This blog has a personality of its own. It grows, changes, goes through phases, surprises me with new developments. There is always more to learn about its content, reach, tools and add-on uses. As it turns out, six metaposts have addressed different aspects of this blog, such as Twitter, RSS feeds, Feedburner, metaphors, and other blawgs that treat in-house management issues.
In like style, I keep writing the periodic self-referential post, last year producing ten of them (See my post of June 20, 2011: 38 retweets of posts by 17 people; Feb. 3, 2011 #1: Avvo rankings; Feb. 20, 2011: a look back six years ago; July 6, 2011 #3: blog honored by Corporate Counsel magazine; July 5, 2011: on metaposts; July 24, 2011: data on sites that have referred readers to this blog; Aug. 9, 2011: why not a book rather than this blog; Aug. 26, 2011: books recently cited on this blog; and Dec. 5, 2011: my post with the most visits – comparison of GC and CLO titles.).
Collective action (See my post of Dec. 19, 2011: collective actions by law departments with 6 references and 1 meta.).
Compliance reports to legal (See my post of Dec. 31, 2011: compliance reporting to GC with 5 references and 2.).
Contract complexity (See my post of Dec. 22, 2011: complexity of contracts with 6 references.).
General counsel behaving badly (See my post of Dec. 14, 2011: poor behavior by GCs with 15 references.).
Indices of concentration, Gini, Herfindahl (See my post of Nov. 30, 2011: measurements of concentration with 6 references.).
Intellectual property IV (See my post of Dec. 29, 2011: IP posts in the 6,000s with 25 references.).
Practice and innate talent (See my post of Dec. 1, 2011: years of deliberate practice leads to expertise with 6 references.).
Risk, recent posts (See my post of Dec. 5, 2011: risk with 7 references.).
Schedules (See my post of Jan. 6, 2011: schedules of in-house lawyers with 6 references.).
Titles II (See my post of Dec. 1, 2011: titles with 8 references and 1 meta.)
Mitratech, a leading matter management system provider, acquired by private equity firm (Nov. 1, 2011)
Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm with some $6 billion in investments, acquired Mitratech.
A reporting line to the board to assure the general counsel of more independence (Nov. 3, 2011)
A general counsel who is appointed and can only be removed by the Board.
Corporate illegality increases law department workload and a methodology to add some reality to that statement (Nov. 21, 2011)
Four categories of criminal activity, maybe with less emphasis on environmental transgressions, could be extended to other industries.
Over ten years, on average each year five percent higher hourly rates for large U.S. law firms (Nov. 22, 2011)
Associate rates went up by 5.4 percent on average each of those years.
Caution: recognize your System 1 reactions, refine them with System 2 thinking, and keep fit (Nov. 23, 2011)
The human brain when it is processing input has two radically different personas: an impulsive, intuitive, impressionable, pattern-creating function and a more deliberate, evaluative, orderly and demanding function.
The typical longevity of a matter management system averages five to seven years (Nov. 28, 2011)
Given the cost, diversion of time and energy, and risks that face law departments when they license and install a matter management system, it surprises me to see a five-year average life.
Reconsider two common beliefs about leadership: trying times demand boldness and innovation is key (Nov. 29, 2011)
Collins does not believe it inevitable that “turbulent times call for bold and risk-loving leaders.”
Causal thinking with stories compared to statistical thinking with numbers (Nov. 29, 2011)
Our evolution equipped us to create causal explanations for events much more readily than to grasp underlying statistical explanations.
Value and its flip-side, risk, ought to both be stated for a time period (Nov. 30, 2011)
Quantification of value and risk needs to state a period of time in which to accrue returns.
Deeper thinking, exploration of more pros and cons, can lead to less feeling of confidence in a decision (Nov. 30, 2011)
The more arguments you come up with to support your decision, the less confident you will be that the decision is correct.
Last year around this time, Dec. 14th to be exact, I published post number 6,000. This post is the one-thousandth post after that one.
After 7,000 of these little critters, as always I fret the well will run dry; so far, however, the aquifer of law department management topics remains high. The blogable ideas just keep on flowing, like the Biblical widow’s cruse. Nor has the pace of metaposts slowed. It does seem, however, that I am not getting more blogs or websites referring readers here. Twitter accounts for an increasing number of my visitors.
I did a few new things during the last thousand posts. My series on Cottage Industrialists began and has had six segments. My first QR (Quick Response) code appeared and for the first time I offered readers a chance to download a file after they had registered through ShareFile. Also new was not the annual summary of the ten best posts per month but a comparison of them to those of the year before.
Happy New Year, everyone!
Don’t worry if you don’t understand the header, I’ll translate. When I notice a potential accumulation, I collect six or more posts on a topic into what I call “metaposts,” of which there are now more than 500. Every now and then at least six metaposts cluster around a topic and when assembled I call them hyper-posts.
Reflexively, as loyal readers would appreciate, I decided to see how many hyper-posts this blog has generated since the first one in the fall of 2008. Astonishingly, there have been at least 19 hyperposts.
Billing (See my post of Jan. 2, 2009: 8 metaposts.).
Benchmarks (See my post of July 19, 2009: 10 metaposts.).
Benchmarks (See my post of May 29, 2011: 13 metaposts.).
Competitive bids (See my post of Oct.12, 2010: 7 references and 6 metaposts.).
Contracts (See my post of July 4, 2011: 11 metaposts, including 2 on document assembly.).
Creativity and innovation (See my post of May 24, 2010: 6 metaposts.).
Intellectual property (See my post of Aug. 19, 2009 #3: 6 metaposts.).
General counsel (See my post of Nov. 18, 2009: 6 metaposts.).
Levels other than general counsel (See my post of Oct. 11, 2009: 7 metaposts.).
Litigation management (See my post of Oct. 2, 2008: 12 metaposts.).
Managerial power (See my post of April 11, 2011: 13 metaposts.).
Marketing by law firms (See my post of July 16, 2009: 7 references and 5 metaposts.).
Patents (See my post of Dec. 31, 2011: 8 metaposts).
Process improvement (See my post of July 31, 2009: 3 references and 5 metaposts.).
Productivity through talent (See my post of Nov. 29, 2009: 12 metaposts.).
Reporting lines (See my post of Jan. 14, 2011: 8 metaposts.).
Software (See my post of Sept. 5, 2009: 5 references and 11 metaposts.).
Software for law departments (See my post of July 8, 2009: 12 metaposts.).
Statistics (See my post of Sept. 13, 2009: 7 metaposts.).
These are the eight metaposts I have compiled since my last hyper-post on intellectual property (See my post of Aug. 19, 2009 #3: six metaposts on intellectual property.). The latest topics include:
Patent trolls (See my post of March 22, 2010: non-practicing entities with 6 references.).
Patent license agreements (See my post of April 29, 2011: licensing patents with 9 references.).
Two on patent software (See my post of Jan. 23, 2011: four categories of patent-related software with 15 references; and Sept. 5, 2009: databases for intellectual property with 11 references.).
Patent invention incentives (See my post of Dec. 13, 2010: awards for inventors with 6 references.).
Intellectual property generally (See my post of Dec. 29, 2011: IP posts in the past 1,000 with 25 references.).
Two on Research & Development (See my post of March 2, 2009: R&D with 12 references; and Sept. 20, 2010: R&D spend related to legal spend with 8 references.).
Not one to eat, shoot and leave, I wish to leave my imprint on law department management in the full regalia of grammatical grace. Toward that end, my powerful search software ferreted out these bibelot:
Plural of general counsel (See my post of March 22, 2006: proper plural of “general counsel”; April 28, 2010 #3: to the same point and cites authority; Nov. 30, 2010 #3: Fowlers lends support; March 3, 2011: an example contrary to my conclusion; and Sept. 28, 2010 #5: verb agreement with “in-house counsel”.).
Proper usage of law and legal (See my post of May 24, 2005: one view of the difference between "law department" and "legal department"; Jan. 4, 2008 #3: Google Blog Search results; Nov. 1, 2008: BlogPulse references to the two terms; April 20, 2009: Google Trends and numbers of references; July 7, 2009 #4: Jux2 searches of the terms; Nov. 7, 2010 #2: favors the compound noun law department; and Oct. 7, 2010 #5: “law” as a noun and “legal” as an adjective.).
To hyphenate “in-house” or not (See my post of June 30, 2009: proper spelling of in-house; and Dec. 8, 2010 #5: in-house vs inhouse.).
A portent of the future: apps on tablet computers for in-house lawyers, supported by SAP and Tata Consulting (Oct. 10, 2011)
Two big players and the advent of tablets and apps for law departments.
Sumptuary laws in 14th century Florence and their echoes in outside counsel guidelines on disbursements (Oct. 14, 2011)
Tracing the idea of clamping down on excessive spending back to 1330 in Florence
Pros (mostly) and cons (a few) of an IT Committee in a law department (Oct. 16, 2011)
Sometimes standing committees in law departments, other times set up for specific task, there are reasons in support of technology committees and reasons against.
Knowledge management efforts falter since they are perceived as a tax on a lawyer’s personal “income” (Oct. 17, 2011)
“Lawyers don’t want to contribute their ‘intellectual property’ to the common good.”
A clue that “globalization” hasn’t the burdensome effect on law departments often claimed (Oct. 18, 2011)
If law firms’ didn’t fare so well who they set up camp all over the world, doesn’t it suggest that law departments were not demanding cross-border legal services.
Ineptitude, forgetting a step, assails in-house lawyers, maybe more than inability or ignorance – use checklists! (Oct. 25, 2011)
If professional errors stem more from forgetfulness than inability or ignorance, checklists have a “forcing function” that pushes uses to follow the minimum steps in a process.
Just what is the total spend by legal departments, in the United States or globally? (Oct. 28, 2011)
This number eludes capture.
The allure of what psychologists call cognitive fluency: too simple explanations for a much more complex world (Oct. 29, 2011)
Cognitive fluency is “the tendency to hold on to things that are simple to understand and remember.”
Costs of financial printers, proxy, and directors should not be included in the law department’s budget? (Oct. 29, 2011)
Thoughts on whether a general counsel’s budget should not include expenses that a company would have to pay even if there were no law department at all.
Data, and thoughts, on allocation of work between inside and outside counsel (Oct. 30, 2011)
What are the considerations or bases for in-house counsel coming up with some estimate of the allocation of legal services?
Bet the company lit (See my post of Oct. 27, 2011: bet-the-company with 8 references.).
Fulbright litigation survey (See my post of Nov. 26, 2011: F&J litigation survey with 21 references.).
Leadership II (See my post of Oct. 19, 2011: leadership with 10 references.).
Legal research online by law firms (See my post of Oct. 10, 2011: online systems for law-related research with 7 references.).
Matrices, matrix (See my post of Oct. 29, 2011: matrices, grids, tables with 9 references.).
Number of lawyers in the US (See my post of Nov. 21, 2011: count of in-house lawyers in the U.S. with 7 references.)
Online legal resources (See my post of Nov. 26, 2011: Internet information for legal guidance with 9 references.).
Percentage of work done inside (See my post of Oct. 30, 2011: work amount inside versus outside and methodology with 9 references.).
Pros and cons of inside career (See my post of Oct. 10, 2011: advantages of practicing law in a company with 10 references.).
Supply and demand (See my post of Nov. 26, 2011: supply and demand and 6 references.).
Some things to do differently on the second iteration of a fixed-fee arrangement (Sept. 5, 2011)
Four recommendations for what to do differently to improve the second process and outcome.
Social-choice theory, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, and group decision-making (Sept. 5, 2011)
Kenneth Arrow laid down five elementary axioms that any rule defining the preferences of a group should satisfy and proved that they are logically inconsistent with each other.
The way we learn about law department operations: a succession of explanations conjectured, tested, and improved (Sept. 12, 2011)
Explanations come about because people conjecture them regarding objective reality.
What pace of productivity increases might reasonably apply to legal departments – one percent a year? (Sept. 12, 2011)
During the 20 years from 1987 to 2008, U.S. manufacturers increased productivity at a cumulative annual growth rate of 1.6 percent. The entire private business sector only managed a 1.0 percent rate, which means service-sector productivity barely rose year over year. Law departments may have fared the same.
Getting the Deal Through (GTDT) and its offerings of global legal information, free for in-house lawyers (Sept. 13, 2011)
This London-based company’s website provides in-house counsel with summaries of laws and regulations in 43 practice areas and more than 120 jurisdictions.
Another foray into the definition of legal complexity – three features (Sept. 14, 2011)
A three-part definition of complexity applied to the workload of law departments.
In re Posner: ten-year term limit for general counsel? (Sept. 16, 2011)
What a change if the top position had a term limit of a decade.!
Unstated consequences or assumptions whenever we measure something in a law department (Sept. 21, 2011)
Ten effects from a decision to count and track something.
Just what are “mobile apps” and how might they infiltrate law departments? (Sept. 26, 2011)
“A mobile ‘app’ is a piece of software linked to a smartphone [such as a Droid or iPhone that has computer capabilities] that allows its user to perform any number of functions.”
Attitudes toward law firms publicizing work they have done for a law department (Sept. 27, 2011)
Some law departments are more tolerant of publicity.
