LDO Buzz

A Honeywell Law Department Profile.

LDO Buzz — Fri, 25 May 2012 19:31:24 +0000

Honywell GC Katherine Adams is a ‘Jill of All Trades’
Roger Adler, CorporateCounsel
General Counsel Katherine Adams leads a legal team comprising 650 professionals, with approximately 150 legal supervisors working in supporting roles. Adams reports to chairman and chief executive officer David Cote.

Given the scale of the business, the department needs help from a lot of outside lawyers. The firms that Adams hires most often include Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi (intellectual property protection); Kirkland & Ellis (large litigation); Arnold & Porter and McDermott Will & Emery (environmental and legacy liability issues); and O’Melveny & Myers (antitrust). Adams’ internal budget outpaces the external spend, but she is “not trying to in-source everything.”

Billing arrangements depend on the specific matter at hand, but Adams generally uses a mixture of alternative and conventional rates. She has paid contingent fees and fixed prices, with add-ons or reductions when warranted. A large block of litigation may call for an annual arrangement with a set fee, she said. (read the article)

A Fortune 500 Pharma Law Department’s Top Metrics.

LDO Buzz — Fri, 25 May 2012 17:04:00 +0000

by lumaxart

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

Who Should You Know in Law Department Operations?

LDO Buzz — Fri, 25 May 2012 13:37:19 +0000

LegalTech West Coast and Law Department Operations.
Jason Emanis
Just got back from LegalTech West Coast where Law Department Operations had a measurable presence. With a 2-day track focused on in-house department operations, there was plenty of education and networking to be had.

So, what or who, has been the impetus behind ALM’s newfound love for corporate department operations given their historical focus on lawyering, and, oh yeah, eDiscovery? It started with John Barber way back before LegalTech New York 2012. John is the Law Operations Senior Manager for Amgen, Inc. John has a passion for his role in the marketplace and wants nothing more than to bring his peers together so that they might learn from each other. And, of course, he has not done it alone. He reached out to the “who’s who” in law operations. (read the post)

Your Department Accounting for All the Spend?

LDO Buzz — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:37:39 +0000

by 401k

The broadest measure of legal-related spending by corporations – one-third for each portion?
Rees Morrison, Law Department Management
Comprehensive legal spending by companies should include settlement, judgments, fines and awards. Data rarely appear on those outlays, but one source found that those “legal resolution costs” amount to about one quarter of internal and external legal costs. That ratio puts those costs at 20% of the total (See my post of Jan. 20, 2009: “for every $1 million spent internally and externally, the law department that conforms to this benchmark ratio spends $250,000 on legal resolution costs.”). (read the post)

What to Do When There’s a Data Security Breach.

LDO Buzz — Fri, 18 May 2012 21:45:28 +0000

by elhombredenegro

10 Steps for Responding to a Corporate Data Security Breach
David Fagan and Stephen Satterfield, Corporate Counsel
While companies can reduce the likelihood of a breach by maintaining robust data security practices and procedures, the reality is that there is no such thing as perfect security. In other words, when it comes to data breaches, the question for most businesses will be not “if,” but “when.” Thus, to manage risk around data breaches, businesses must also have in place procedures to guide a quick and effective response. (read the article)

The “Ensure You Don’t Hire a ‘Dewey’ Firm” Checklist.

LDO Buzz — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:57:24 +0000

by Alan Cleaver

A (Don’t Be) Dewey Dozen: Use This Checklist to Make Sure Your Firm Isn’t Dewey
Paul Lippe, Legal Rebels
My further guess is that at least 10 Am Law 250 firms will fail between now and the end of 2013, for reasons more or less identical to Dewey’s. So here’s a checklist of 12 questions so to make sure you’re not one of them:

1. Does the firm trust its leadership? It is unlikely the people running a law firm will be the perfect mix of George Washington, Steve Jobs and Hillary Clinton, but at minimum they must be viewed as competent, trustworthy and doing their best to put the long-term interests of the firm first. (read the post)

Congrats to Abbott, Best Legal Department 2012!

LDO Buzz — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:33:20 +0000

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)

When Does Your Department In-source?

LDO Buzz — Tue, 15 May 2012 19:17:36 +0000

by alborzshawn

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)

Best Legal Departments of the Year.

LDO Buzz — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:35:02 +0000

Best Legal Departments 2012: From Singular to Plural
Corporate Counsel
This year, for the first time, we’ve chosen four Best Legal Departments. They range in size from a department that features 140 attorneys in the United States to a department with just one. We didn’t go looking for a department that small just to make a point, but we’re kind of glad it worked out that way. This year, size really didn’t matter.

What do these departments have in common? At first glance, not much. One general counsel’s problem was a billion-dollar verdict that her company was facing; another was dealing with a contract dispute over a killer whale. One GC was buried under 5,000 pending legal actions; another inherited a department that sued first and asked questions later. (read the article)

Did AFA’s Contribute to Dewey’s Demise?

LDO Buzz — Mon, 14 May 2012 15:05:02 +0000

by Portland Afoot

Did alternative fee arrangements contribute to Dewey’s demise?
Jim Boeckman, Right-Tasking
In a lengthy interview published in today’s edition of The Wall Street Journal (sub. req’d), two top Dewey partners – members of its office of the chairman – shared their views on why the firm is on the brink of collapse. One of the factors cited by Messrs. Bienenstock and Landgraf was “a huge litigation situation in which the clients started paying 60 percent of the bill, with the other 40 percent saved until the end of the matter.” To my ear that sounds like a back-end loaded AFA – with the payout of the withheld 40 percent likely tied to success and/or performance criteria. (read the post)