007: an unsuccessful contest.) and implored readers not to lurk and remain silent (See my post of Oct. 26, 2007: silence from blog readers; Feb. 16, 2008: a shout out to those who have commented; and May 5, 2008: ask me for topic collections.).
Quite a few times I have shared my rational for content and the development of this blog (See my post of Nov. 5, 2006: various ways I think about its concepts; Aug. 21, 2005: consolidated posts on this blog by category; Sept. 22, 2008: concepts and hierarchies; May 4, 2007 attack on blawgs by a magazine publisher; Nov. 13, 2007: publications I have sourced; Sept. 7, 2008: the bulk of this blog; Nov. 24, 2007: first use of “artiblog” here; Oct. 16, 2006: this blog’s value in three dimensions; Jan. 4, 2008: disappearance of posts on writing well; Sept. 3, 2006: gratitude to my assistant; Jan. 10, 2008 #2: harmonics from the ideas of this blog; and July 30, 2008: my views as a blogger on press releases.).
Equine-imity: spurring horse metaphors until I am hoarse. Equipage leaves me cold, but when I saddle up I write/ride with a herd of horse metaphors. At a gallop I will reel off my posts that have been horsing around (See my post of Dec. 23, 2005: racehorses in a paddock and 11 double entendres; Dec. 4, 2006: horses for courses and transferring cases; Sept. 12, 2008: change horses in mid-stream; Aug. 28, 2006: beating a dead horse; July 31, 2006: horse equals knight in chess; Nov. 30, 2007 #3: price serves as a whipping horse; April 1, 2007: horseshoe litigation; Aug. 4, 2007: workhorses in a law firm should present; and Aug. 10, 2007: horsepower and virtual law firms.). I never look a good horse trope in the mouth nor give them an hors d’oeuvres.
Collective action on diversity. DuPont has teamed with Royal Dutch Shell and Wal-Mart to publish for the first time a list of minority-owned law firms the companies have used. The three have also sent a directory of the firms to about 100 in-house lawyers and they’ve also launched a Web site (See my post of June 17, 2008: diversity with 29 references.).
Two more associations of law firms, one employment and one Latin American. An ad for Worklaw™Network in ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Sept. 2008 at 107, caught my eye. Then I mentioned The Bomchil group as a sponsor at an upcoming trade show (See my post of Sept. 21, 2008: ACC Conference, a network of 19 Latin American firms.).
Since my earliest months of this blog, about three-and-a-half years ago, the 16 categories to which I assign posts have remained stable. Perhaps I am too lazy to rethink them; perhaps most of what I write feels to me to fit comfortably into one of those categories; perhaps the categories are so broad and crude that it makes little difference to anyone (See my post of March 4, 2007: categories on this blog by number of visitors; Jan. 13, 2008: Technorati details on categories; and Feb. 4, 2008: information architecture of this blog.).
Still, other ways of slicing and dicing the ideas in my posts might be more fertile and spur more insights. For example, categories relevant to law department management could include complexity, economics, evolution and change, hierarchies, information flows, productivity, quality, resources, risk, and specialization (See my post of May 19, 2006 #1: all law department activities viewed as information flows, information processes, or information systems.).
What do you think is a plausible change in some aspect of how law departments will operate five years from now?
If you email me a good idea, I will tip my hat to you on this blog, if not credit you in some research I am conducting with Legal OnRamp and the American Lawyer. Also, if several people write, I will create a small database showing the frequency of ideas.
Please make use of ten more embedded metaposts with URL links (See my post of Aug. 28, 2008: Part XVII.) along with the number of posts or other references cited within them.
1. Budgets, internal and not outside counsel (See my post of Sept. 9, 2008: internal budgets with 27 references.)
2. Data visualization (See my post of May 7, 2008: methods to portray data with 9 references and 22 cited in one of them.)
More explanation about standard deviations and Bayesian statistics. There’s a 95 percent chance that normally distributed data will fall within two standard deviations of its mean. When statisticians say that a result is statistically significant, they are really just saying that some outcome is more than two standard deviations away from the expected average. Given a mean and standard deviation Excel can calculate the likelihood that a number will fall within any given range of values (See my post of Nov. 6, 2006: basic explanation of standard deviation and its importance.). Bayes equation tells us how to update an initial probability given a new piece of evidence (See my post of June 16, 2007: Bayes and in-house counsel.).
Difference between “litigation” and “lawsuit.” “Litigation” is the process of bringing and pursuing or defending a “lawsuit.” Now I know. Do you agree?
The Plimsoll Line for law departments. Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (Oxford 1999) at 187, acquainted me with the Plimsoll Line. “They are on ships the world over to save the lives of sailors by showing the level between safe and dangerous loading.” We could use Plimsoll Lines for such decisions as how much work to assign to an in-house lawyer and another for how much to intervene in the operations of law firms (See my post of Aug. 4, 2008: interventions with three posts and 40 references.).
Not that any reader has asked “How big is Law Department Management Blog?” but I wanted to know.
As of September 3rd, my three Word files of past posts – including tables of contents for headers, and indices for sources and proper nouns – total 753,347 words. The 3,538 posts would print as 1,298 pages at half-inch margins all around. Nestled among that throng of posts, organized into 16 categories, are 170 metaposts (See my post of May 13, 2007: cross-references and metaposts; Jan. 24, 2008: information architecture; Feb. 25, 2008: third anniversary thoughts; and Aug. 12, 2008: more than 100 metaposts.).
Thus, three-quarters of a million words have poured into this blog since February 2005, 42 months ago, means I have been bloggedly churning out for 1,277 days nearly 600 words a day.
Please make use of ten more embedded metaposts with URL links (See my post of Aug. 21, 2008: Part XVI.) along with the number of posts or other references cited within them.
1. Compensation by level in the department (See my post of Aug. 27, 2008: compensation by levels with 18 references.)
2. Delegation within the law department (See my post of Aug. 28, 2008: delegation within a law department with 14 references.)
Law Department Management Blog