“Take no man’s word for it.” I subscribe wholeheartedly to the motto of the Royal Society (London) in the enlightened version: “Take no person’s word for it.” As a partisan of empirical evidence in law department management or at least explanations that try to be objective, I look for proof,…
Many times on this blog I have compiled lists but I have never sat back and thought about lists. For this post, a list doesn’t simply note elements, such as “the ten articles I wrote in 2010.” Here, I mean the result of someone thinking about a situation and coming…
Emic and etic descriptions of law department activities. These are terms used by social scientists to refer to two kinds of descriptions of human behavior. An “emic” account is a description of behavior or a belief in terms meaningful (consciously or unconsciously) to the actor; that is, an emic account…
A “Found Money” initiative. One of the law departments that took part in a recent survey recognizes its ”In-house attorneys who have saved or delivered money to the company by going beyond their ‘day jobs’ and leveraged their legal skills sets and knowledge of the company to ‘find’ money that…
For a group of insurance companies, litigation in the past 12 months dropped or held steady Whether people sue more or sue less when the economy declines ought to be a well-understood empirical fact. Managers of in-house legal teams should be able to plan based on the correlation or lack…
The January issue of Historically Speaking has several essays on narrative. As historians use the term, it means the larger “story” told by them in their articles, monographs, and books. Different from factual accumulation, causal relation, or measured argument, the narrative power of good historical writing rests on an over-arching…
Not a good mission to “try and do as much legal work as possible in-house” (April 1, 2011) My conclusion: a bad idea. Data on matter management systems of large law departments – quite a few with no system or a customized one (April 3, 2011) In the 50 law…
Impressive that a number two in a law department jumps to the Court of Appeals. Corporate Counsel online on May 18, 2011, said that the US Senate confirmed Yale University’s number-two GC, Susan Carney, to the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals (See my post of May 3, 2007: Chubb…
At the obvious level, they are right. Every person being unique, every law department, a fortiori, is unique. That no-argument point accepted, the felt differences have much less consequence when you look at a department in terms of its processes, structure, culture, software, and other attributes. Then the department shares…
The ratio of meeting time to working time (March 10, 2011) The ratio of meeting to non-meeting time and two suggestions to improve the effectiveness of meetings. Early findings from 142 in GCM’s 2011 benchmark survey regarding 30+ matter management systems (March 12, 2011) Of 142 responding law departments, 76…