Ten posts that interested this blogger the most from September 2009

Click on the links to read the full post.

No grounds for “moving away from the RFP mentality of too many law departments” (Sept. 9, 2009)

Contrary to some views, RFPs are underutilized as a tool to learn from the market.

What controlling costs of outside counsel is NOT (Sept. 9, 2009)

Five ideas about cost control that are not as influential as the one recommended

“Trolls demanding tolls”: thoughts on markets where third parties invest in legal assets (Sept. 21, 2009)

Too much money is at stake in legal disputes for outsiders – non-lawyers with business skills and capital – not to find investment opportunities.

The neuroscience of why stories persuade and teach clients more enduringly than facts and numbers (Sept. 21, 2009)

In-house lawyers should tell their clients more stories if they want to reach them effectively.

Clients are from Pluto, lawyers from Mercury – huge personality differences mean change is due (Sept. 22, 2009)

Peter Kurer, the former chairman of UBS and before that its general counsel, sketched a vivid typology of behavioral and psychological differences between business people and lawyers.

Management decisions rest on social values of the manager (Sept. 23, 2009)

Every decision a general counsel makes about how the legal department should operate rests on implicit or explicit philosophies of what motivates humans.

To set you thinking: guidelines for the number of core staff scaled to fees projected on a matter (Sept. 27, 2009)

A rough estimation scaled to budgeted fees lets a supervising lawyer more realistically assess the staffing recommended by the law firm.

Make the most of the billing recap at the end of a bill (Sept. 28, 2009)

Ideas to add insights to the recap at the end of an invoice.

Quality-adjusted and inflation-adjusted legal fees may have remained fairly stable over recent years (Sept. 28, 2009)

A quality-adjusted measurement of legal services over time would likely show a correlation between fees and additional depth of services covered.

More objections to notion of best practices: assumptions of givens, boundaries, and common measures (Sept. 30, 2009)

Three more reasons why I mistrust casual comments about “best practices.”