Rees Morrison’s Morsels #108 – additions to earlier posts and short takes

Take notice of good counsel on the other side. “Some [legal departments] track their expenditures per matter based on the identity/quality of opposing counsel to determine the best advocate against a thorny opponent or to hire that opposing lawyer away.” Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, June 2009 at 11 (Marcus Linden), mentions this and I include it because your next choice of counsel might be the adversary who just opposed you and did a good job.

Hakia as a semantic search engine and pictures for “law department management.” Having heard about Hakia, I tried it and of course searched for “law department management.” Aside from the results, I was fascinated by the six or more images that nestled to the right of the list of search results. A few connected immediately to legal departments, but others appear to have been photos uploaded next to some comment that has the term in it.

A bit more on litigation financing. The NY Times, June 3, 2009 at B1, has a column on investments in portfolios of lawsuits. It mentions Juris Capital, “a Chicago firm backed by two hedge funds” and David Dresser, managing director of Juris. The article also refers to Anthony J. Sebok, a professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City “who has studied the business” (See my post of May 21, 2009: lawsuit financing by groups with 8 references.).

Jux2 searches and comparison of three major engines. Jux2 runs simultaneous searches across Google, Yahoo! and MSN, according to Strategies: The Journal of Legal Marketing, Vol. 11, July 2009 at 18, so I tried it out. When I searched for “law department,” it showed hits as follows: Google 1.43 million, Yahoo! 3.52 million and MSN .33 million. For “legal department” Jux2 returned Google 1.65 million, Yahoo! 5.36 million and MSN .34 million. Jux2 returns what it claims to be the top results from each engine (See my post of April 20, 2009: Google results for the search; and May 24, 2005: difference between “legal department” and “law department”; slightly more hits for “legal department.”).