Law Department Management Blog
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 outside lawyers could not.” I find that quote bizarre.
Don’t start your day by checking your emails! A piece in the Harvard Business Review, May 2011 at 85, claims that “Ninety percent of people check their e-mail as soon as they get to work. That turns their agenda over to someone else.” They peek first at e-mail because it seems easy and effective to shoot off some replies and it makes them feel wanted, part of the collective, in the loop. Don’t do it. Decide what you need to do and later check email (See my post of Nov. 6, 2006: e-mail with 6 references; Aug. 26, 2009: 30 e-mail effectiveness tips with 9 references; and Nov. 27, 2010: productivity given huge amount of time on e-mail with 14 references.).
Contract terms and posts on them. Having assembled metaposts of various kinds related to contracts, I had some posts left over. Each of them pertains to the contract terms themselves (See my post of Jan. 21, 2010: 30 contract terms most frequently negotiated; March 16, 2010: nine rules for contract drafting; Sept. 4, 2010: three priority levels for contracts handled by law departments; Nov. 10, 2010: measurement of contract complexity; March 20, 2011: exhaustive contracts and their risks; and March 21, 2011: revenue leakage from contracts.).
Litigation database regarding U.S. patents and trademarks. LITAlert, from Thomson Reuters, contains some 96,000 records. Each contains the patent number or trademark registration number and date of issue; patent title or trademark name; name(s) of inventors, owners, and assignees; and classification title and class number. For the lawsuit information LITAlert shows the court, the docket number, plaintiffs and defendants, the filing date of the lawsuit, and the judgment and date, if applicable.
BASF selects doeLEGAL The North American subsidiary of the chemical company BASF has selected ASCENT from doeLEGAL as its new legal spend management platform, as reported in the Orange Rag, June 2011. I mention this because I want to list other law departments that have selected a matter management system. My research based on the General Counsel Metrics benchmark survey will thereby be strengthened.