Law Department Management Blog
If only a lawyer’s sexual orientation was not even worth mentioning! The General Counsel of Constellation Energy, Charles Berardesco, is profiled in Diversity & The Bar, Sept./Oct. 2010 at 46. The piece makes much of his being gay and public about it (See my post of March 17, 2006: gay and lesbian lawyers; Jan. 14, 2007: Accenture’s survey of law firms; Aug. 4, 2007: NYC’s Office of Corporation Counsel; and April 16, 2009: the Corporate Equality Index.).
Review every word of every contract? In a profile called “Quotes to Practice By,” from the ACC Docket, Oct. 2010 at 22, we read this gem from a general counsel: “To this day, I still review every word of every contract to make sure it really needs to be there.” Surely you jest?
Deluge of articles and student notes on offshoring. Cassandra Burke Robertson, A Collaborative Model of Offshore Legal Outsourcing, Case Western School of Law Working Paper 2010-35 (Nov. 2010), cites in two footnotes a total of eight law review articles and six student notes. The 59-page paper cites many others but I did not count them. Most of the articles concern ethical issues perceived to be associated with the provision of offshore legal services. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1705505
“Paraprofessionals” as a term and some examples. A benchmark survey for technology companies used the term paraprofessional. The four types they reported on were patent agents, contract negotiators, stock plan administrators, and other paralegals. I could imagine litigation support analysts in the category as well as librarians. It is the level of member in a law department with more responsibilities than admins (secretaries), receptionists, and file clerks, and data entry staff.
More benchmark data on total legal spending as a percentage of revenue. On the website of ALM Intelligence, one of the sample pages for its survey of law departments shows median total legal spend (TLS) as a percentage of revenue for four revenue brackets. Less than $100 million in revenue was 1.9%. Between $100 million and $999 million it was 0.330% while $1 billion to $4.9 billion dropped a bit to 0.327 and above $5 billion even further to 0.148%. The trend down with size is confirmed once again.