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Rees Morrison’s Morsels #138: posts longa, morsels breva

Retirement formulas, such as 50 years old and 15 years of service. When general counsel worry about loss of talent, one of the considerations is the age of lawyers in the department and whether they are eligible for retirement. Companies have different formulae, one of which is summarized in the header (See my post of April 20, 2009: retirement of in-house lawyers with 8 references.).

Anonymous, confidential and unnamed. With most lists of participants in benchmark surveys, some asked to be kept anonymous. All of them want complete non-disclosure of their specific data. A third category, however, includes legal departments whose data is available from a third source for the benchmark set but whose identity is not revealed (See my post of May 24, 2010: anonymous participants and confidential information.). Those are the unnamed.

For surveys, even the names of companies can be problematic. One of the companies in my benchmark survey is 盛虹集团有限公司. I Googled those Chinese characters and found out that one translation of the company name is Sheng Hong Group. Is that a fair, non-chauvinistic way to refer to it? What if a company from Saudi Arabia operates with a name in Arabic?. My participants from Portugal have lost all their accent marks. Nothing goes simply for the intrepid benchmarker!

How are ADP’s services different than an LPO’s? I heard of one company that has delegated to ADP the handling of garnishments and subpoenas. ADP also handles QUADROS at reduced cost. The person who mentioned this said that the “outsourced” company was more efficient – since they specialize and have volume, they are more confidential – since they don’t know the people involved and don’t gossip, more cost effective – since they negotiated a fixed fee, and more timely – since they work 24 by 7. How does this differ from having someone in Mumbai do the work (See my post of Sept. 21, 2010: Mindcrest.)?

Verb agreement with “in-house counsel.” An ad by the law firm Dickie McCamey states “Now more than ever, in-house counsel has to get ….” By my grammatical lights, “in-house counsel” is plural, “an in-house counsel” is singular.