Law Department Management Blog
Resource Dependence Theory is the study of organizations and how their external resources affect their behavior. It may have something to offer for general counsel, but I am not sure. The procurement of external resources is an important tenet of both the strategic and tactical management of any legal department. Courtesy of Wikipedia, the basic argument of RDT can be summarized in terms of legal departments (my translation) as follows:
• Law departments are dependent on resources such as vendors, service providers and law firms
• These resources ultimately originate from the environment of organizations
• Other law departments retain and influence these same resources
• The resources one law department needs are thus sometimes in the hand of law departments. Conflict rules and vendor capacity could be examples.
• Resources and influence over them are a basis of power
Oh well, the theoretical framework of resource dependency theory interests me even if it is foreign to the daily concerns of legal department