Law Department Management

Legal Suite, a leading matter management system abroad, coming to the United States

Yesterday I received a press release from Legal Suite. It was notable for its level of disclosure so I offer two extracts from it. “Legal Suite has already helped numerous clients in North America, across a number of industry sectors:...

More concepts that all managers in legal departments should feel comfortable with (Part 5 of a series)

As I dig deeper into concepts, processes and tools of law departments, I fear spreading my net too widely. What makes the list and why leaves me unsure, yet it seems worthwhile to make the effort and think about the...

The bedrock of what every law department does

Having never defined “law department,” a term that astute readers may have noted makes the occasional cameo appearance on this blog, I thought about what attributes a corporate function absolutely needs to have to qualify as a law department. Three...

Taxing your brain on management taxonomies

Some of those who think and write about law departments create taxonomies to classify what they study. A taxonomy creates superordinate categories that are similar on a number of different underlying dimensions. “Structure of legal departments,” for instance, allows a...

General counsel may fancy a client satisfaction survey, but will they carry it out?

Corp. Counsel, Dec. 2011 at 76, reports on a survey of 107 senior in-house lawyers that was conducted late last year. Many of the respondents complained that clients perceive the legal department to be reactive at best and a roadblock...

Odd data about the size of Apple’s seemingly small law department in 2007

An interview in Corp. Counsel, Dec. 2011 at 17, with the former general counsel of Apple describes how challenged the law department was when the company launched the iPhone in 2007. Dan Cooperman was then in charge of the “100-lawyer...

Combinatorial math, and its application to task, structure and law firm arrangements

The more ideas and possible mixes and matches a manager has available to choose from, the more permutations there are. Obvious, yes, but do you know the mathematics of that increasing complexity? Think about a process that has 10 tasks...

A Q-sort methodology to evaluate outside counsel guidelines quantitatively

Academic researchers sometimes use a methodology referred to as a Q-sort to translate complex qualitative observations into quantitative metrics. An article in Acad. Mgt. Rev., Dec. 2011 at 1209, explains research that applied the technique. It occurred to me that...

Better to base benchmarks on Return on Assets than on share-based figures

At various times I have written about benchmark metrics based on the market capitalization of a company, earnings per share, total shareholder return, or return on equity. An article in Acad. Mgt. Rev., Dec. 2011 at 1126, faults such stock-market...

Spinning off from an estimate of what clients pay big law firms for litigation

Burford Group, a lawsuit finance outfit, analyzed figures gathered by American Lawyer magazine. Those figures appeared in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Jan. 10, 2012 at 42: “the 200 largest U.S. law firms bill about $33 billion annually related to litigation.” I will...