For ContractWorks co-founder Albert Oaten, AI is not an abstract future; it is the concrete means to help law departments save money, save time and mitigate risk – right now.
Continue Reading
E-Billing Is No Panacea for Law Departments
Nathan Cemenska, director of legal operations and industry insights at Wolters Kluwer’s ELM Solutions, says that complex billing guidelines coupled with the mounting workloads of in-house professionals erodes the effectiveness of e-billing solutions. Here, he provides some useful advice on maximizing e-billing ROI without dumping more work on law departments already slammed with too much to do.
Continue Reading
Making In-House Mentorship More Accessible
MOSAIC founders Claire Debney and Emma Sharpe, and ACC’s associate vice president for leadership development Tori Payne discuss the importance of mentorship for in-house counsel, and how the MOSAIC program is making it easier than ever to find a mentor – or become one.
Continue Reading
Not If But When: Pulling E-Discovery In-House
Zapproved co-founder and CEO Monica Enand discusses the strategies and tactics that in-house law departments can use to transform their litigation response from a reactive situation into a routine business process.
Continue Reading
FT Shines a Light on In-House Innovators
The annual FT Innovative Lawyers competition is the brainchild of Reena SenGupta of RSG Consulting. In 2005, the London-based journalist hit on the idea of ranking law firms based on their innovations and partnering with FT on spreading the word.
Continue Reading
Communication from the Eye of the Storm
Perkins Coie’s Toby Brown discusses the importance of trust and communication in maintaining positive relationships between in-house and outside counsel.
Tell us about your role as Chief Practice Management Officer at Perkins Coie.
Toby Brown: My role really started with – and expanded around – pricing and profitability. As that area became more advanced, it highlighted other needs and demands like legal project management (LPM). I still oversee pricing now, in the sense that pricing is how we win work, and legal project management is how we manage that work in regard to client success and profitability. About a year and a half ago, I also took on the role of overseeing our lateral partner acquisition. It might seem like that’s unrelated to my role as Chief Practice Management Officer, but actually it requires the same type of assessments we make with pricing and practice management.
With the growth of the in-house legal operations community, we hear many references to legal project management. What does LPM look like from the perspective of a law firm? What should our in-house readers know about how law firms are approaching it?
Project management is a function – I liken it to standing in
Continue Reading
Capture Pricing Data with the End in Mind
Barnes & Thornburg’s Jared Applegate discusses challenges and ideas for gathering and using data.
CCBJ: Both law firms and in-house law departments look to gain pricing certainty from a better understanding of data related to matters. What type of data should be focused upon?
Jared Applegate: From an in-house law department perspective and, frankly, from a law firm perspective, I think you always want to start with the end in mind. Ask these questions: At the end of the day, what business decisions will be driven by the capture and analysis of the data? Will that ultimately provide greater value/insights to my business unit leaders?
Continue Reading
E-Discovery Challenges of BYOD Programs
With many companies increasingly allowing – and in many cases encouraging – the use of personal devices for work-related matters, a recent CCBJ webinar highlighted the importance of implementing a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy.
Continue Reading
Special Special Ops
Bjarne P. Tellmann, CLO and GC of Pearson, recently dished up a bit of advice for law departments facing continuing resource restraints
Continue Reading
An Offer He Couldn’t Refuse
David Cambria, the so-called “Godfather” of legal operations, made big news recently when he announced he was leaving his in-house post at Fortune 50 food and agriculture giant ADM to join
Continue Reading
Data Analytics Drive Value for Corporate Law Departments
Jeffrey Solomon of ELM Solutions explains how well-deployed data analytics can help in-house counsel better serve their companies by managing matters more strategically.
Continue Reading