Ask and You Shall Receive
Convergence: Is It Just a Numbers Game?
Establishing and Maximizing Corporate Legal Resources
Maximizing the benefits realized from internal and external legal resources requires an understanding of a multitude of factors. The ultimate goal should be to identify and retain the correct resource for the task at hand.
In-House Counsel, Executive Must Play Strong Role: To Win in Litigation, All Players Must Take the Field
When facing litigation, a company must put its best foot (and ideas) forward. To do so, it should ensure that all relevant perspectives on the issues and the facts in question come into play.
Legal Expenses are a Controllable Cost of Doing Business
Any company that faces legal challenges or needs the assistance of lawyers to effectuate its business objectives should desire to do so at the least expense feasible.
Litigation Planning and Budgeting – The Use of Task-based Budgeting to Manage Litigation
Disputes and litigation, which are often viewed as a cost of doing business and largely beyond control, do lend themselves to greater management.
Project Management – Clients Demand It
As corporate clients exerted ever-greater pressure for lower or more controlled costs, their law departments focused increasingly on pushing outside counsel (and their in-house counterparts) to apply to the use of legal service techniques developed in project management.
Strategic Strengths: The Basis of an Efficient Design for a Corporate Legal Function
To manage legal service effectively so as to achieve maximum benefits at the lowest reasonable cost requires a process of identifying and deploying the right resource for each identified task or assignment.
The Development of the Corporate Law Department and Its Consequences
The legal market focused on corporate clients has undergone considerable change over the past couple of decades. Most of that change originated in demands by the in-house legal community.
The Evaluation of Cases is a Critical Element of Litigation Management
The “process” costs of managing litigation receive a great deal of attention. While such costs can be controlled, a larger target of companies’ efforts to reduce or control expense consists of the outcomes of disputes and litigation.
What Is the Most Important Task of In-House Counsel?
Of the many responsibilities of in-house attorneys, one of the most significant (if not the most important in many situations) relates to the selection and retention of outside counsel for each matter entrusted to the in-house attorneys.
Think Strategically — Plan!
Achieving the maximum benefit from lawyers’ efforts requires considerable effort. Most specifically, it calls for careful planning.
Disputes and Litigation: Tame the Two-Headed Beast
In order to manage disputes and litigation effectively, a corporate law department must ensure that its efforts dovetail with those of the company’s compliance program.
Acquisition Professionals and In-house Attorneys are a Team
Successful teams often evidence nimbleness among their members. In an industry such as real estate, where rapid reaction to market opportunities can distinguish those who prevail from those who do not, this may be even more significant.
Partner or GC?: The move from law firm partner to general counsel is not always the best choice
The selection of an attorney to serve as a company’s general counsel can further a company’s business goals significantly if the selection is well considered and draws from a pool of candidates with demonstrated strengths for the role.
Prudential Begins a Convergence Program
Managing all environmental matters involving the real estate investments of a large insurance company requires considerable effort on the part of many individuals.
What Business Can Teach Law
Applying business concepts to the functions of a corporate law department can improve that department’s performance of those functions.
Constructing Standard Metrics of Your Law Department’s Value
Today’s corporate law department must not only manage the law-related affairs of its company well, it must also demonstrate to management’s satisfaction that it is doing just that.
Records Management And The Role Of The Law Department: Some Musings
The management of corporate records has received considerable attention since a series of corporate scandals that led to the enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.
Staffing Flexibility Addresses Client Needs and Delivers Greater Value
In their efforts to realize greater value from the work of their outside counterparts, many in-house lawyers have pursued convergence programs and otherwise restructured their use of external resources.
Maximizing The Utility Of Law Department Metrics
More and more law departments have used metrics more and more to manage the legal work entrusted to them. In that regard, it is useful to remember that the term covers two distinct types of metrics: “benchmarking” metrics and “internal” metrics. The first type consists of comparing one company’s processes or results to those of competitors or comparable organizations. The latter reviews the company’s own results periodically using the same or comparable data about the same processes in order to assess whether and how the company is improving those processes.
Incorporating Value into the Strategic Planning Process
Strategic planning can serve a law department well by illustrating the various types of work it does and manages for its internal clients, the internal and external resources available to it for that purpose, and how it expects to deploy those resources so as to maximize the benefit for the company. In order to develop a strategic plan that achieves that goal and does so in a manner consistent with those clients’ views regarding the lawyers and the legal service, the in-house lawyers should endeavor to engage those clients in discussions about value as it relates to that legal service. How much legal service do they want or need and how do they believe that it can most readily assist them to achieve their business objectives? These and other questions related to value should animate those discussions and, ultimately, the plan.
The Need to Secure Agreement with the Client about the Definition of Value
Ultimately, a corporate law department serves the corporate interest as enunciated by corporate management, or else it (the department) will not have a place in the corporate entity for long. Consequently, the in-house lawyers should ensure that they create value for the organization and that they communicate that to management. To do so effectively, they need to speak the same language as management. They need to secure an agreement with management on terms that can convey that value proposition in understandable terms.
