We recently attended a private meeting held in Panama with the General Counsel of 35 global corporations. Given the differences in their businesses, geography, cultures and operational envelopes, one would surmise that they saw their practices, priorities and peeves quite differently. Not so: it would be fair to say that there were more areas… Continue Reading
Category Archives: General Counsel
Subscribe to General Counsel RSS FeedLegal Project Management & Beyond: The Extraordinary Promise of “Collaboration Technology” (Part 3 of 3)
Posted in General Counsel, Legal Project Management, Legal Project Management toolsArguably the biggest change in the legal profession’s “New Normal” is the extent to which it demands and rewards collaboration to manage scale and complexity. Today’s client-driven demand for greater collaboration is leading us away from the days when rampant individualists thought that everything they did was unique but disconnected, and that every lawyer should… Continue Reading
GCs: Are You Looking in the Right Direction for an Efficient Legal Department? (Part 2 of 3)
Posted in E-billing, General Counsel, Legal Department Management, Legal Spend, New Normal, Outside CounselSupposedly, General Counsel everywhere have gotten the memo: tough economic times demand better, more business-like management of legal departments and outside vendors. So, are you moving assertively toward becoming a sharper, better-informed manager, or do you run what respected consultant Rees Morrison calls a “passive pusillanimous law department?” In our last post we talked about… Continue Reading
Brave New World: The Drive Toward Efficient Legal Department Management (Part 1 of 3)
Posted in E-billing, General Counsel, Legal Department Management, Legal SpendSlip ‘em some truth serum (or a few scotches), and most General Counsel will tell you their jobs are getting tougher in today’s global economy. For decades it was enough to be a knowledgeable lawyer with superb legal judgment. Today, however, top management requires them to be both great lawyers and savvy members of… Continue Reading
Legal Project Management: Going for Broke and Turning Up the Heat
Posted in General Counsel, Law firm practices, Law Firm Profits, Legal Project Management, Legal Spend, Outside CounselHeretofore, the burgeoning worldwide Legal Project Management (LPM) trend has shown what you see when the buyer turns up the heat. It’s safe to say that if more and more clients were not demanding legal services that are on time, on budget, efficiently managed and predictably rendered, we’d still be back in the “good old… Continue Reading
Well, Isn’t That Predictable? Using Legal Project Management To Improve Client Satisfaction
Posted in General Counsel, Law firm practices, Legal Project Management, Legal Project Management tools, Legal SpendWhether you are planning to climb Mt. McKinley or to provide well-managed legal services to a key client, assaying the possible and probable changes to your plan is key to success. Recent headlines in Alaska told a tragic story about four climbers on Mt. McKinley, the highest peak in North America. Because the weather had… Continue Reading
Corporate Counsel: How to Stop Bluster, Boilerplate & BS in RFP Responses
Posted in General Counsel, Legal Spend, Outside Counsel, Request for ProposalWe’re seeing huge increases in the number of RFPs corporate legal departments are issuing to try to get the best law firms, lawyers and service. But we’re not seeing huge increases in the quality or effectiveness of those RFPs. To flip the old phrase on its head, a lot of RFPs are garbage out, garbage… Continue Reading
A Case Study at the Cutting Edge: Legal Project Management in Australia
Posted in General Counsel, Law firm practices, Legal Project Management, Legal Project Management tools, Legal Spend, New Normal, Outside CounselThe legal profession, sad to say, rewards its denizens with relatively few breakout moments, a dearth of challenges that allow its movers and shakers to break new ground. All the talk about law’s “New Normal” notwithstanding, the legal landscape is a pretty conventional place, populated by more “first followers” than “first movers.” That’s why it… Continue Reading
THE LOW DELTA FIRM: Demise of the Low Ball?
Posted in General Counsel, Law firm practices, Law Firm Profits, Legal Project Management, Legal Spend, Outside CounselIf you are racing to stay competitive in today’s rapidly-changing legal marketplace, you probably have learned some new words and acronyms. Convergence programs. Alternative fee arrangements – or AFAs. RFPs, those increasingly draconian client requests for proposals. LPM, that is, legal project management. LPOs, those legal process outsourcing enterprises. The Key Selection Criterion All of… Continue Reading
A General Counsel’s Take On Legal Project Management & Foreseeability
Posted in Alternative Fee Arrangements, General Counsel, Law firm practices, Legal Project Management, Legal Project Management tools, Legal Spend, Outside CounselGuest Post by Russ Dempsey, Vice President and Chief Legal Officer United Retirement Plan Consultants Pam Woldow’s recent blog post, Putting Some Pepper Into Legal Project Management, called to mind my own recent successful use of Legal Project Management (LPM) to manage the risks and foreseeability issues in an engagement with one of our… Continue Reading
Are You Prepared to Kick Butt?
Posted in General Counsel, Law firm practices, Legal Spend, New Normal, Outside CounselThis song goes out to all you General Counsel and senior in-house lawyers, and its title is “Sometimes You Folks Get Hosed and Don’t Do Nothin’ About It.” I could just as easily have directed the song to those law firm lawyers who sometimes are a little, ah, “casual” about the finer points of scoping… Continue Reading
Dialing for Pizza: Practical Perspectives on Scoping Legal Projects
Posted in General Counsel, Law firm practices, Legal Project Management, Outside CounselLegal Project Management (LPM) assigns extraordinary importance to providing legal services that deliver value as perceived by the client. Yet over and again we observe that while in-house counsel tend to view legal matters in terms of broad business issues and the pressures of “commerciality,” law firm lawyers tend to focus on identifying narrow legal… Continue Reading
10 Key Questions That Law Firms Should Ask Clients
Posted in General Counsel, Law firm practices, Outside Counsel1. Are there any formal methods that you use to measure the quality of legal services? 2. If yes, what are those methods (and metrics) and are you willing to share those with us so that we can strive to continually improve our service to you? 3. If no, can we set up some metrics… Continue Reading
More Eureka Moments in Legal Project Management
Posted in General Counsel, Law firm practices, Legal Project Management, Legal Project Management tools, Midsize firms, Outside CounselWelcome to the new site for At the Intersection. We are settling in to our new address and relationship with Lexblog, and are delighted to commence the kickoff with a GUEST POST. Proving that great minds and great firms think alike, I’m pleased to share a guest post contributed by Sheri Palomaki, Director of Practice… Continue Reading
Communicating With “The Client” – Lessons From Lex
Posted in General Counsel, Law firm practices, Legal Project Management, Outside CounselBy Pam Woldow & Douglas Richardson (Part 3 of 5, LPM in Transactional Practices) Welcome Back, Lex In the last several posts, we’ve been telling you about Lex, the head of a national firm’s transactional practice group, and his staunch support for the application of Legal Project Management (LPM) principles and practices to transactional work…. Continue Reading
A New Approach to Collaboration: Legal Project Management
Posted in General Counsel, Law firm practices, Legal Project Management, Outside Counsel, Request for ProposalGiven the hard-nosed economic realities of the legal profession, it strikes many lawyers as a little touchy-feely, and even a bit naïve, to speak of “partnerships” between law firms and their clients. Although the parties share a need and appreciation for high-quality legal work, law is basically a vendor-purchaser relationship where one side’s desire to… Continue Reading
Bye Bye, Miss American Pie! Susan Hackett Moves to New Role.
Posted in General Counsel, Outside CounselWhat a bombshell! It’s true: after 22 years, Susan Hackett, gloriously outspoken, brilliant, and forward-thinking general counsel has announced that she is leaving the Association of Corporate Counsel. What a loss for ACC…but what a boon for whatever organization next benefits from her enormous talents. For many of us in the legal marketplace, our entire careers… Continue Reading
5 Key Takeaways from General Counsel Outside the US
Posted in General Counsel, Law firm practices, Legal Project Management, Legal Spend, Outside CounselMore than 60 in-house General Counsel and Chief Legal Officers met in Sao Paulo last month to participate in the Latin American Corporate Counsel Association (LACCA) annual meeting. They haled from companies based throughout Latin America, as well as international companies with major offices in Latin America. A sampling of the companies included Dow Corning,… Continue Reading
Double Vision: Evolving Perspectives on Law Firms
Posted in Alternative Fee Arrangements, General Counsel, Law firm practices, Legal Spend, Outside CounselIf the legal profession is indeed driving toward a “new normal,” it has not yet resolved which road it will take. On one hand, the Goliaths continue to bulk up, and there clearly is a lot of life left in the Big-Bigger-BiggestLaw model. 2010 was a dormant year for mergers, but in 2011 the big… Continue Reading
General Counsel Colloquium
Posted in General Counsel, Law firm practices, Legal Project Management, Legal Spend, Outside Counsel, Request for ProposalThanks to one savvy GC for the great suggestion that At the Intersection provide a periodic summary of the posts for corporate counsel. Here then is the roll call (in reverse chronological order): The Client’s New Voice No Place to Hide Warning Bells Legal Project Management Moves In-House An Open Letter to General Counsel in… Continue Reading
Legal Project Management: The Communications Component
Posted in General Counsel, Law firm practices, Legal Project Management, Legal Spend, Outside CounselIn this post I collaborate with my Edge colleague, Doug Richardson, who has decades of experience as a communications guru. Doug and I often teach Legal Project Management Workshops together for law firms and legal departments. © 2011, Edge International US, LLC True Tales Let’s start with a few true-life wake-up calls. First, the bad news:… Continue Reading
Legal Project Management: An Expanding Perspective
Posted in General Counsel, Law firm practices, Legal Project Management, Legal Spend, Outside CounselThe most significant news on the legal project management (LPM) front is that the thinking is evolving about the roles and responsibilities of the players. Until fairly recently, LPM was seen as a re-engineering of legal service delivery that took place primarily within the law firm. In other words, the firms promised their clients that… Continue Reading
The Client’s New Voice
Posted in General Counsel, Law firm practices, Legal Project Management, Legal Spend, Outside Counsel, Request for ProposalMost commentators agree that the economically-driven sea change in the legal profession has changed the way legal services are procured and has shifted the balance of negotiating and pricing power from law firms to their clients. Corporate counsel now have mandates from the C-Suite to do more with less, contain costs, think outside the box… Continue Reading
2011: Contemplating the Great What Next
Posted in Alternative Fee Arrangements, General Counsel, Legal Project Management, Legal Spend, Outside CounselIt’s been an eventful year for the legal profession, although scores of law firm lawyers and in-house counsel wish it hadn’t been. For many lawyers, Legal Project Management (LPM) — the drive to make the cost of legal services more predictable and their delivery more efficient – remains at center stage as an economic imperative,… Continue Reading
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