Law Department Management Blog
Twenty industries rankedby “legal efficiency” based on the world’s largest benchmark survey (Dec. 1, 2010)
On lawyers per billion dollars of revenue, legal staff per billion, internal spending as a percentage of revenue, and external spending as a percentage of revenue, I ranked 20 industries by their median benchmarks.
The “first call” is free as part of a major refiguring of ITV’s outside counsel panel (Dec. 5, 2010)
Media company ITV negotiated a free ‘first call’ with its partner firms.
Tradeoffs of risk and standardization, but the advantage easily goes to standardization (Dec. 5, 2010)
When you standardizes a process, you can sometimes increase risks, but its’ worth it.
Ten relevant concepts not enough in law department management discussions (Dec. 6, 2010)
Ten management concepts that ought to have more currency among enlightened managers within law departments, including concept visualization, correlations, culture, decision analysis, and demographics.
Six primary drivers of total legal spending (Dec. 7, 2010)
Six candidates for what pumps up total legal spending for an industry, starting with heavy regulation and significant R&D.
Five reasons why globally dispersed US law departments might have lower total legal spending (Dec. 11, 2010)
Counter-intuitively, it may be that US law departments staffed around the world spend less on internal and external costs, in terms of revenue, than geographically centralized departments.
Legal departments viewed as reducing transaction costs or increasing resource benefits: two theories of economists (Dec. 22, 2010)
Transaction-costs and resource-based views.
Text analysis software that summarizes federal legislation holds promise for other aids to in-house counsel (Dec. 24, 2010)
XML (eXtensible Markup Language), IBM’s Many Bills website, and speculation.
Reward good decision processes more than outcomes, which are often influenced strongly by factors other than the person who decides (Dec. 26, 2010)
Since good managers can suffer from bad outcomes as much as bad managers can enjoy undeserved outcomes, take these steps to focus on their decision processes.