Law Department Management Blog
It is hard for this blogger to escape US-centrism, given my background and primarily domestic consulting history. Aside from whatever blinders I wear, I do believe that law departments outside the United States have the same management concerns, perspectives, tools, and measures. Much of the time, general counsel of every country, language and industry face similar challenges of management.
National differences exist. For example, the absence of paralegals or the lack of attorney-client privilege or the reporting lines of general counsel. Thus, when I read that approximately half of the in-house lawyers in the Netherlands had never practiced in a law firm, the point was made yet again: amid the international similarities of operational issues and solutions for law departments there yet remain many variations. The Dutch data is reported in the European Lawyer, Sept. 2010 at 32. In this case, I doubt that as high as ten percent of in-house lawyers in America missed the joy of working for a law firm.