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Rees Morrison Morsels #55 — Modest additions to previous posts

Hedge funds invest in litigation outcomes. Somewhere I read that hedge funds invest in the outcome of major lawsuits. Perhaps it was taking the position on the reserves of a company and treating that like a commodity. Perhaps the hedge funds bought bundles of litigation and sought to manage it more effectively than the company. Maybe they advance money to plaintiffs in return for a share of the recovery (See my post of Sept. 9, 2006 on hedge funds supporting plaintiff firms.).

Compensation data by law school. ACC has partnered with Empsight International, a provider of compensation data for law departments. Empsight’s 2007 survey results provide information from 205 large-company participants on compensation data. What struck me was that the survey reports compensation by top-20 law school www.empsight.com/acc.htm. It is beyond me how a law department would find it useful to know about comparative compensation data for graduates of different law schools.

Process simplification sometimes transfers complexity elsewhere. Simplicity at one level can be deceiving when it relies on layers of increasing complexity at other levels. Making a contract generation systems simpler for clients, for example, probably means complicating the underlying software and its maintenance. In fact, according to MIT Sloan Mgt. Rev., Vol. 48, Summer 2007 at 68, simplification often means the opposite, as more of the complexity management is simply transferred from the user to the technology (See my post of Feb. 6, 2007 on law department processes and references cited.).