Law Department Management Blog
Corporate credit unions as a cost of lawyers. I had never thought of it, but if a company supports a credit union, its in-house attorneys can benefit. Thus, it is yet another cost that is unlikely to be allocated to the legal department and therefore included in the fully-loaded cost of its lawyers (See my post of Aug. 27, 2008: fully-loaded cost per lawyer hour with 31 references; and March 9, 2009: fully-loaded with 7 more posts.).
Vendors that provide job competency evaluations of legal departments. A tantalizing item from the General Counsel Roundtable in October 2004 says that one of its reports provides “profiles of four vendors that provide job competency evaluations of in-house legal departments.” The notion of a legal department’s core competencies is related, but presumably not the same as the job competencies of an individual in the department (See my post of May 23, 2008: core competence with 12 references.).
Reporting lines of the chief compliance officer as per the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. The Guidelines contain provisions regarding reporting structures of corporate compliance functions. Specifically, many compliance officers and lawyers cite and interpret Sections 8B2.1(b)(2)(A) and (C) and the accompanying commentary. The question under the Guidelines, I read recentlyl, is whether a chief compliance officer needs to report to the board of directors or, alternatively, may report to a committee of the board. In my experience, however, many compliance heads report to the chief legal officer (See my post of Jan. 20, 2009: reporting lines of compliance function with 11 references.).
Rev. Bayes and concept searching in discovery. An article in Lit. Support Today, Aug./Oct. 2009 at 18, discusses concept search in the context of e-discovery. Two of the most popular techniques are “Bayesian Inference” and “Latent Semantic Indexing,” both of which are mathematically based. It is good to see another application of Bayesian statistics to the world of legal department managers (See my post of April 5, 2009: Bayesian statistics with 6 references.)