To supplement some earlier posts that discuss aspects of expert witnesses (See my posts of May 17, 2006 about the industry; Oct. 19, 2005 regarding patent experts; and March 20, 2007 on the cottage industry generally), I have listed some online sites that may be useful. These references came from the website of the Internet Legal Research Group, and I have not checked all of them for currency or accuracy.

American Forensic Medical Specialists
Community of Science
Experts.Com (The Noble Group)
ExpertLaw.com
ExpertWitness.com
Expert Witness Info on the Internet
Hieros Gamos' Expert Testimony Index
Legal Expert Resources Network
North American Medical Jurisprudence
National Directory of Expert Witnesses (Claims Providers of America)
PsyBar, Psychological/Psychiatric Experts
Seamless WebSite's ExpertPages.com
USC Experts Directory
University of Wisconsin-Madison Experts Database
Washburn's List of Expert Witnesses and Consultants
Yahoo! Directory B2B Law - Expert Witnesses

A profile of Peter Bevan, group general counsel of British Petroleum for the past 15 years, which ran in Law Dept Quart., Vol. 2, May-July 2006 at 41. The profile states that there are approximately 400 lawyers worldwide in BP’s group legal function.

More pertinently, “The lawyers are based in 36 countries worldwide” and “Individual sub-teams vary in size from one to over seventy lawyers.” Note that the term “sub-teams” may or may not refer to the number of lawyers in those countries, let alone individual locations. But BP must have at least 36 offices with lawyers. Another example of a heavy sprinkling of international offices, drawn from Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, Feb. 2007 at 31, is the law department of Aon Corporation. david_cabria@aon.com Aon scatters approximately 250 professionals in 17 countries (See my post of April 17, 2007 about J&J with its 35 lawyer locations; Oct. 19, 2005 on Goldman Sachs and 90 lawyers outside the US.).

International offices raise many management issues. They include purchase power parity determinations of compensation (See my post of April 22, 2007.); ex pat pay and relocations (See my post of Oct. 10, 2005.), extensive travel obligations for the general counsel, use of local law firms and lawyers who are not native speakers of your language (See my post of April 26, 2006.), currency conversion (See my post of Sept. 5, 2005.), and compliance with local requirements about invoices and their data (See my post of April 22, 2007.).

Tyco, a $42 billion conglomerate, has dramatically reduced the number of law firms serving it in three major areas. According to Of Counsel, Vol. 26, April 2007 at 1, "Tyco selected Kansas City's Shook, Hardy & Bacon to handle all of its product-liability legal work and Atlanta-based Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart for its labor and employment matters.” Ogletree replaced 33 law firms in the fall of 2004 (at 21).

As if those two massive efforts to combine all work of a certain kind with a single firm were not enough, most recently, Tyco International pared the 250-some law firms that has retained for its operations in 31 countries in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa to a single firm: the UK’s Eversheds. Fueling the project that led to that firm’s selection were concerns about global compliance, consistency in quality and standards, and savings from “fewer fines, settlements, and other costs.” The article points out that Eversheds offers Tyco a global reach, an extensive training program for its attorneys, a “legal help line,” and an extranet.

The Shaw Group, a $5 billion engineering and related services group, announces that its general counsel for the past eight years, Gary Graphia, has been promoted to “Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary.” Shaw has brought on board a former law-firm partner, Cliff Rankin, to become the “General Counsel and Corporate Secretary.” That must give them enough corporate secretaries! Note also the elevation of chief legal officer over general counsel (See my post of March 22, 2006 as to the distinction.).

To the point of this post, however, the release emphasizes that during the promoted GCs time, the legal department has grown from 3 to 24 lawyers (with 18 other staff) and completed three major acquisitions “as well as numerous smaller transactions. “In addition, the Company has completed seven public capital markets transactions totaling over $2.7 billion, and three increases to its bank credit facilities, the most recent being to increase the facility to $850 million.”

Those metrics of accomplishment evidently count highly to senior executives of that company, and probably other companies, and yet the transactional ones are metrics that law departments do not track and compare for purposes of benchmarking.

As reported in Law Dept Quart., Vol. 2, May-July 2006 at 41, in early 2005 a group led by Jeff Hodge of Datacert, a leading e-billing vendor, and Brad Blickstein, the founding consultant of the Blickstein Group, began a collective effort to update and improve the various code sets. One particular focus, according to the article, was the code set for international use.

At the time of the article, the collective counted more than 200 members from the US and Europe.

In a recent e-mail to me, Blickstein adds that “We have new patent and trademark code sets in beta. A handful of corporations are already using these. We have an updated project code set, designed to better handle transactional activity, also in beta.” The collective plans to reach out to ACC, IBA (the International Bar Association) and the ABA (American Bar Association) to ask for their imprimatur. More about all this can be found on the group’s website http://utbms.com and even more is available at a website about LEDES.

Law departments that have lawyers stationed all over the world (See my post of April 17, 2007 about J&J with its 35 lawyer locations; Oct. 19, 2005 on Goldman Sachs and its 90 lawyers out of the US.) sometimes look at the compensation of their lawyers in terms of relative purchasing power parity (See my post of Oct. 10, 2005 on PPP.). In some situations the application of that method has glitches.

The Fin. Times, Jan. 29, 2007 at 15, points out some potential drawbacks of PPP. One is the likely difference between the consumption profile of an average lawyer and that represented by the basket of “standard” consumer goods from which PPP rates are derived. The costs of lawyer-friendly up-market goods in less-developed countries can be extremely high. A second anomaly is that PPP conversions make it appear that the salaries of lawyers in countries with lower costs of labor look much more enticing. The third concern is that most lawyers in foreign countries work in large cities, whereas the PPP calculations are based on the average costs throughout those countries. Caveat payor.

A tour de force on statistics can be found in the ACC Docket, April 2007 at 58. In the context of employment discrimination cases, the authors clearly describe nine advanced statistical calculations and make four recommendations on statistical methodology. Of the calculations, they criticize five of them – chi-square (better to use logistic regression), ANOVA, multiple-measure tests such as the MANCOVA, factor analysis (aka cluster analysis), and stepwise regression - and approve four of them.

The authors favor (1) “protected t-tests like the Duncan range test or Hsu’s test rather than a cascade of independent t-tests; (2) data reliability tests such as Cronbach’s Alpha (but less so the Spearman-Brown Rho and the Kappa and (3) statistical significance criteria of .01 or less. As to the fourth technique, arguments during a lawsuit or in a trial are stronger, “where results are not [statistically] significant,” when the side uses a power test to show that sample size was adequate.”

Turning to methodologies, the authors criticize “mechanistic statistical models that neglect to include social psychological variables such as years of experience, job level, skill, etc.” They urge lawyers and their statistics experts instead to consider using hierarchical linear modeling or multiple regression. Second, they recommend against weighted formulas as well as reliance on personality tests or even discussion of personality traits. Instead, since “personality is not a particularly good predictor of behavior,” it is better to “focus on directly observable behavior.” Finally, the authors advocate that litigants “build a clear set of graphic displays … showing all three pieces of evidence that prove a causal linkage according to Quine’s (1941) classic text.”

If you have any interest in statistics, this sophisticated article is a treasure house of information.

An informative advertisement/article in Met. Corp. Counsel, April 2007 at 35, describes the offerings of Corporation Services Co. (CSC) regarding software for corporate secretaries (See my posts of July 19, 2006 on board software, Aug. 9, 2006 on the merger of corporate secretary and board software; Oct. 1, 2006 on matter management software joined with corporate service-of-process software; Jan. 24, 2006 for ten corporate-secretary applications; and Feb. 14, 2007 on the cottage industry of corporate secretarial packages.). Most of the article describes the company’s Virtual Boardroom software suite.

Among its offerings is a capability I have not written about: CSC Compliance Calendarsm, which can be customized to send alerts for specific events such as nonprofit filings and SEC or regulatory filings. Another new capability, which CSC is finishing, is an “audit committee checklist based on the responsibilities of audit committees as outlined in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.” I note these capabilities – new to me – in their own right and to make the larger point that well-run software vendors continuously strengthen and extend their offerings.

"One study suggests that the number of meetings attended by the average executive doubled between the 1960s and the 1980s." According to other researchers, “Senior managers attend nearly 23 hours of meetings every week, and people working for large organizations tend to have more meetings than those in smaller ones." Both quotes come from a useful article about meetings sgrogelb@email.uncc.edu in MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Winter 2007 at 18 (See my post of Oct. 19, 2005 on communication tools for managers.). Both findings apply directly to in-house counsel, especially senior lawyers in large companies.

Oddly, "researchers have found no direct relationship between a person's obligations to attend meetings (the number of meetings and time spent) and his or her job satisfaction." It turns out that when people have a strong drive to accomplish their work, meetings diminish job satisfaction; for those who are less goal oriented more meetings are actually more desirable (See my post of Oct. 22, 2006 on bureaucracy and meetings.).

Yet meetings are very important to how one feels about one's work. Three studies found that "the single most powerful factor in job satisfaction is how one feels about the effectiveness of the meetings he or she attends” (See my posts of March 27, 2005 about productivity muted by meetings; March 6, 2006 on decision-making at meetings; Dec. 7, 2005 on communication time wasters.).

To improve the quality of meetings, that authors recommend that law department managers focus on three fronts: "improving employees' skills at meetings; improving managers' skills at meetings; and implementing best practices for running particular types of meetings." The article explains each of these ways to enhance meetings. Some of the ideas have been addressed here (See my posts of Sept. 27, 2005 and June 28, 2005, April 8, 2005, Oct. 19, 2005, Jan. 14, 2007 #2, and March 12, 2006 about facilitators, scribes, conference room rules, telecommuting, agenda time in proportion to a topics importance, and voting software, respectively.).

Several vendors of e-billing systems offer ASP (application specific packages, aka hosted services) that run on servers maintained by the vendor (See my posts of March 26, 2006 and April 26, 2006 for more on this option.). A piece in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, Feb. 2007 at 31, mentions a hybrid solution for data protection (See my post of Jan. 25, 2007 on encryption of invoice information.) which law departments may wish to evaluate.

"We use a hosted provider for our [vendor name] system and maintain the majority of our data inside our firewall for added protection. Our invoices are sent in an encrypted format which we are able to decode once they pass through our firewall." Thus, the law department has the benefit of the ASP solution – less IT support needed while also enjoying the security of guarding its own data.