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As part of my series, here are the comments of Rob Thomas, for years the voice and pen of Serengeti: “Serengeti was founded in 2001 with ten employees. It arose from the ashes of ELF Technologies, a legal website company that failed for lack of funding in the aftermath of the Dotcom Bubble in 2000. ELF had developed Serengeti Tracker and gained about a dozen users, all of which were enthusiastic supporters. Ten of us decided to buy the company assets out of foreclosure, kept Serengeti going, added new features, and quickly ramped up new customers. Serengeti’s unique offering of both matter management and e-billing in a single online system, its ease of use, and its low cost all helped to fuel our rapid growth. It wasn’t long before Serengeti became the most widely used system for managing legal work in the world. Last year, Thomson Reuters acquired Serengeti to be the heart of its new technology platform for corporate law departments and their law firms.”

“Currently more than 420 law departments manage their legal work through Serengeti. Serengeti currently has over 25,000 individual law department users, and over 125,000 law firm and other vendor users, with an average of more than 3,000 new users joining Serengeti every month. We are particularly proud of the adoption of Serengeti across law departments of different sizes, from law departments with solo GCs working on their own, to some of the world’s largest law departments (e.g., American Express, Capital One, Disney, etc.).”

“A couple of weeks ago we released Serengeti Intelligence — which for the first time aggregates live key performance data across the hundreds of companies and thousands of law firms that work in Serengeti. Serengeti users can now compare their own benchmarks with those of their peers related to spending, budgets, rates, allocation of work, etc.”

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ILTA’s 2011 Law Department Technology Survey gathered data in December 2010 on the document management systems used by 54 responding companies. Tops was Autonomy iManage/Interwoven with 15 users (27% of the DMS users), followed by Microsoft Sharepoint (14 users). The remaining five systems were OpenText Livelink/Hummingbird, EMC Documentum, IBM Lotus Notes, FileNet, and Worldox.

Two years before, the same survey attracted 45 respondents and ranked document management systems among the 22 of them who used such systems (See my post of Feb. 13, 2009: ILTA corporate technology survey.). It offered the same seven vendors, albeit with somewhat different names than the recent survey. The DMS’s mentioned back then, with absolute numbers and percentages of the respondent base) were:

Open Text DocsOpen/DB (7, 30%)

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A survey was conducted of UK and global companies that polled their general counsel and company secretaries. A detailed report of the survey’s findings involving board-level information can be found at:the Accelus website of ThomsonReuters.

One finding was that the average corporation surveyed prepares and disseminates nearly 6,000 pages of sensitive material to their board every year, with some companies producing more than 200 board packs per year.” If a Board has 10 members and meets five times a year, then 100 pages per meeting per member actually sounds modest.

A second finding concerned frequencies of how material is shared with board members:

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Paraphrased in a recent profile, the General Counsel of AOL, Julie Jacobs, “sees the role of corporate counsel as establishing trust both inside and outside the company.” She makes other points in the long piece about expectations for inside counsel, but this one made me sit back and try to figure out what she meant.

No doubt, if an executive doesn’t trust a lawyer, either for the accuracy of advice or fundamental loyalty, directness, and ethical compass, then the attorney-client relationship collapses. Essential trust missing, all is lost, but presumably such doubts arise rarely (well, execs may wonder about the sharpness of their internal lawyers but hopefully not their bona fides).

Jacobs may have said something regarding her expectations of her 50-lawyer team about respect and reliability or professional integrity, which got boiled down by the journalist to “trust.” You can decide for yourself from SuperLawyers, Bus. Ed. 2011 at 143. For everyone, your word should be your bond.

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It’s often unfortunate for both a law department and a firm when the department stops using the firm; it’s worse when a department takes away pending matters from a firm but sometimes transitions are justified; it’s downright disastrous when a law department sues a firm for malpractice.

That is what happened eight to ten years ago, as related by Starwood Hotels & Resorts General Counsel, Ken Siegel, in SuperLawyers, Bus. Ed. 2011 at 76. The suit created new law because Siegel claimed breach of contract – “the first time anyone had done so to try to prove legal malpractice.” I wonder whether law firms that sign to indicate their agreement to outside counsel guidelines have accepted contractual risks that had not been present before (See my post of Nov. 8, 2009: malpractice of law firms with 8 references.).

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The Walt Disney Company’s law department has some 350 lawyers companywide. To help keep them all part of the same kingdom, a “couple of years ago, the legal department began having global videoconferences three or four times a year to discuss influential changes in the business, such as emerging technologies.” This quote comes from SuperLawyers, Bus. Ed. 2011 at 18, and its article about Alan Braverman, the veteran general counsel of Disney. As I have written teleconferencing will become the handmaiden of globally distributed lawyers (See my post of June 8, 2011: videoconferences internal to law departments.). Note also that the video updates focus on the company’s operations, not substantive legal developments.

The article also states that Braverman “told his lawyers it’s imperative that each has and plays with a PDA or table computer.” The article does not say what hardware qualifies, since a Blackberry is a PDA nor whether the legal department pays for the device. But I commend the progressive view: these technologies and associated software will grow and glow in the near future (See my post of Oct. 10, 2011: apps and tablets in the future.).

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A recent book states that “when counsel does not act as counsel there are potential issues around professional indemnity insurance and whether or not the indemnity policy will respond.” The quote comes from Benny Tabalujan, ed. Leadership and Management Challenges of In-House Legal Counsel (LexisNexis Australia 2008) at 11. That poses a provocative question for which I wish there were some feedback and input (See my post of April 25, 2009: malpractice and in-house lawyers with 6 references.).

If readers can enlighten me on this subject, I would appreciate it. One part of my ignorance is how many in-house lawyers are covered by professional indemnity insurance (and, the metrics guy in me wants to know what that coverage costs and who pays for it). Another desire would be for some facts and figures about know how often the issue has arisen in recent years.

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A long-time observer of the corporate legal scene in Australia, Peter Turner believes that “Maintaining professional standards and independence in an increasingly tough and unforgiving business environment is perhaps the greatest single challenge that the in-house profession will face in coming years.” Turner is the former CEO of the venerable Australian Corporate Lawyers Association (ACLA) and before that the general counsel of Fosters, so his views cannot be taken lightly. He wrote this for his chapter in Benny Tabalujan, ed. Leadership and Management Challenges of In-House Legal Counsel(LexisNexis Australia 2008) at 10.

Remaining professional as a lawyer counts significantly and poses periodic challenges, I will concede. Even so, as compared to productivity, cost, knowledge of the business, and team contribution, is independence the Achilles heel of in-side lawyers? Do outside counsel tout their supposed independence and objectivity, and make much of the employed lawyer as bending under pressure, as a significant truth or more as a marketing ploy? If business executives want pliant lawyers, why would they see stiff-necked hardliners outside as attractive?

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“Over the years, the cost differential between external and in-house lawyers has narrowed.” This statement by Peter Turner, with no empirical backup, is found in Benny Tabalujan, ed. Leadership and Management Challenges of In-House Legal Counsel (LexisNexis Australia 2008) at 6.

To assess this claim, we need data to support the assertion by Turner, the former CEO of ACLA and general counsel of Fosters. Various surveys that calculate the fully-loaded costs of in-house lawyers, primarily US and Canadian, suggest that internal costs per lawyer hour have been keeping pace with inflation or thereabouts. It is unlikely to me that law firm rate increases have not matched; indeed, I believe hourly billing rates have climbed at a faster pace.

If this gap-closing were true, companies would shift toward more use of outside counsel and that has not happened (See my post of Sept. 28, 2011: my article comparing year-over-year changes in staffing.).

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If you are thinking about participating in the no-cost, quick and confidential online survey, you might want to see whether you have peers of about your size in your industry. Release 4.0 will go out in early December with more than 750 law departments. Covering 22 industries and five revenue ranges, the table that you can download will answer your question immediately.

Click here to download the industry-participant table. Look for your industry row and then the column that includes your revenue for fiscal year 2010.

To take the quick survey and get your report, click on this survey link.