LDO Buzz

Jason Emanis
While attending the session, “Metrics and Dashboards-Examples of Useful Report Formats”, at LegalTech West Coast’s LDO Track, I grabbed a few nuggets for the law department operations folks. Like the top metrics Amgen’s law department measures:

1. Annual Spend
2. Spend by Practice Area
3. Top 10 Law Firms
4. Top Law Firms by Practice Areas
5. Top 10 Matters
6. Top Matters by Practice Area

Setting the Bar High: Abbott Laboratories
Best Legal Departments 2012: Abbott’s in-house lawyers are expected to meet big challenges—and they do.
Shannon Green, CorporateCounsel
To help them meet her always high expectations, one of the big changes Schumacher made early on was taking the administrative work of running the department away from the lawyers. Before she took over, the lawyers were shouldering a lot of the legal operations work. Instead of using a centralized system, department heads were haphazardly managing vendors and processing conflicts waivers. Schumacher knew that the department needed to be run more like a business.

Enter Jeff Paquin. Paquin was a long way from Illinois when he was asked to come onboard as head of legal operations. “I was running my own firm in Atlanta,” he says, “minding my own business.” Schumacher had a vision to create a division that would be led by high-caliber legal and business minds. Paquin was impressed enough to move. (read the article)

Metrics plus further thoughts on the substitution of an in-house lawyer for outside counsel
Rees Morrison, Law Department Management
A column by Richard Stock for the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association’s quarterly, Leading Corporate Counsel, Fall 2010, provides a rule-of-thumb for when to consider in-sourcing legal work. Stock writes that “a minimum of 600 external hours must be in-sourced to cost justify a new position in the legal department.” (read the post)

Three ways survey respondents believe their legal department demonstrates value
Rees Morrison, Law Department Management
Almost 900 in-house counsel from 10 countries responded to a survey published as Deloitte’s Global Corporate Counsel Report 2011. Five years ago, a similar survey found that the top three choices for ways the legal team demonstrates value were “timely resolution of legal problems,” “achieving best legal outcomes,” and “reducing legal risk.” In last year’s survey, the top three ways were timely resolution, reducing legal risk, and “achieving cost-effective resolution of legal problems.” (read the post)

How to leverage “Big Data” to better manage the business of law
Using large data sets to identify trends, predict risk and improve performance
Richard Flynn, InsideCounsel
“Big Data” is a term that is capturing a lot of attention. Almost every industry is involved with some type of transaction that leads to mass amounts of data. These large data sets are often referred to as Big Data because they are difficult to optimize: How do you capture, store or analyze the information in a meaningful way? (read the article)

How to establish a defensible deletion policy
Control risk and manage expenses associated with employee documents and email
Jim McGann, InsideCounsel
Are you a data hoarder? Does your Outlook inbox remind you of a cluttered attic filled with items of questionable use and unknown origin? If you’re like most in-house counsel, you keep as many emails and documents as your IT department will allow. It may well be time for some prudent spring cleaning. (read the article)

Inside Experts: Striking a balance between censoring your employees and protecting your company’s brand online
5 tips for crafting social media policies
Eric Esperne, InsideCounsel
Which brings me to social media policies. I’m not responsible for the social media policy at my company, and I’m very glad I’m not. Companies can easily trip over themselves drawing up rules for employee conduct online. There are several stakeholders in corporate social media policies, each with their own objectives. The marketing department smacks their lips over the opportunity for placing targeted, personalized product messages on social media sites. Human resources wants to attract young, well-educated, tech-savvy job candidates. (read the article)

General Counsel at the Intersection of Politics and Business
Politics, Policy & the Law
Tom McCoy, CorporateCounsel
As the balance of power has shifted, the positions of CEO and CFO have become more pressured and less tenured. Boards struggle with balancing investor pressures for short-term results against their overarching responsibility for long-term success. Tracking political trends has become a core work stream in corporate strategy development. No surprise, then, that the premium has risen for general counsel with lighthouse leadership skills, business and political acumen, strategic thinking aptitude—and crisis management courage. (read the article)

Canned reports, dashboards, and data analytics – different levels of insight
Rees Morrison, Law Department Management
Data analysis goes further than reports and dashboards. It strives to correlate more than two metrics with each other. An example might be the size of law firms and their effective billing rates. Another might link numbers of timekeepers to monthly burn rates or settlements paid to external fees. (read the post)

IT and legal perspectives on data security
How to play nice with your IT department when managing records By Stacy Jackson, IE Discovery
Stacy Jackson, InsideCounsel
When it comes to a company’s data, both the IT and legal departments should be involved and understand how the data flows and where it resides. However, the two groups have different perspectives and, sometimes, conflicting priorities when it comes to data security and records management. (read the article)