Law Department Management Blog
Scenario planning and Delphi process. Having written previously on scenario planning (See my posts of Dec. 9 and Dec. 20, 2005.), I should give credit to its inventor (or at least earlier populizer), Herman Kahn. In the late 1950’s at RAND, Kahn created or applied the technique to his thinking about nuclear war (Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 30, Winter 2006 at 16).
That same article explained that in 1964 two RAND researchers introduced the Delphi technique (See my post of Dec. 9, 2005 on that technique.).
Patent litigation costs in 2000: more than $4 billion. Constance E. Bagley, Winning Legally: How to Use the Law to Create Value, Marshall Resources, and Manage Risks (Harv. Bus. School Press 2005) at 127 cites a NY Times article (Nov. 11, 2001, Sec. 3 at 1) when she writes that “patent litigation cost American companies more than $4 billion in 2000…” (See my posts of Nov. 11, 2005 on Microsoft’s expenditures and Nov. 27, 2005 on why many patent metrics are available.)
UK CLE requirements. The Law Society, the overseer and representative body of the UK legal profession (its ABA) “requires all 96,757 lawyers practising in England and Wales to undertake 16 hours of self-certified professional development training each year.” Fin. Times, Nov. 14, 2005 at S6. What happens with the Scottish and Irish lawyers? I assume this requirement includes in-house lawyers. Note that the UK has about one-tenth the number of lawyers as practice in the US. (See my posts of May 10, 2005 on payments for CLE and Jan. 20, 2006 on funding CLE.)
Reverse bids. Helen Pudlin, general counsel of PNC Bank, has conducted several reverse auctions in 2004 and 2005. “It’s the wave of the future for high-volume work that will be standardized.” Legal Intelligencer, Vol. 232, Oct. 31, 2005 (Gina Passarella) (See my post today about my article on law department auctions.)
Data visualization software. A post on Joy London’s Excited Utterances (Dec. 20, 2005) discusses Clifford Chance’s knowledge management system which provides, among other capabilities, a graphical view of the firm’s documents and experts.
Directors’ compensation in a law department’s budget. A piece in the Economist, (Economist, Vol. 378, Jan. 21, 2006 at 61) reports a study published the same month by the Corporate Library, a governance oversight group. The study found that the median total compensation of large companies’ groups of outside directors was just over $800,000. If a sum that size plops into the law department’s budget, it makes a significant splash. (See my post of Jan. 27, 2006 about three other unusual items covered by some inside budgets.)