Three Canadian firms that provide lawyers to law departments for project work when needed are noted in the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association’s magazine (Autumn 2010) at 36. They are Cognition LLP, Delegatus Legal Services, and LexLocom. Cognition, the article notes, is five years old and has 24 lawyers. Delegatus, also…
If Rand Corporation says something about data, you have to give it much due. They are careful and they understand the difference between bits and pieces of numbers and reliable data. So, attend to this caveat: “Descriptive data on the use of contract attorneys and outsourced legal talent are even…
A survey now underway asks law department respondents, “What have you found to be the most common reason for people [presumably, just lawyers] leaving the business [presumably, the law department]?” The four choices offered on the survey deserve comment: “Career progression,” “s alary,” “join competitor,” and “redundancy.” My supposition is…
When companies do business in many languages, their legal department can help more when it has lawyers who are conversant in those languages. Multi-lingual capability is a topic this blog has addressed (See my post of April 26, 2006: managing lawyers who do not speak English as a primary language;…
Good reasons can be adduced for why a general counsel hires a senior lawyer from outside the department, but drawbacks to that decision persist. According to research reported in the NY Times, April 22, 2012 at BU7, external hires, “on average, make around 18 percent more money than internal employees…
The Economist, April 14, 2012 at 76, writes that the current CEO of Honeywell took over in 2002. Rather than try to change values of employees, which are harder to measure, he focused on how to increase the frequency and effectiveness of a dozen important behaviors. General counsel can learn…
Talent is so hard to find, recruit and keep that when one of your strong performers announces that they are departing to lead another law department, do you feel good for them or do you gnash your teeth? Deep down you realize that ambitious, capable lawyers won’t want to wait…
Sometimes it is difficult for a general counsel to get objective feedback about personal performance. One source, tipped by an article in the ACC Docket, March 2012 at 69, could be the search firm that placed you. The source may strike you as strange, but if that firm has good…
Promoting a lawyer from within has the advantage of letting you promote or reassign others at the same time. Like adding a chair to the musical game, you create choices regarding other members of your department. If you bring in someone from outside to fill a vacated slot, no one…
An earlier post gave average in-house cash compensation for the five highest-paid practice areas: M&A, Antitrust, International, Intellectual Property – Licensing, and Tax (See my post of April 16, 2012: survey reports averages from $289,000 down.). That post focused on the relationship between cash compensation and the fully loaded costs…