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My speculation is that the degree of competition in an industry strongly determines the industry’s legal intensity. Benchmarks such as those on personnel and dollars per unit of revenue will vary between industries because of greater or legal competition.

You can measure competition by the number of firms (both public and private) operating in the industry. For manufacturers, some researchers use the Census of Manufacturers as their data source. They measure manufacturing intensity through the ratio of the dollar value of manufacturing companies in the industry and the total dollar value of shipments in the segment or industry.

Once enough benchmark data is collected for industries, and better for segments within industries, it will be possible to test my hypothesis (See my post of Dec. 14, 2005: legal intensity of regulation; Nov. 24, 2007: intensity equals complexity, volume, and velocity; Aug. 13, 2008: R&D spending correlates to total legal spend; Feb. 24, 2009: intellectual capital of a company and legal intensity; March 2, 2009: industries vary in level of legal issues; Dec. 3, 2009: R&D intensity and legal costs; Aug. 3, 2010: little difference based on legal intensity in law firm assessments; Aug. 16, 2010: technological and competitive aspects of industries; Dec. 27, 2010: benchmark data on inter-industry differences; and April 3, 2011: litigation in relation to growth and competition.).

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Earlier I wrote about the managerial decisions at the disposal of general counsel regarding lawyers who report to them. Each decision has limits but together they comprise power (See my post of April 5, 2011: 12 aspects of power.). Much material appears on this blog regarding each of those indicia of power.

Here is the list with a metapost or two for most. A general counsel has the power to:

(1) promote (See my post of May 4, 2009: in-house counsel career paths with 15 references.).

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A conference scheduled to take place in New York City on April 27-29, is called the Litigation Finance & Investment Summit. The agenda includes speakers from organizations that are involved in litigation financing. Listed below in alphabetical order by company are fifteen of them according to the brochure for the conference.

Wayne Rubin, Managing Partner, 5 Star Legal Funding; Bill Tilley, CEO, Amicus Capital Services; Jeffrey Shachat, ARCA Capital; John Fernando, Boston Finance Group; Christopher Bogart, CEO, Burford Group, Aaron Katz, Director, Credit Suisse Securities; Brendan M. Hare, Partner, Hare & Associates; Richard W. Fields, CEO, Juridica Capital Management; David Desser, Managing Director, Juris Capital; Alan Zimmerman, CEO, LawFinanceGroup; Peter Blanton, Managing Director, Macquarie Capital (USA); Gary Chodes, CEO, Oasis Legal Finance; Howard Liberson, President, Trial & Appellate Resources; Ray Chan, TTM Capital; and Ralph J. Sutton, Managing Director, Validity Capital Partners.

To get a copy of the brochure or to learn more about this Infocast conference, write Erin Dolleris. To read more on this blog about litigation financing, you can start with my first metapost (See my post of May 21, 2009: lawsuit financing by groups with 8 references.) and then move to more recent items (See my post of July 7, 2009: data from Juridica Investments; July 7, 2009 #3: additional players in litigation funding; Sept. 29, 2009 #2: contingent fee financing; Oct. 12, 2009: top 17 litigation funding firms; Dec. 23, 2009: publicly traded companies include two; June 15, 2010: detail on Burford and Juridica and Rand study; June 25, 2010: law firm offers funding of a sort; and Jan. 23, 2011: a UK funder.).

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Little Bets: How breakthrough ideas emerge from small discoveries, by Peter Sims (Free Press 2011), has much to stimulate entrepreneurs and business people. Its theme also pertain to general counsel.

Sims creates a compelling argument for “little bets,” which are “concrete actions taken to discover, test, and develop ideas that are achievable and affordable” (at 8). General counsel can place little bets and thereby more confidently, securely and rapidly improve how their departments operate. Fundamental to little bets are experimentation, improvisation, immersion in the real world, problem definition (especially with design thinking), flexibility in direction, and constant repetition of these cycles (at 13-14).

Examples of little bets for general counsel could include an LPO pilot of limited range, agreement to telecommuting for two paralegals, document assembly software for one type of agreement, a fixed fee deal with a small firm – little bets can be taken everywhere you look.

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A hazard for me as I select and write about something on LawDepartmentManagementBlog is that I am lured by novelty and frontiers. The nuts-and-bolts of management for law departments – think of substantive oversight, workflow, adequacy of coverage, bench strength as a few examples – are less enthralling to write about even though general counsel want ideas to help them with blocking and tackling. They can’t very often try razzle-dazzle new plays.

My idiosyncratic interests lead me to touch down on lots of new ideas. I enjoy concepts I have not thought about and the frontier exploits of law departments. To critics, that “intellectual tourism” may be far from the fundamental, meat-and-potatoes concerns that dominate running a legal team. To fans, I bring to their attention something they had not known or thought about in the context of law department effectiveness; you are still reading this blog.

Truth be told, I blog about what interests me and in a style that both appeals to me and lets me try to write better. To average three posts a day for more than six years and still get up in the morning looking forward to writing means there are rewards: curiosity satisfied, catholic range, a maturing prose style, and an accumulation of material online that may improve a little bit how well the legal industry operates.

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The March 2011 Issues & Insights from Corporation Service Company discusses contract management systems. One of the capabilities of a good one, and presumably part of what CSC’s software offers, is the automatic integration of e-mails to the contract in the system the e-mail refers to. This must entail a way to tag e-mails, whether manually by the in-house lawyer who sends the message or in the background by software, so that the system puts together the contract or a pointer to it in the contract management system and the e-mail.

As I read that I imagined matter codes embedded in all emails so that their contracts are stored appropriately. Filters in G-Mail allow me to do some of that and I suspect Outlook and other systems can do the same. The flow to the contract management system follows logically. To read more or take a look at Issues & Insights, write Jen Mailander at CSC.

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A short white-paper by Mike Lipps, managing director for LexisNexis of corporate counsel solutions, explains a study that pitted UTBMS coding against his company’s proprietary technology for bill review. According to the paper, CounselLink “processes more than $3 billion of invoices annually through SmartReview.” That automated bill review software does not require any codes in matter records since it relies on scrutinizing the text of the invoices.

The head-to-head study included 15 law departments and 25 law firms and from them a sample of 100 invoices that totaled nearly $3 million. First, the researchers used standard billing guidelines and UTBMS codes to review the invoices; next, they used the same guidelines and SmartReview. The paper asserts that from more than 8,400 timekeeper entries and 1,100 expense entries, the UTBMS review adjusted 0.4 percent of the charges whereas the SmartReview software adjusted more than 18 percent. I could not find the paper on the website, but I have a copy from a friend of mine.

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Will there someday soon be an app cottage industry for matter management systems? (Feb. 1, 2011)

Vendors, law firms, user groups or collectives of departments might fund the development of apps.

If the costs of lawyers have risen have risen at the same rate as other artisan-type professional services, where’s the beef? (Feb. 4, 2011)

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It sounds like a tricky situation for the general counsel, what with solicitation rules and non-compete agreements and unfair competition lurking. In reality, the general counsel may be on the side of the angels and should feel free to discuss the likelihood that work will follow the partner or remain with the partner’s former firm (See my post of Nov. 29, 2010: move work when partner moves with 6 references.).
https://www.lawdepartmentmanagementblog.com/if-the-respected-partner-leaves-for-another-firm-the-partners-performance-is-likely-to-suffer/

That’s my view on Attorney at Work, April 6, 2011, where just this month I became a guest columnist. To read the complete discussion click here for Attorney at Work.

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Courtesy of World Trademark Rev., June/July 2010 at 36, law departments that have significant trademark activity can see the top ten trademark service providers. The ten cited most by respondents to the WTR survey were also ranked. In declining order they were Edital, Onscope, Corporate Service Company (CSC), CT Corsearch, Computer Packages inc, Thomson CompuMark, CPA Global, Avantiq, SMD markeur, and Patrix. On a scale of 10 high to 1 low, these firms ranged from 8.5 at the top score to 6.43 at the bottom.

The specialized niche of trademark-related services has many contenders jostling in it (See my post of Aug. 19, 2009: trademarks with 33 references.).