Law Department Management Blog
Publicly-traded companies significantly dealing with legal departments; know any others? Do readers know of any companies that are both publicly traded and gain a significant amount of their revenue from legal departments? Some that have come to my attention are Bottomline Technologies, an e-billing vendor (NASDAQ: EPAY), Jurimetrics, a litigation investment fund (a London Stock Exchange/AIM-listed company); Acacia Technologies, also a litigation investment fund (ACTG); and Slater and Gordon, an Australian law firm. Previously I mentioned several firms that do some consulting with legal departments (See my post of Oct. 13, 2009: five publicly traded consulting groups – CRA International (Nasdaq: CRAI), FTI Consulting Inc. (NYSE: FCN), Huron Consulting Group (Nasdaq: HURN), LECG Corporation (Nasdaq: XPRT) and Navigant Consulting (NYSE: NCI).
Security certification and e-billing. According to an ad by Serengeti, a leading provider of e-billing capabilities, most vendors obtain a Type I certification “which only verifies the existence of controls covering their data center.” Serengeti’s Type II certification goes further. It confirms the existence and effectiveness of physical and logical security, quality assurance, and change control.” Both certificate Types come under SAS 70 (See my post of April 28, 2009: ISO certification and legal department vendors.).
In-house lawyers micro-blogging and networking online. Consulting firm Leader Networks determined from a survey that six percent of in-house lawyers use Twitter or similar micro-blogging services. As reported in Legal Strat. Rev., Winter 2009/10 at 10, “58% of the lawyers surveyed said that they were members of online professional networks such as LinkedIn” (See my post of Sept. 22, 2008: professional networks such as LinkedIn, with 7 references.).
500 lawyers per billion of revenue! Legal Strat. Rev., Winter 2009/10 at 40, mentions that NuVasiv, a medical technology company formed in 1997, reached approximately $2.1 million in sales by 2001. That year it recruited Jonathan Spangler to run its IP legal functions. If both these facts are correct, and there were no other in-house lawyers, NuVasiv had an eye-popping 500 lawyers per billion of revenue that year (See my post of Feb. 25, 2009: lawyers per billion with 22 references and one metapost.).