THE VALUE OF LEGAL SERVICE
In order for in-house attorneys to satisfy the expectations and demands from corporate leadership that they manage the companies’ legal service with an eye to bottom line value in addition to top-of-the-line quality, law departments must understand how certain qualities and traits of the service and of the providers of that service can increase or decrease the value of that service.
These articles explore the dynamics of legal service delivery and management.
CLIENT-FIRM RELATIONSHIPS AND THE MANAGEMENT OF OUTSIDE COUNSEL
For most companies represented by lawyers, the fees and costs paid to external counsel exceed the cost of the attorneys employed by the company. For the in-house attorneys, managing the efforts of their external counterparts to maximize the value that the company realizes from those efforts constitutes an important responsibility.
The articles listed here explore various ways of managing and working with outside lawyers so as to achieve greater efficiency and value.
LAW DEPARTMENT MANAGEMENT
Maximizing the value that an in-house law department delivers to the organization of which it is a part requires a careful understanding of how the legal service can and should serve the company to achieve its business objectives.
This challenge requires that the in-house lawyers explore how the organization of their department matches up to achieving those objectives and how the lawyers’ efforts can be deployed for maximum impact at the lowest overall cost, all of which these articles explore.
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
Law and compliance both represent knowledge management challenges. Collecting and organizing discrete facts and distilling knowledge from them lies at the heart of each of those disciplines.
How does this truth relate to the responsibilities of lawyers in those two organizational efforts? These articles focus on that question.
FEE ARRANGEMENTS AND BILLING
For in-house lawyers, calibrating the cost of legal service and the benefits realized from it (the relationship between those two represents the “value” of the service for the company) constitutes the core challenge in respect of external legal resources.
In these articles, I explore the relationship and ways in which the value can be increased through carefully designed fee arrangements.
DATA & PRIVACY
In recent years, the collection and use of personal information of customers, employees and others has received magnified attention. Even an inadvertent misuse or misapplication of such information can lead to regulatory investigation, litigation and other adverse consequences. The varying approaches of different jurisdictions to these issues magnify the challenges of data management.
These articles explore those challenges.
COMPLIANCE
In recent years, the collection and use of personal information of customers, employees and others has received magnified attention. Even an inadvertent misuse or misapplication of such information can lead to regulatory investigation, litigation and other adverse consequences. The varying approaches of different jurisdictions to these issues magnify the challenges of data management.
These articles explore those challenges.
