Law Department Management

Recent Posts from Law Department Management

• Different views on the appropriateness of methods to freeze billing rates

  It is wonderful for me, blogging into mostly implacable silence, to hear from someone, whether or not they agree with me. In fact, disagreement helps me learn and adjust my views. So when Dan Williams…

• Borrowing from evidence-based medicine, let’s foster evidence-based management

  A review of a book about “evidence-based medicine” launched this post. Essentially, EBM emphasizes tests and data collection as the guide to the efficacy of medical interventions. Don’t rely on doctors’ anecdotal conclusions, but deliberately…

• A suggestion about the value equation law departments and law firms are struggling over

  More readers downloaded my article on value propositions than anything I have posted in my five years of blogging. If you missed it, here it is again. Download Rees Morrison's Value In-House NLJ Meanwhile, an…

• Too many faceless general counsel

  Schumpter’s column in the Economist, Nov. 14, 2009 at 80, speaks to the “cult of the faceless boss.” It discusses some of the reasons for why there are so many bland CEOs who mouth platitudes,…

• Plenum spaces and pony walls: ways lighting and sound affect the productivity of workers

  “Countless studies show that proper lighting and acoustic levels play a key role in increasing workplace productivity.” The point is made in an article in Law Practice, Nov./Dec. 2009 at 39 by experts at PDR…

• Four more environmentally progressive ideas that legal departments might adopt

  An article in Legal Tech. News, Vol. 16, Nov. 2009 at 39, describes the environmental efforts of a 40-person law firm. It adds several ideas, and quantifies some of their benefits, to my previous collection…

• To strengthen your company and improve the quality of your work, train your clients

  An earlier post today describes a method of training, spaced education, that could help in-house lawyers when they train clients (See my post of Nov. 19, 2009: spaced education.). To find other instances where this…

• Train clients or members of the legal department using “spaced education”

  People learn much more effectively if they spread out their learning over a period of time, rather than cramming, and if they are tested as they proceed, rather than at the end. Those are the…

• One of this year’s Nobel prizes for economics speaks to the make-or-buy choice for legal services

  That all economic transactions are costly in terms of finding, contracting with, and enforcing the arrangement we know from the seminal work of Ronald Coase, winner of the 1991 Nobel prize for economics. Finding the…

• Some recent firsts on or about this blog

  If bloggers don’t tinker and take chances, their blog dries up and blows away. So I keep trying out new things, and welcome ideas for more (See my post of Feb. 20, 2009: first blook,…