Law Department Management BlogRepresentative Consulting Projects by Rees Morrison for General Counsel
Overall Review. The general counsel of a pharmaceutical company asked Rees Morrison to review the law department for operational effectiveness. Drawing on a full range of consulting techniques — interviews, focus groups, data collection, targeted e-mails, online surveys, draft reports, benchmark data, concurrent databases — Morrison identified the strengths and opportunities to improve of the law department and made recommendations for how the department could improve across a broad range of activities.
Structure and Cost Control. A major consumer products company decided to reorganize its entire structure and also reduce General and Administrative costs. The law department, asked to carry out a similar initiative, retained Rees Morrison to assist the project team. Over the course of several months, he helped different groups of lawyers think through how they could consolidate and streamline their functions. He also helped them calculate the estimated savings from those changes and present their findings and conclusions to the executive steering committee. His work involved interviewing lawyers, analyzing data, and applying his experience with the practices of many other law departments.
Law Firm Convergence. The General Counsel of a leading aerospace company decided to reduce the number of law firms retained by the company. To accomplish that convergence, the law department embarked on a multi-month process to obtain competitive bids from dozens of law firms. Morrison helped the law department team separate out the work that would be subject to the bids, choose the law firms to invite to propose, prepare the various request for proposals, analyze the responses, and otherwise assist with every aspect of the massive convergence project.
Legal Processes. The CEO of a major manufacturer wanted to know whether the company’s law department was effectively handling processes. The CEO retained Rees Morrison to dig into the activities of the large law department and categorize how well it was handling a range of more than 40 legal processes. The resulting study drew on extensive material obtained from interviews and surveys to create a picture of relative legal effectiveness.
Matter Management Systems and E-Billing. For the general counsel of a consumer goods company, Rees Morrison assisted with every step of finding and implementing a matter management system that also offered e-billing capabilities. The project involved defining needs, locating appropriate vendors, conducting vendor demonstrations, and ultimately negotiating the agreement with the vendor. Thereafter, Morrison helped the department convert data into the new system, train users, and put key law firms online.
Benchmarking. For a pharmaceutical company’s legal department, Morrison helped craft the survey, arrange for its distribution online to 30 companies, collected and quality-checked the data, and prepared graphs. In addition, Morrison interpreted the large set of benchmarks that resulted and recommended what the law department could do to improve on the metrics it chose to emphasize.