A respectable view holds that in-house lawyers should draft and interpret contracts, possibly negotiate them, but not administer them. The term “contract management” means different things to different people, but is roughly coterminous with “contract administration.” Exari tried in a recent survey to gather some data about practices in this…
Surprisingly, of the law departments that completed the ALM benchmarking inquiry about recording lawyer time, 9 of them said they track it and 41 said they did not. However, if we assume that the 32 non-replies were also denials of time tracking, then overall about one out of nine law…
Very commonly general counsel and business executives complain vociferously about “regulatory overload.” Spewing out every year hundreds or thousands of new laws, regulations agency practices hobble business. The burden rises – but you know about every cloud. Four silver linings balance the picture a bit. Were it not for governmental…
The reason there are so many awards handed out to law departments is that vendors and service providers pay handsomely for the publicity. If you are a software vendor, for example, you rejoice when one of the law departments that has installed your software bags an award (See my post…
Something is amiss if the distinguished Legal Tech. News of ALM proclaims that the year’s most innovative law department, from the standpoint of technology, achieved that distinction because it selected a litigation hold system. The February 2012 write-up, at page 15, unquestionably describes something new and unheard of: the “extensive…
An interview of Thomas Russo, who became the general counsel of AIG in early 2010, appears in Corp. Counsel, Dec. 2011 at 18. In addition to being a senior executive of the company he views his role as having another component: “administering a department that has approximately 1,400 people in…
One of my blog posts drew on data from Portugal, USA, UK, and Belgium to estimate very roughly legal departments per billion dollars of GDP at 0.6, 0.7, 0.5, and 1.2 (See my post of May 10, 2010: four countries and GDP.). If we take as the lodestar the low…
For a typical U.S. company, the percentage of patents held outside the country might approximate its percentage of international revenue. Stated differently and with an illustration, if a third of its patents are ex-U.S., then its revenue from overseas might also be expected to be around a third. Companies pay…
This opening sentence from a column in the NY Times, Dec. 24, 2011 at B1, irritated me: “Count the T-Mobile lawyers who negotiated a multibillion dollar breakup fee – [two Wachtell, Lipton lawyers] – and got AT&T to agree to it as among those who will actually deserve their year-end…
The quote comes from a NY Times article on Dec. 18, 2011 at BU 1. Prof. Andrew Morriss of the University of Alabama School of Law then adds that there aren’t enough lawyers who will handle personal matters for individuals, like divorces and bankruptcy filings, at “reasonable rates.” The article…